Frank Pickersgill

Once he was safely back in Britain, he rejected the offer of a desk job in Ottawa and instead received a commission in the newly created Canadian Intelligence Corps.

Because he was fluent in German, Latin, Greek and especially French, he worked in close contact with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Along with a fellow Canadian, John Kenneth Macalister, he was parachuted into the Loire Valley in occupied France on June 15, 1943, to work with the French Resistance.

On August 27, 1944, he was shipped with members of the Robert Benoist group to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was executed on September 14, along with 35 other SOE agents, including two other Canadians, Roméo Sabourin and John Kenneth Macalister.

The University of Toronto designated a Pickersgill-Macalister Garden on the west side of the "Soldiers' Tower" monument, but later the plot was rededicated "in memory of those tho gave their lives for peace and freedom", though there is still a plaque saying that it was originally dedicated to Macalister and Pickersgill.