Eighty years after Christian Lamb helped rescue France from Nazi tyrannyFrench President Emmanuel Macron kissed her on both cheeks and pinned the nation's highest honor on her lapel.
Lamb spent the months before D-Day alone in a small room in central London drawing the detailed maps that guided the landing craft to the Normandy beaches as the Allied forces began their invasion of occupied France on June 6, 1944. The job was so secret that she didn't even tell her husband.
Now 103 and confined to a wheelchair, Lamb took center stage on Thursday when Macron awarded him the Legion of Honor during British ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
“You were, in your own way, among those figures in the shadow of D-Day,” Macron told him. “You weren't there in person, but you guided every step they took.”
“You have given us an example that we will not forget,” he added.
Ludovic Marín / AP
By the time of the Normandy landings, Lamb had been doing her part to defeat the Nazis for nearly five years as a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service, known as the Wrens.
While the story of D-Day is often told through the stories of the men who fought and died on the beaches, hundreds of thousands of military women worked behind the scenes in crucial non-combat roles, such as code breakersship plotters, radar operators and cartographers.
The contributions of women such as Lamb, radio operator Marie Scott and Pat Owtram, whose work helped break earlier unbreakable Nazi codeshave come into sharper focus as the number of living D-Day veterans dwindles. All three have been awarded the Legion of Honor as the French government offers its thanks to those who helped liberate the country during World War II.
As D-Day approached, Lamb was assigned the task of creating letters for the crews of the landing craft that would deliver troops to the Normandy beaches.
Referring to the large maps of the French coast pinned to the wall of her small office, the young officer of the Women's Royal Naval Service carefully created maps that highlighted all the landmarks to help the crews orient themselves.
The maps “showed railroads, roads, churches, castles, every possible feature that could be visible to an incoming invader and from every angle,” Lamb told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It was intense and exciting work, and obviously detail was vital. It was crucial that the maps were 100% accurate.”
Lamb recalled the tension that everyone around him was preparing for Operation Overlord, the long-awaited invasion of Europe that finally ended Nazi domination of the continent. When he passed Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the stairs on his way to work, he worried about the pressure he was facing.
Remembering those days, his eyes sparkled as he spoke of the way Churchill inspired the nation.
“He made these speeches that everybody heard,” he said. “And now I could hear him say, “We'll fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the hills. We'll never give up.' We all felt that way.”
Lamb's Wrens career began shortly after war broke out in the summer of 1939.
One of his assignments was as a conspiracy officer in Portsmouth, home of the Royal Navy. Lamb was part of a team of Wrens that used information from radar stations and coastguards to plot ship movements across the English Channel on a large flat table.
He later took on a similar role in Belfast, planning the movements of convoys carrying supplies from North America. This included manning her place when word came that a convoy escorted by her future husband's ship, the destroyer HMS Oribi, had been attacked by a wolf pack of U-boats.
Twelve of the 43 ships in the convoy were lost, but HMS Oribi reached Newfoundland safely. The couple married six months later, in December 1943.
Lamb said he had a special determination to help drive the Nazis out of France, especially the centers of art and culture such as Caen and Bayeux, where he had studied before the war.
“I really wanted to (do) anything that would help me bring France back to the French,” he said. “We wanted them to belong to each other again.”
In a 2007 book about his wartime experiences, Lamb joked that he only joined the Wrens because of their tricorn hats, which he thought were “splendid”.
He lost his a long time ago.
But now it has a gorgeous decoration with a bright red ribbon to replace it.
