McKenna, Marthe (1893–1969)
McKenna, Marthe (1893–1969)
Belgian spy and novelist . Born Marthe Cnockaert in Belgium in 1893; died in 1969; married Jock McKenna.
Marthe McKenna was born Marthe Cnockaert in Belgium in 1893, and became a qualified nurse. During World War I, when she was pressed into service in military hospitals set up by the occupying Germans, McKenna became a spy, gathering information from her patients and their superior officers and passing it to Allied forces. The information she provided was important enough to secure her mention in a dispatch from British Field Marshal Earl Haig, who praised her "gallant and distinguished services in the field." She was eventually caught and sentenced to death by a German military court, but the end of the war in 1918 came before the sentence could be carried out. Marthe married British soldier Jock McKenna after the war, and moved to Britain where she began writing spy fiction. Her most notable work was the autobiographical I Was a Spy, published in 1953 with a foreword by Winston Churchill. Marthe McKenna died in 1969.
Grant Eldridge , freelance writer, Pontiac, Michigan