He volunteered for special commando training and was sent to a special base in Helena, Montana, which trained both Americans and Canadians in the darker arts of combat.
From Montana, d'Artois moved to Britain and a camp in Scotland where SOE agents learned what they were to do in France.
During a parachute training exercise, a beautiful young Englishwoman winked at him.
She was Sonya Butt, the 19-year-old daughter of a senior Royal Air Force officer. As she had been to school in France and was fluent in French, she volunteered for the SOE.
However, love at first sight for both of them created problems, which they compounded by getting married while they were still in Scotland.
That ruined the plan to drop them into France as a team where the last thing officers wanted was to have one person emotionally attached to another, in case of capture.
Eventually, both Butt and d'Artois were parachuted into France, but they were landed hundreds of kilometres away from each other.
D'Artois, then a captain, parachuted into the countryside near Lyon, deep inside occupied German territory.
For almost six months his task was to disrupt the German army by destroying bridges and rail lines, and attacking German military positions.
His troops were a ragtag group of patriotic French men and women, many of whom joined the resistance to avoid being shipped to Germany to work in its war factories.
The young French Canadian officer would later recount that they treated him like a general and followed his orders religiously.
He trained 600 members of the maquis as a combat unit and used other members to set up a secure telephone network behind German lines.
In one battle between the maquis and German troops, d'Artois reported that German soldiers used their rifle butts to club to death 33 wounded resistance fighters.
A his-and-hers photo
(photo from evolutra.com)
While d'Artois was doing his bit around Lyon, his real wife, Butt, was operating as an SOE agent in the north of France.
At one point, she was captured by the Germans but escaped. The two reunited in Paris in late 1944 and returned to Canada where they would eventually have six children.
Guy d'Artois died in 1999. Sonya d'Artois, always known by her nickname Tony, is still alive and lives just outside of Montreal. At 85, she is one of the few survivors of the SOE and its operations in France but she refuses to give interviews.
Guy D'Artois at Wikipedia
By: Brant
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