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Cecile Pearl Witherington Cornioley CBE (24 June 1914 – 24 February 2008) was a World War II SOE agent born in Paris to British parents. ==Wartime service== Pearl Witherington was born and raised in France but was a British subject. She was employed at the British embassy in Paris and engaged to Henri Cornioley (1910–1999) when the Germans invaded in May 1940. She escaped from occupied France with her mother and three 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 June 1943. In training she emerged as the "best shot" the service had ever seen.〔Martin, Douglas, "(Pearl Cornioley, Resistance Fighter Who Opposed the Nazis, Is Dead at 93 )", ''New York Times'', 11 March 2008〕 Given the code name "Marie", Witherington was dropped by parachute into occupied France on 22 September 1943, where she joined Maurice Southgate, leader of the Stationer Network. Over the next eight months, she worked as Southgate's courier. After the Gestapo arrested Southgate in May 1944 who was subsequently deported to Buchenwald, she became leader of the new Wrestler Network, under a new code-name "Pauline", in the Valencay–Issoudun–Châteauroux triangle. She reorganised the network with the help of her fiancé, Henri Cornioley, and it fielded over 1,500 members of the Maquis; they played an important role fighting the German Army during the D-Day landings. They 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: 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 guerilla assaults that wreaked havoc among German columns travelling to the battlefront through her area of operations.〔 (‘Too cautious’ - how Army rated freedom fighter Pearl Cornioley ), The Times, 1 April 2008〕 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.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pearl Witherington」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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