WWII veteran Stanley, the 98-year-old father of Friend of The SWW2LN, Pat Vinycomb, has two ‘secret war’ connections of a) being taken into the famous Comète escape line of MI9 after his Halifax was shot down over France in 1944 and b) later being imprisoned in the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany where he heard the tannoy announcement calling the first group of Allied agents to their execution on 12 September 1944 – a group that included several male agents from F Section, SOE.

The SWW2LN supported and helped Pat in her (kept secret) successful application for Stanley to be made an Officier de la Légion d’honneur and he is pictured having received his decoration from the French government in January. In the photograph (next to the flowers) is the framed montage, created and presented to him last year by The SWW2LN, of the agents whom Stanley fought to have commemorated at Buchenwald.