Gertrude Sanford Legendre (1902-2000)
OSS Operative, Socialite & Adventurer
She was born at Aiken, South Carolina, to a wealthy New York family. She and her siblings were the inspiration for the Seton siblings in the Broadway hit Holiday, made into a film in 1938 in which Katharine Hepburn played Gertie's character. She was educated under the notorious Miss Charlotte at Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia. She was eighteen when she went on her first hunting trip which ignited a passion for big game hunting and collecting specimens for natural history museums. Before the war in 1939, she went on expeditions to Africa, South East Asia, Iran, Canada and Alaska. In 1928, she and her sister were invited to the French Riviera with the Murphys where they hung out with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Harpo Marx and Somerset Maugham, who called the sisters “crazy show-offs”. There she met Sidney J. Legendre who had been studying at Oxford and who she would follow on an expedition to Abyssinia. They were married at New York in September, 1929, and bought Medway Plantation in South Carolina that they dedicated themselves to restoring.
On the outbreak of war, Sidney joined the Navy and Gertie took a job on the cable desk for the Communications Branch in Washington D.C. (under General 'Wild Bill' Donovan) later known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which later still evolved into the CIA. In 1942, the agency transferred her to the Central Cable Desk in London where she handled the communications from agents all over North Africa and Europe, including those in France and Germany. In September, 1944, she was transferred again to Paris where she was given a Women's Army Corps uniform and the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. With time on her hands before the office was set-up, she drove off with four others in search of the Front Line in Germany but suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of it and German troops opened fire on their jeep. They were taken prisoner and German radio proclaimed Gertie, “the first American woman to be made a prisoner of war on the Western Front”. She was kept with other "honor detainees" that included 42 French generals, 75 colonels, 7 civilian diplomats and one woman, Mme. Caillau, the sister of Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. She escaped onto a train bound for Switzerland and made a dash for it over the border with a German soldier threatening to shoot behind her.
She was the mother of two daughters who were primarily brought up by a governess, as one of daughters said, "not letting motherhood get in the way of her adventures". She lived between Medway and Chocomount House overlooking Long Island Sound, New York.
On the outbreak of war, Sidney joined the Navy and Gertie took a job on the cable desk for the Communications Branch in Washington D.C. (under General 'Wild Bill' Donovan) later known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which later still evolved into the CIA. In 1942, the agency transferred her to the Central Cable Desk in London where she handled the communications from agents all over North Africa and Europe, including those in France and Germany. In September, 1944, she was transferred again to Paris where she was given a Women's Army Corps uniform and the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. With time on her hands before the office was set-up, she drove off with four others in search of the Front Line in Germany but suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of it and German troops opened fire on their jeep. They were taken prisoner and German radio proclaimed Gertie, “the first American woman to be made a prisoner of war on the Western Front”. She was kept with other "honor detainees" that included 42 French generals, 75 colonels, 7 civilian diplomats and one woman, Mme. Caillau, the sister of Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. She escaped onto a train bound for Switzerland and made a dash for it over the border with a German soldier threatening to shoot behind her.
She was the mother of two daughters who were primarily brought up by a governess, as one of daughters said, "not letting motherhood get in the way of her adventures". She lived between Medway and Chocomount House overlooking Long Island Sound, New York.
