SOE agents allied themselves with French Resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.

[1] Cormeau also survived an unusually long time for wireless operators who were vulnerable to detection and capture by the German occupiers.

She was a recipient of the Order of the British Empire from the United Kingdom and the Legion of Honour and Croix de Guerre from France.

[2][3][4] Newly widowed, Cormeau decided to "take her husband's place in the Armed Forces" and she joined the WAAF as an administrator in November 1941 (Service No 2027172).

[5] While serving at RAF Swinderby she answered an appeal on the noticeboard for linguists, and was recruited by SOE and began training as an F Section wireless operator on 15 February 1943.

Cormeau preferred to use a battery as she believed it was harder for the Germans to locate the source of the transmission and also because the villages in which she worked often lacked electricity.

Early in her mission, SOE provided Cormeau with a much more portable Type A MK III wireless which weighed only 4 kilograms (8.8 lb) and was contained in an attache case.

The SOE's instructions were, "The ideal is for the W/T operator to do nothing but W/T work, to see his organiser [leader] as little as possible, if at all, and to have contact with the fewest possible number of the circuit.

As the Wheelwright network was large in area, she often had to bicycle up to 50 kilometres (31 miles) to change residences and to deliver or receive messages.

Eventually the Germans accepted her story and the false identification papers and she succeeded in passing her wireless equipment off as an X-ray machine.

[3][15] In the early months of 1944, as the invasion of France by allies was anticipated, the tempo of activity by the resistance increased and Cormeau's work as a wireless operator became more demanding.

She now transmitted several times a day and she stayed for lengthy periods in one place, the hilltop village of Castelnau-sur-l'Auvignon, the headquarters of George Starr.

She could see for three miles from the window where she worked, which was one safeguard; a more effective one was that there was no running water in the village, so the Germans who knew there was an English wireless operator somewhere close by never thought of looking for her there.

She assisted in the cutting of the power and telephone lines, resulting in the isolation of the Wehrmacht Group G garrison near Toulouse.

The dress she wore on this occasion and the bloodstained briefcase she carried are on permanent display in the Imperial War Museum in London along with her WAAF officer's uniform.

She spent her later years at Tall Pines nursing home, formerly in Gally Hill Road, Fleet, Hampshire.