George Alfred Wilkinson

George Alfred Wilkinson (31 August 1913 - 5 October 1944) was a member of the Special Operations Executive, as was his brother Edward. His codename was 'Étienne' and he reached the rank of captain. He was mentioned in despatches and France awarded him the Croix de guerre 1939-1945 with palm.

He is mentioned on the Valençay SOE Memorial and panel 21 column 3 of the Brookwood Memorial, whilst a panel unveiled at Buchenwald on 15 October 2010 honours Allied officers from block 17 murdered between September 1944 and March 1945, notably including Wilkinson and nineteen other SOE agents.

Life

He was born in the 1st arrondissement of Paris to the Englishman Gaston Wilkinson and his wife Alice Leimbach, who was from an Alsatian family. George's own wife was Jeanne Fifis (1915, Clichy - 1994, Olivet).

On 5 April 1944 he was parachuted in near Orléans to set up the 'Historian' network in that area. Philippe de Vomécourt indicated his first contacts and on the night of 5-6 April two more of the network arrived, radio operator Lilian Rolfe and André Studler, an American weapons instructor.^[1] He effectively organised several arms drops for the French Resistance - two in May, seventeen in June and twenty-four in July.

On 26 June 1944 he was arrested at Olivet and imprisoned in Orléans. In August he was moved to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was executed on 5 October the same year aged thirty-one.