Cecile Witherington (1914-2008)

DOSSIER:Cecile Pearl Witherington, daughter of British parents, was born in France on 24 Jun 1914. On 26 Oct 1944 she married Henri Cornioley with whom she had one daughter: Claire. Cecile died on 24 Feb 2008 in a retirement home in the Loire Valley of France.

CODE NAME:

Marie

Pauline

Cecile was engaged to Henri Cornioley when the Germans invaded France in May 1940. She escaped from occupied France with her mother and sisters in December 1940 and eventually arrived in London where she found work with the Air Ministry. Determined to fight back against the German occupation of France, she joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) on 8 Jun 1943. In training she emerged as the "best shot" the service had ever seen.

Given the code name "Marie", she was dropped by parachute into occupied France on 22 Sep 1943. There she joined Maurice Southgate, leader of the Stationer Network and, over the next eight months, worked as his courier.

In May 1944, after the Gestapo arrested Southgate and deported him to Buchenwald, Cecile became leader of the new Wrestler Network (under the new code name "Pauline") in the Valencay–Issoudun–Châteauroux triangle. She reorganized the network with the help of her fiancé, Henri Cornioley, and fielded over 1,500 members of the Maquis. They played an important role fighting the German Army during the D-Day landings and were so effective that the Nazi regime put a ƒ1,000,000 bounty on her head. 

The Germans even ordered 2,000 men to attack her force with artillery in a 14 hour long battle. Cornioley states:

"We were attacked by 2,000 Germans on the 11th June [1944] at 8 o'clock in the morning and the small maquis, comprising approximately 40 men, badly armed and untrained, put up a terrific fight, with the neighboring communist maquis which numbered approximately 100 men."

She records that the battle raged for 14 hours and the Germans lost 86 men while the maquis lost 24 "including civilians who were shot and the injured who were finished off". She fled to a cornfield until the Germans left the area. While the Germans succeeded in breaking up her group, she quickly regrouped and launched large scale guerrilla assaults that wreaked havoc among German columns travelling to the battlefront through her area of operations. The force she commanded ultimately killed 1,000 German soldiers while suffering few casualties of its own and disrupted a key railway line connecting the south of France to Normandy more than 800 times. She would ultimately preside over the surrender of 18,000 German troops.