Pearl Witherington was born in Paris in 1914 to British parents.

Her father was born into money and drank most of it away.

As a young girl, Pearl met the creditors at the door and talked them out of taking everything.

She was 25, engaged to Henri Cornioley, and working at the British embassy when Germany took Paris in 1940.

Swastika banners hung six floors high over her street.

Someone had walked into her home and started shouting orders.

In December 1940 she escaped occupied France with her mother and three sisters.

It took them seven months to reach London.

She found a quiet Air Ministry desk job but could not stand it, so in 1943 she volunteered for Churchill's secret army.

On the firing range she outshot every recruit they had ever trained, man or woman, according to her training file.

But one assessor wrote that she was slow, cautious, shy, of average intelligence.

His conclusion said, “She is not leadership material.”

In September 1943 she jumped from a bomber into a dark field under the code name Marie.

For eight months she posed as a cosmetics saleswoman and slept on trains, carrying messages.

In May 1944 the Gestapo seized her chief, Maurice Southgate, and shipped him to Buchenwald.

Pearl was free only because she had told his exhausted radio operator to take the afternoon off, and taken him on a picnic instead.

London split the shattered network and handed her half of it to lead in her own right.

At 29 she became Pauline, the only woman to officially command an SOE network in France.

Her force grew from roughly 1,500 fighters to as many as 3,500.

After D-Day, her fighters and the network beside hers cut the rail lines more than 800 times in a single month. That’s 26 times a day, every single day.

They severed the main line from Paris to Bordeaux.

German reinforcements never reached Normandy in time because of her force and “leadership capabilities.”

The Germans papered the countryside with posters offering a million francs for her capture.

On 11 June 1944, they stormed her headquarters with 56 truckloads of soldiers.

She hid the money tin, ran into a wheat field, and lay there until dark.

She had no weapons and no radio left.

She cycled to another agent, radioed London, and on her thirtieth birthday three planes dropped everything back.

Within weeks she was arming four separate groups of fighters again.

That September, nearly 19,000 German troops trapped in her region surrendered.

Their general refused to hand his pistol to the Resistance and gave it to an American general instead.

Pearl was not invited to the ceremony.

She watched Americans hand the defeated Germans oranges and chocolate while French families nearby had nothing.

Soldiers were welcoming other soldiers, she said years later.

And then: "We weren't soldiers."

Back in London she was recommended for the Military Cross, and told women were ineligible.

They offered her a civil MBE, the honour for desk work.

She returned it saying noting there had been remotely civil about what she did in France.

France gave her the Legion of Honour, Britain eventually made her a CBE.

But she waited until 2006, aged 91, for the parachute wings women were never allowed to earn.

She lived to the age of 93, dying in 2008, having been finally awarded her coveted RAF parachute wings.

Hi, I’m Olivia—the author of “You Stand On Her Shoulders” and the founder of HerWiki—Wikipedia for Women.

I’ve spent 16 years researching the stories of women heroes hidden by the patriarchy and every single day, I share one of those stories here.

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