Pearl Cornioley, better known by her maiden name of Witherington, who died on 24 February, 2008, was a French-British secret service agent who played a key role in the resistance in the run-up to D-Day.

After boldly parachuting into occupied France in 1943, the former secretary led 1,500 members of the Maquis in thwarting the German army during Operation Overlord. Her efforts resulted in the Nazis offering a one million franc reward for her capture.

After returning to England she married a fellow maquisard. They settled back into civilian life in Paris after the war, but it wasn’t for another 63 years that her contribution to the Allied victory was given the appropriate military acknowledgement.

Cécile Pearl Witherington was born on 24 June, 1914 in Paris. Her parents were expatriate Londoners and her father owned a factory. She had an unhappy childhood with little education and was forced to work when her father acquired a drink problem and subsequently died in 1930.

In 1940, when the Germans invaded, Miss Witherington was working as a typist with the British Embassy. Fearing the Nazi forces, she embarked on her first act of rebellion, smuggling her mother and three sisters south into unoccupied territory and then to England.

But no sooner was she out of France and working for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, than she became frustrated at her pen-pushing job. "I was furious about what was happening in France," she later said. "You have no idea what it was like to live in an occupied country – having your enemy in your own home and jolly well having to do what they said."

She went to the Special Operations Executive and demanded a job, pestering the chiefs until they agreed to train her as a courier for the resistance. She trained for seven weeks in combat, sabotage and Morse code, and made three practice parachute jumps. Her only previous training had been with the Girl Guides.

In September 1943 she parachuted into the Loire Valley and joined up with Stationer, a group of the Maquis, the name given to the rural resistance, taken from the bushes they frequently used as cover. Her codename was Wrestler and she also used the assumed names Pauline and Marie.

She was tasked with delivering coded messages, often travelling many miles by bicycle, all the time trying to avoid German troops. She narrowly escaped detection on many occasions, despite one time having her house searched by the Gestapo.

Her network’s leader, Maurice Southgate, was not so fortunate. He was captured and sent to a concentration camp, leaving Miss Witherington to assume control of the 1,500 dissidents. Over the next few months she orchestrated hundreds of attacks on German lines of supply and transport, preventing them from strengthening in the north where Allied forces were planning to invade.

After D-Day on 6 June, 1944, the Wrestler Network, as it was now known, changed its focus, engaging German troops in actual combat to stop them fleeing France. A total of 18,000 enemy soldiers gave themselves up as a result. But Miss Witherington was nearly killed during one attack by the Germans and she was forced her to hide in a wheat field for an entire day.

Despite the danger of her work, she remained steadfast in her determination to stop the atrocities of the Nazis – she had heard first-hand experiences of their POW camps from Henri Cornioley, a pre-war sweetheart with whom fate had reunited her after his escape from German imprisonment.

He had worked with her in the resistance and they escaped Europe together in September 1944, marrying the following month. She spent the rest of her working life as a secretary to the World Bank in post-war Paris, but her later years were also characterised by a struggle for recognition for her efforts.

She had originally been offered a civilian MBE, but turned it down saying "there was nothing civil about what I did". Her forthrightness gained her a Military MBE, but she was ineligible for the Military Cross because of her sex and didn’t qualify for Parachute Wings because, owing to her brief training, she had only made a total of four jumps, not the required five.

Eventually, 60 years overdue, she was given a CBE. "We should have done this a long time ago," the Queen was reported to have said, and two years later the Parachute Regiment finally granted her Wings. "I was tickled pink," she said, "because I was somewhat miffed when no one thought to give me them all those years ago. But I don't consider myself a heroine. Not at all. I am just an ordinary person who did her job during the war."

Pearl Cornioley died at the age of 93, having survived her husband for nine years. She was survived by their daughter.