Historical Badasses

[Watser?]

I came across this article about two French-Canadians who saved a lot of airmen in occupied France, working with/for the resistance.

French-Canadian spies outfox the Nazis to save Allied airmen in preparation for D-Day.

LaBrosse first signed up for active duty with the Canadian army in 1940, when he turned eighteen. He was a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals when the British recruited him as their first Canadian spy.

He parachuted into France on February 28, 1943, to be the contact between a French Resistance cell in Paris and the British secret service. He was soon blowing up bridges and rail installations, as well as firing machine guns and other small arms in raids against the Germans.

But the German secret police had infiltrated the Resistance cell. Learning this, M.I.9 ordered LaBrosse to leave France at once to avoid arrest. LaBrosse radioed back that he had become mother hen to twenty-nine downed Allied flyers, most of whom spoke no French. The next M.I.9 message ordered LaBrosse to leave the others behind. He flatly refused and instead guided his flock through enemy territory, crossing over the Pyrenees mountains into Spain, then on to the British-held territory of Gibraltar on the Mediterranean.

Dumais was a thirty-eight-year-old career sergeantmajor with Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal when he and some two thousand other Canadian soldiers were captured in a suicide raid on the port of Dieppe in August 1942. Vowing he’d never be delivered alive to a Nazi prison camp, he escaped from the train heading to Germany. Like LaBrosse, he fled via the Pyrenees.

And that's before they went back to France together to prepare for D-Day.