Charlotte Gray does heroism no justice

This week the Prince of Wales attended the charity premiere of Charlotte Gray. This "epic wartime romance", based on the novel by Sebastian Faulks, stars Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon, Rupert Penry-Jones and Cate Blanchett - who plays a British woman parachuted behind enemy lines to fight with the French Resistance and rescue her lover, an RAF pilot who has been shot down.

Charlotte Gray has been billed as a tribute to SOE (the Special Operations Executive), set up by Churchill in 1940 to "set Europe ablaze". Unfortunately the film is such a simplification of history that it manages to obscure the real achievements of the women who risked torture and death to fight beside the Resistance.

The story of this fictional beauty, driven by l'amour to drop in and organise a French network, also strengthens the myth that without the British there would have been little resistance. In fact, as the modest survivors of SOE want us to know, the opposite was the case. Without the French Resistance, SOE agents could have accomplished very little. Last Sunday the English SOE veteran, Francis Cammaerts DSO, said: "The lives of SOE agents have been terribly romanticised. What we were risking was our skins, but for the French it was their homes, their families, their children. It was everything."

Of course, the film is not intended to be history. It is a romance shot in the beautiful countryside of France, not so much the Second World War, more "Chocolat goes to war", to mention another charming view of France. One Frenchman who greatly enjoyed working on the film, and whose father was deported during the war, described the finished product to me as "cinema-sucre. A would-be Gone with the Wind". Unlike Charlotte Gray, the women of SOE did not go to war to rescue their boyfriends. And if they were volunteering for a dangerous mission, it was not to help them "heal their inner conflicts".

In real life, Charlotte Gray would have been weeded out at the preliminary interview. "Basket cases" were too unpredictable under pressure.

On Sunday night on Channel 4, several surviving SOE women agents spoke about their true motives. Lise de Baissac, 94, said that, as a patriotic Frenchwoman, she had refused to accept the armistice of June 1940. She added that she had been ashamed, and that she still felt ashamed, when she thought about Marshal Petain's surrender. She made her way to London, volunteered for the British section of SOE and became one of the first women to be sent in. Her network eventually numbered 11,000. The Australian, Nancy Wake, who won the George Medal, was originally drawn into the Resistance because she was living in Marseille when France collapsed and was asked to help escaping British servicemen. An English volunteer, Pearl Witherington, 89, said that she joined SOE because "there was a job to be done". She spoke fluent French, had a deep love of France and a French fiance. "But I didn't put my life at risk just so I could be with him." She finds the modern obsession with the romantic and the personal "offensive".

Charlotte Gray is set in south-western France, where resistance did not really start until the last 12 months of the Occupation. When it did start the consequences were often terrible. The German army was jumpy, waiting for the inevitable Allied landings, and any signs of resistance was met with immediate reprisals. In the town of Figeac, not far from the countryside shown in the film, in May 1944, the SS "Das Reich" Panzer Division drove in one morning, shot 41 men and deported more than 1,000 more.

After the Normandy landings in June, the same SS division was ordered to wipe out all regional resistance. Its men carried out the notorious massacre of an entire village at Oradour-sur-Glane. They also committed a less wellknown atrocity in the town of Tulle in response to a provocation from a communist Resistance leader who had disregarded Allied orders. Ninety- nine men were hanged before midday from the balconies outside their homes and left dangling there until nightfall. That particular SS armoured division was based in Montauban, a town close to the village that provides the background to much of Charlotte Gray.

SOE agents fought back with equal ruthlessness. Nancy Wake, now 89, used to kill German sentries with a knife. Charlotte Gray spends more time falling in and out of love. There are other improbabilities. The resisters in the film frequently talk to each other on the telephone, which is rather like giving Napoleon a walkie-talkie in a film about Waterloo. It was because the Resistance could never use the telephone that SOE sent women to act as couriers - written messages were the only secure way to communicate, and women couriers were less likely to be stopped by the police. In Charlotte Gray, our heroine, so far from trying to pass unnoticed when confronted with a French gendarme, flirts with him.

But the main problem with the film is that it never begins to convey the daily exhaustion and fear that so many resisters remembered after the war. It is because the women agents overcame that fear that we so greatly admire them.

A typical story is that of Yvonne Rudellat, one of the first woman to be landed by SOE in Occupied France. She was French but had lived in London for so long that she spoke her native language with an English accent. She worked under the code name "Jacqueline" in the Loire Valley as a courier and organiser of SOE's largest network. In June 1943, she was arrested after attempting to help a Canadian radio operator who spoke practically no French. The entire network collapsed and hundreds of French resisters were deported and shot. " Jacqueline" was severely wounded, interrogated by the Gestapo and deported, one of 27,000 French women sent to Ravensbruck alone. She died in Belsen in 1945. She was 5ft 2in tall, 45 years old and the mother of a married daughter.

So far as I know there is no memorial to her, either here or in France. But for many years after the war, a little black-andwhite photograph of " Jacqueline" was displayed in all the houses that had sheltered her.

There are few left to remember her heroism today. The 13 SOE women agents who died deserved a better tribute than this preposterous fable.

Patrick Marnham author of The Death of Jean Moulin, a biography of a French Resistance leader.