Anne-Marie Walters

Who was Anne-Marie Walters?

Anne-Marie Walters MBE was a WAAF officer recruited into the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. Her code name was Colette.

Walters was born in Geneva of an English father, F.P. Walters, who had been Deputy Secretary-General of the League of Nations, and a French mother. The family left Switzerland for England after the outbreak of the war and Walters initially joined the WAAF in 1941. On 6 July 1943 she was recruited into SOE and during the summer and autumn of that year underwent training as an agent at the SOE Special Training School 23 at Loch Morar, Scotland.

The first attempt to parachute her into France in December 1943 failed because of bad weather over the dropping zone and ended with a crash-landing back in England. There is a dramatic account of this incident in the first chapter of her book.

In the company of a fellow agent, Claude Arnault, she was successfully dropped into the Armagnac area in SW France on the night of 3/4 January 1944, to join George Starr’s WHEELWRIGHT circuit. Walters acted as a courier for Starr until after D-Day. She worked alongside Yvonne Cormeau.