Eighty years after Christian Lamb helped save France from Nazi oppression, French President Emmanuel Macron kissed her on both cheeks and bestowed the country’s highest decoration on her lapel.
Lamb spent the months leading up to D-Day alone in a small room in central London, making accurate charts that guided landing craft to Normandy beaches as Allied forces invaded and occupied France on June 6, 1944. The job was so secret that she didn’t even inform her spouse.
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Lamb, who is now 103 years old and in a wheelchair, took center stage Thursday as Macron gave her the Legion of Honor amid British events commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
“You were, in your own way, among those figures in the shadow of D-Day,” Macron stated to her. “You were not there in person, but you guided each step they took.”
“You have set us an example that we’ll not forget,” he said.
Lamb had been a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or Wrens, for nearly five years before the Normandy invasion.
While the memories of the men who fought and died on the beaches dominate D-Day history, hundreds of thousands of military women worked behind the scenes in critical non-combat positions such as codebreakers, ship plotters, radar operators, and cartographers.
As the number of living D-Day veterans declines, the achievements of women such as Lamb, radio operator Marie Scott, and Pat Owtram, whose work helped crack previously unbreakable Nazi codes, have become more prominent. All three have received the Legion of Honor as the French government expresses gratitude to soldiers who helped liberate the country during World War II.
Lamb had the responsibility of creating maps for the landing craft crews that would carry troops to the Normandy beaches as D-Day drew near.
Referring to large maps of the French coast tacked to the wall of her cramped office, the young Women’s Royal Naval Service officer painstakingly prepared maps that highlighted every landmark to assist crews in finding their bearings.
The maps “showed railways, 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 detail was obviously important. It was critical that the maps were completely accurate.”
Lamb remembered the tense atmosphere as everyone around her prepared for Operation Overlord, the long-awaited invasion of Europe that finally destroyed the Nazis’ hold on the continent. On her way to work, she worried about Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the pressure he was under.
Her eyes glistened as she described Churchill’s ability to inspire the nation.
“He made these speeches, which everybody listened to,” she continued. “I could hear him now yelling, ‘We’ll battle on the beaches and in the hills. We will never give up.” We all felt the same way.”
Lamb’s career with the Wrens began in the summer of 1939, right after the war broke out.
She worked as a plotting officer in Portsmouth, the Royal Navy’s headquarters. Lamb was part of a Wren team that used radar stations and coast guard data to trace ship movements along the English Channel on a large flat table.
She eventually took on a similar position in Belfast, charting the movements of convoys transporting supplies from North America. This included staffing her post as news broke that a convoy led by her future husband’s ship, the destroyer HMS Oribi, had been attacked by a U-boat wolf pack.
The convoy lost twelve of its forty-three ships, but HMS Oribi made it safely to Newfoundland. The pair got married six months later, in December 1943.
Lamb stated that she was determined to help push the Nazis out of France, particularly from artistic and cultural areas such as Caen and Bayeux, where she had studied prior to the war.
“I really wanted to do anything that would help me get France back to the French,” she stated. “We wanted them to belong to each other again.”
Lamb quipped in a 2007 book about her wartime experiences that she joined the Wrens solely for their tricorne hats, which she felt were “splendid.”
She lost it a long time ago.
However, she now has a stunning ornament with a brilliant red ribbon to replace it.
