PARIS (AFP) ― One of Winston Churchill’s French secret agents will be decorated by Queen Elizabeth II in Paris on Thursday as the British monarch begins a three-day state visit to France.
Robert “Bob” Maloubier, a specialist in sabotage who worked for the British wartime leader’s Special Operations Executive is to be made an honorary MBE (Member of the most excellent Order of the British Empire) in recognition of his services to Britain.
Maloubier, 91, said he was hoping to get the opportunity to exchange a few words with the queen and remind her of a previous meeting, when she was a teenager in wartime London.
“I will tell her that I remember her wearing her girl guide uniform in the ruins of London in 1943,” Maloubier told AFP.
“I was in Kensington. There had been a lot of bombing and the royal family and Winston Churchill were there to offer words of comfort to the affected families.”
Maloubier’s action-packed career continued after the war and he later wrote a book about his experiences with the SOE, created by Churchill to carry out spying and sabotage missions behind German lines.
He was twice parachuted into occupied France, once the day after D-Day, and had a string of narrow escapes from Nazi clutches.
“The war for me represented the best years of my life, because I survived,” he says today.
Maloubier left the British army at the end of the war with the rank of captain and as a recipient of the Distinguished Service Order, one of Britain’s top military honors.
Queen Elizabeth will arrive in France on Thursday afternoon via the Eurostar cross-Channel train.
She is due to lay a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe, France’s national monument to its war dead before attending a garden party at the British embassy, where Maloubier will be among the guests.
She is due to attend the D-Day 70th anniversary commemorations in Normandy on Friday and will be President Francois Hollande’s guest for a state dinner at the Elysee Palace in the evening.
French officials revealed that the monarch had been asked what she would like for dinner and, much to their delight, the result of the consultation is that the menu is going to be “very classically French.”
On Saturday, Hollande will join her on a visit to a flower market on the Ile de la Cite that the Paris authorities have decided to rename in her honor.
“It really is an exceptional gesture because, in France, we rarely name a place after living people,” a senior aide said, underlining the huge effort being made to honor a monarch regarded as a true friend of France.
The queen first visited the market in 1948, when she was still a princess and was pregnant with her first child, the future Prince Charles.
koreaherald@heraldcorp.com
