Virginia Hall lost her left leg in a hunting accident before the war and walked with a wooden prosthetic she named "Cuthbert." Despite this, she became one of the most effective operatives of both SOE and the American OSS.
Hall first entered France in 1941 as an SOE agent, establishing spy networks, organizing safe houses, arranging prison escapes, and coordinating parachute drops while posing as a journalist. When the Gestapo identified her as "the most dangerous of all Allied spies," she escaped over the Pyrenees in winter—on her wooden leg. She famously cabled London: "Cuthbert is being tiresome." London replied, not understanding: "If Cuthbert is tiresome, have him eliminated."
She returned to France in 1944 with the OSS, disguised as an elderly milkmaid, and organized three resistance battalions that captured 500 German soldiers. She was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross—the only one given to a civilian woman in WWII—in a private ceremony, as she insisted on remaining undercover. After the war, she joined the newly formed CIA.