André Hue

André Hunter Alfred Hue (7 December 1923 – 11 January 2005) was an Anglo-French businessman, soldier and spy best remembered for his work as an operative with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France and Burma during World War II.

Early life Hue was born in Swansea, Wales to a French father and Welsh mother. Hue's father, also named André, was a World War I veteran who had been badly wounded, having taken a bullet in his head, which remained there until his early death in 1938. The elder Hue served as an officer in the French merchant marine who worked on a ship taking coal from Swansea to Le Havre while his wife Caroline Hunter did not speak French, but insisted their children be brought up knowing French. Fluent in both English and French, Hue grew up in Le Havre. Hue was given the rank of acting captain just before Operation Overlord.

After passing courses that taught him combat, sabotage and parachuting, Hue parachuted into France on the night of 5 June 1944 together with a number of men from the French Special Air Service (SAS) regiment.

Hue noted in his book The Next Moon that he feared the Milice much more than the Germans because the Milice being French could always notice anybody whose accent did not sound entirely French and the regional accents; Hue's Norman French stood out in Brittany. Hue described his enemy as utterly ruthless in the pursuit of his forces, recalling: "Women were being raped then shot in front of their husbands, fathers, and children; and if was not that way around, then fathers were shot in front of their women, but only after the women had been publicly raped". Hue in a report was very critical of SOE's security in Burma, writing the Japanese should never had been allowed to ambush the landing zone.

After the war: spy and businessman At the end of World War II, Hue held the rank of major in the British Army. In January 1946, Hue was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French republic. Hue served in the Palestine Mandate during the last years of British rule, and afterwards he served in Cyprus. In 1954–55, he served as the British military attaché in Cambodia, during which time he met his future wife Maureen Taylor who worked in the British embassy in Phnom Penh as a secretary. Cambodia had been a French protectorate, and the Khmer elite all spoke French while the British Army did not have many officers fluent in Khmer.

In 1957, Hue married Taylor and had one daughter by her. Hue worked for MI6, the British intelligence service in the Far East. After leaving MI6 in 1967, Hue worked for the British-American Tobacco company in Paraguay, Senegal, and Malawi before having a successful career as a businessman in France. In 1980, Hue moved to the town of Chichester in Sussex, where he was served as member of the town council where he was known for pressing for municipal improvements. Hue spent much of the 1990s writing his memoir The Next Moon with the writer and former Royal Marine Ewen Southby-Tailyour recounting his service with the SOE, which was published in 2004. In his last years, Hue suffered from Alzheimer's disease, which killed him in 2005. His wife placed a copy of The Next Moon to him on his hospital bed, hoping that it would remind him of who he was during his final months.