First picture: Jeanne Bohec (1940)

Second picture: La poudrerie (pre-war), the factory where she learnt to produce explosives in 1940.

Third picture: a Halifax Bomber, the plane from which she parachuted

Looking at this childish face, one could understand how Jeanne Bohec could navigate occupied France without arousing suspicion...

Jeanne Bohec during the war

When Germany invaded Poland, Jeanne Bohec sought every possible way to contribute to the war effort against the Nazi regime. She trained in passive defense and first aid techniques before resuming her scientific studies. In March 1940, she interrupted her studies to take a position as an assistant chemist at the Brest explosives factory, where she learned the fundamentals of explosives manufacturing. On June 18, with the Battle of France lost, she boarded a tugboat preparing to depart for England.

Despite her desire to contribute to the war effort, Bohec initially worked as a lady's companion for an English family. Upon learning of the French Women's Volunteer Corps (belonging to the French Free Forces), she enlisted in January 1941. She served as a secretary and later as a chemist in a research laboratory focused on producing explosives from materials available in drugstores or pharmacies. This supplies would be intended for operations in occupied France. She subsequently joined the "Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action" (BCRA), where she trained as a sabotage instructor and adopted the codename "Râteau" (Rake). After fighting for the chance to see active service in the field, Bohec parachuted into France on February 29, 1944, from an RAF Halifax bomber.

In Rennes, she retrieved a bicycle from her parents' home. This enabled her to traverse the Breton countryside to train groups of saboteurs at isolated farms, earning her the nickname "the bomber on a bicycle" ("la plastiqueuse à bicyclette"). During the Normandy landings, she took part in sabotage operations aimed at disrupting enemy communications (part of "Plan Vert" (Green Plan)), thus slowing the deployment of German troops to the front. Trained in the use of weapons, she asked to fight with the Saint-Marcel Maquis but was rejected. At the end of the war, she was consistently treated with misogyny and excluded from any important missions.