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I was thirteen years old in 1970, living in Dayton, Ohio. My Mom was from England; we had been there to visit relatives several times.\u00a0 \u00a0I knew she had done something more in World War II than the civil service job she mentioned.\u00a0 I also knew she had a deep-seated hate for the Germans (a hate that faded when my good friend\u2019s Dad turned out to have served in Luftwaffe.) But I didn\u2019t know much about what Mom did during the War.<\/p>\n
1970 was twenty-five years after the end of the War.\u00a0 It was also when the Official Secrets Act oath expired. \u00a0Mom had sworn to keep her wartime activities secret, and had lived up to the promise.\u00a0 So we were in a car, driving down the South Dixie Highway, when Mom began to tell her story:\u00a0 the story of a covert operative at war.<\/p>\n
Phyllis Mary Teresa O\u2019Connor was born in June of 1918, during the Great War.\u00a0 She was the fifth and youngest child, and given the nickname Babs that stayed with her the rest of her life.\u00a0 \u00a0Her parents did their best to raise their children in the tradition of the British \u201cPublic\u201d School (what in the US we would called private boarding schools.)\u00a0Mom went to several, finishing her education at the Loretto School in Leige, Belgium.\u00a0 When she returned to London, she was fluent in French with a Belgian accent, and began her study of English Literature at the University of London.<\/p>\n
It was the late 1930\u2019s: \u00a0as the nations of the world recovered from the Great Depression, the young people found ways to have fun.\u00a0 Babs was friends with a group studying at Oxford University, and while in her later years she would strongly deny it, they were a partying crew.\u00a0 She fell for a young man, her \u201c\u2026golden haired Apollo,\u201d and they loved life.\u00a0 Her parents held an engagement party; twenty men and twenty women attended.<\/p>\n
“Babs” O’Connor Dahlman – 1945<\/em><\/p>\n But Nazism was growing more powerful in Germany, as Hitler moved to take over Europe.\u00a0The leaders of Great Britain made compromises to appease him, but on September 1st<\/sup>, 1939, he invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. All of Babs\u2019 male friends went into the service, her fianc\u00e9 joining the Royal Air Force.\u00a0 By 1940 the Nazis determined that they could bomb Great Britain \u201c\u2026to her knees,\u201d and the Battle of Britain began.<\/p>\n The Spitfire pilots of the RAF defended the island at a high cost.\u00a0 Her fianc\u00e9, stationed not far from London at Grantham, would \u201cbuzz\u201d her home after each mission.\u00a0 But inevitably, he did not come back; shot down and killed.\u00a0 Of the twenty men at the engagement party, all perished in the war.<\/p>\n When the war began, military intelligence was forced to staff up quickly.\u00a0 One major source of personnel was academia, the professors from Oxford and Cambridge were brought in to defend their nation.\u00a0 As the young men went to the service to fight, their older professors went to the intelligence agencies.\u00a0 As these same young men died defending the skies over England, a new branch was formed:\u00a0 Special Operations Executive.\u00a0 The goal was to run missions in Nazi-occupied Europe, disrupting the infrastructure, and keeping Nazi troops pinned down controlling the countryside.\u00a0 SOE worked with underground resistance groups throughout Europe, and also performed solo missions.<\/p>\n What SOE needed was dedicated operatives, willing to risk everything, who could blend into the population.\u00a0 A young woman, educated in Belgium and desperate for a chance for revenge, would be perfect.\u00a0 Babs was approached by an SOE officer who was familiar with the Oxford group and the fate of her fianc\u00e9. \u00a0He offered her that chance:\u00a0 \u201cit would be very dangerous, was I willing to chance my life?\u201d\u00a0 She was.\u00a0 She was given a code name:\u00a0 Virginia.<\/p>\n The select team was trained to be spies.\u00a0 They practiced tradecraft, how to leave and take secret messages.\u00a0 They learned how to work the tiny radios, and were trained to memorize at a glance (Mom was a master of \u201cpelmanism,\u201d what we would call fifty-two card pickup.\u00a0 We thought it was a game.) \u00a0They followed each other through the streets of London, learning the art of remaining undetected.<\/p>\n They were sent to commando training in Scotland, climbing cliffs and making forced marches.\u00a0 Her group raided other groups, practicing their techniques as they stole cases of Scotch.\u00a0It made the ten mile march back easier. \u00a0While a sprained ankle delayed her parachute training, she was still ordered to deploy.\u00a0 Training was over.<\/p>\n Mom\u2019s favorite plane was called a Lysander.\u00a0 It was a single engine, top wing plane that could land and takeoff on short and rough runways (we used to visit the one hanging in the Air Force Museum in Dayton.) The SOE used it to fly their agents into fields in Europe, lighted only by a few torches.\u00a0 Virginia started her first mission from RAF Base Tempsford, headed to France.<\/p>\n Lysander at US Air Force Museum<\/em><\/p>\n A chance encounter with a Messerschmitt almost ended things before they began, but the pilot was able to evade, and a few days later she was off again to France.\u00a0 The Lysander landed in a farm field, met by the Resistance.\u00a0\u00a0Information was exchanged, and soon after another Lysander landed in the field and she was back in England.<\/p>\n During those early missions, Virginia was paired with a teammate, Tony Graham.\u00a0 Tony was another dashing blonde from Oxford, part of the social group that included her fianc\u00e9. \u00a0\u00a0He fell in love with her, and she loved him, but only as a great friend.<\/p>\n Virginia and Tony went on many missions into occupied Europe.\u00a0 In one, she had the information about the mission, he had the explosives needed for the job.\u00a0 They landed in Belgium, contacted the underground, and delivered the goods.\u00a0 A Nazi troop train was destroyed, and Virginia and Tony were picked up by another plane.<\/p>\n The plane was shot up and caught fire.\u00a0 They bailed out, parachuting back into Belgium.\u00a0 The pilot wasn\u2019t so lucky, staying with the burning plane into the ground.\u00a0 Virginia made her way to a safe house.\u00a0 Tony was on his way to the same place, when he ran into a German tank column, asking for directions.\u00a0 He directed them in perfect German and both went on their way.\u00a0 Tony arrived at the safe house, and in a day, both were back in England, Babs at her cover assignment in the pensions office.<\/p>\n Tony was later sent to the Tehran conference (Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Tehran in 1943 to plan the invasion.) He was captured by the Nazis along the way.\u00a0 Of the ninety-six members of Virginia\u2019s group in SOE, only three survived the war.<\/p>\n Virginia was sent to Yugoslavia (now Serbia) to work with the Resistance there.\u00a0 She aided in their operations, and met the leader and future dictator of \u00a0Yugoslavia, Tito.<\/p>\n When back in London, Babs continued to find ways to have fun.\u00a0 An American was coming to London and arranged a blind date with her through a mutual friend.\u00a0 Since Americans had \u201cterrible reputations,\u201d she wanted to meet publicly, so she chose a restaurant called \u201cthe Queen\u2019s Brasserie.\u201d\u00a0 As she described it, \u201c\u2026 she kept looking at the tall blonde Americans coming in the door.\u00a0 But then there was a dark haired smaller man, he looked interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n Don Dahlman – 1944 \u00a0(thread on canvas by Patricia Dahlman)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Babs and Don fell madly in love.\u00a0 They talked through the night, walking through the blacked out streets of London. Don only had suspicions of what Babs did (he had some friends in US Army Intelligence) but he wanted to be near her, so he wrangled a transfer to be closer to London.\u00a0 They were married on March 27th<\/sup>of 1944, but their honeymoon was interrupted.\u00a0 Don was sent to a port in England to prepare for the D-Day Invasion, Virginia was flown to France to help the coastal Resistance groups prepare.<\/p>\n After the invasion, Don followed the fighting across France. \u00a0Virginia continued missions ahead of the battle, and for ten months they were separated. \u00a0After one mission, she hitchhiked across France to find Don. \u00a0When she finally located his unit, he was out on the town and she had to return without seeing him.<\/p>\n As the Nazis faced total defeat, Virginia was sent to search for her SOE teammates in the Concentration Camps, where they might be taken if they weren’t executed.\u00a0 She found Tony at Dachau.\u00a0 The Nazis had done brain surgery experiments on him, and there was little left to save.\u00a0She got him back to England, but there was nothing the doctors could do. \u00a0He soon died. \u00a0As Mom said, \u201c\u2026Virginia died then too.\u201d<\/p>\n In late 1945, Babs and Don left England for the United States, sailing on separate ships.\u00a0 They went to Cincinnati (Don\u2019s hometown) to start a family, then teamed together to advance his career in broadcasting.\u00a0 It wouldn’t be until that drive in 1970 that she would talk about her real role in World War II to family and friends:\u00a0 Babs, Virginia, Mom; we learned about a real story of sacrifice in the War.<\/p>\n Don and Babs Dahlman – 2008<\/em><\/p>\n It is Mom\u2019s 100th<\/sup>birthday, and her story lives on. \u00a0She had a final request, that as much as she loved the United States, she was \u201calways, always,\u201d to be remembered as a citizen of \u00a0England. \u00a0We quoted her favorite poet, Rupert Brooke, on her headstone.<\/p>\n Mom\u2019s Grave Stone <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>Note:\u00a0 Mom told us many of her stories in the latter years of her life.\u00a0 We (the family) are lucky to have them both in written and recorded form.\u00a0 The actual SOE records were destroyed in the 1950\u2019s \u2013burned in a fire – too many lives lost.\u00a0I have used information from her writings for this essay, as well as my own \u2018history teacher\u2019 memory.<\/em><\/p>\n My sister Pat has done a complete art work of Mom’s life –\u00a0link here.\u00a0\u00a0<\/a><\/i>Thanks \u00a0for allowing me to use one of her\u00a0works in this essay.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dahlman.online\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Babs-Dahlman.jpeg?resize=210%2C240&ssl=1\")
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