Moondrop to Gascony

On a cold, moonlit night in January 1944, Anne-Marie Walters, just twenty years old, parachuted into southwest France to work with the Resistance in preparation for the long-awaited Allied invasion. The daughter of a British father and a French mother, she was to act as a courier for George Starr, head of the “Wheelwright” circuit of the Special Operations Executive. Over the next seven months, Walters crisscrossed the region, carrying messages, delivering explosives, arranging the escape of downed airmen, and receiving parachute drops of arms and personnel in the dead of night—living in constant fear of capture and torture by the Gestapo. Then, on the very eve of liberation, she was sent off on foot over the Pyrenees to Spain, carrying urgent dispatches for London.

Anne-Marie Walters wrote Moondrop to Gascony immediately after the war, while the events were still vivid in her mind. It is a tale of high adventure, comradeship and kindness, of betrayals and appalling atrocities, and of the often unremarked courage of many ordinary French men and women who risked their lives to help drive German armies from French soil. And through it all shines her’s quiet courage, a keen sense of humor and, above all, her pure zest for life.

For this new edition, David Hewson, a former regular-army officer interested in military history, adds biographical details for the main characters, identifies the real people behind the code names, and provides background information. He also tells about Anne-Marie Walters’ early life and what happened to her in the postwar years.