occupation anne-marie walters
Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton , Baron Dalton PC ( 16 August 1887  13 February 1962 ) was a British Labour Party ___MASK73___ and ___MASK6___ who served as ___MASK38___ of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947 . He shaped Labour Party foreign - policy in the 1930s , opposed pacifism , promoted rearmament against the German threat , and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 . He served in Churchill ' s wartime coalition cabinet . As ___MASK38___ , he pushed his cheap money policy too hard , and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947 . Dalton ' s political position was already in jeopardy in 1947 , when , he , seemingly inadvertently , revealed a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his budget speech . Prime Minister Clement Attlee accepted his resignation , but he later returned to the cabinet in relatively minor positions . In ___MASK39___ operations , reconnaissance is the exploration outside an area occupied by friendly forces to gain information about natural features and enemy presence . The ___MASK94___ of Economic Warfare was a British government position which existed during the Second World War . The ___MASK94___ was in charge of the Special Operations Executive and the ___MASK68___ of Economic Warfare . Espionage ( colloquially , spying ) is the obtaining of information considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information . Espionage can be committed by an individual or a ___MASK53___ ring ( a cooperating group of spies ), in the service of a government or a company , or operating independently . The practice is inherently clandestine , as it is by definition unwelcome and in many cases illegal and punishable by law . Espionage is a subset of " intelligence " gathering , which includes espionage as well as information gathering from public sources . Anne - Marie Walters MBE ( 16 March 1923 -- 3 October 1998 ) 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 ( Service Number 2001920 ) . 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 ( at a diversionary airfield because of widespread fog ) . There is a dramatic account of this incident in the first chapter of her book . In the company of a fellow agent , Claude Arnault ( Néron ) , 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 ( Starr ' s Wireless Operator ) . On her return to Britain in August 1944 she attempted to return to France on active service , if not with SOE then with the Free French Forces . In this she was unsuccessful . Having been promoted to the rank of Section Officer in May 1944 while she was in the field , Walters resigned her commission in November 1944 and left SOE at the same time . She was subsequently awarded the MBE ( Civil list ) for her work in occupied France and , from France , the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance française . Later she published an account of her experiences in Moondrop to Gascony ( Macmillan , 1946 ; Moho Books , 2009 ) . The book provides a vivid portrait of Starr ( Le Patron in the book ) and also of Arnault ( Jean - Claude in the book ) with whom Walters was romantically involved . Moondrop to Gascony won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1947 . After the war she lived in Spain and France and was known as a translator and editor under her married name Anne - Marie Comert . She died in France in 1998 at the age of 75 . The Special Operations Executive ( SOE ) was a British World War II organisation . Following Cabinet approval , it was officially formed by ___MASK94___ of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940 , to conduct espionage , sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe ( and later , also in occupied Southeast Asia ) against the Axis powers , and to aid local resistance movements . World War II ( often abbreviated to WWII or WW2 ), also known as the Second World War , was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945 , although related conflicts began earlier . It involved the vast majority of the world ' s nations  including all of the great powers  eventually forming two opposing ___MASK39___ alliances : the Allies and the Axis . It was the most widespread war in history , and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries . In a state of " total war ", the major participants threw their entire economic , industrial , and scientific capabilities behind the war effort , erasing the distinction between civilian and ___MASK39___ resources . Marked by mass deaths of civilians , including the Holocaust ( in which approximately 11 million people were killed ) and the strategic bombing of industrial and population centres ( in which approximately one million were killed , and which included the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ), it resulted in an estimated 50 million to 85 million fatalities . These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history .