Woman who made maps for D-Day landings receives France’s highest honor

Eighty years after Christian Lamb helped rescue France from Nazi tyrannyFrench President Emmanuel Macron kissed her on both cheeks and pinned the country’s highest honor to her lapel.

Lamb spent the months leading up to D-Day alone in a small room in central London drawing the detailed maps that guided landing craft to the Normandy beaches when Allied forces began their invasion of occupied France on June 6, 1944. The work was so secret that she didn’t even tell her husband.

Now 103 and wheelchair-bound, Lamb took center stage on Thursday when Macron awarded her 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 her. “You weren’t there in person, but you guided every step they took.”

“You gave us an example that we will not forget,” he added.

By the time of the Normandy landings, Lamb had already been doing her part to defeat the Nazis for almost five years as a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, known as 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 like Lamb, radio operator Marie Scott, and Pat Owtram, whose work helped break earlier unbreakable Nazi codes, have gained greater attention as the number of living D-Day veterans dwindles. All three were awarded the Legion of Honor as the French government offers its gratitude to those who helped liberate the country during World War II.

As D-Day approached, Lamb was tasked with creating maps for the landing craft crews that would deliver troops to the beaches of Normandy.

Referring to the huge maps of the French coast posted on the wall of her small office, the young officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service meticulously created maps that highlighted each landmark to help crews find their way.

The maps “showed railroads, roads, churches, castles, every possible feature that could be visible to an invader and from every angle,” Lamb told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It was intense and exciting work and obviously the details were vital. It was crucial that the maps were 100% accurate.”

Lamb recalled the tension as everyone around him prepared to Operation Overlord, the long-awaited invasion of Europe that ended Nazi rule on the continent. As she passed Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the stairs on her way to work, she worried about the pressure he was facing.

Recalling those days, his eyes lit up as he spoke about the way Churchill inspired the nation.

“He gave these speeches that everyone heard,” she said. “And I could hear him saying, ‘We’re going to fight on the beaches, we’re going to fight in the hills. We will never surrender.’ We all felt that way.”

Lamb’s Wrens career began shortly after the outbreak of war in the summer of 1939.

One of his assignments was as a plotting officer at Portsmouth, headquarters of the Royal Navy. Lamb was part of a team of Wrens who used information from radar stations and the coast guard to plot the movements of ships across the English Channel on a large flat table.

She later took on a similar role in Belfast, planning the movements of convoys carrying supplies from North America. This included staffing her post when news arrived that a convoy escorted by her future husband’s ship, the destroyer HMS Oribi, had been attacked by a pack of U-boat wolves.

Twelve of the 43 ships in the convoy were lost, but HMS Oribi managed to reach 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 from centers of art and culture like Caen and Bayeux, where he studied before the war.

“I really wanted to (do) anything that would help me take…France back to the French,” she said. “We wanted them to belong together again.”

In a 2007 book about her wartime experiences, Lamb joked that she only joined the Wrens because of their tricorn hats, which she thought were “splendid”.

She lost hers a long time ago.

But now it has a magnificent decoration with a bright red ribbon to replace it.