Nancy Wake was the most decorated woman of World War II.  Her numerous honors include the British War Medal 1939–1945, George medal, 1939–1945 Star, France and Germany Star, Defense Metal, French Croix de Guerre with Star and two Palms, French Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, U.S. Presidential Medal for Freedom with Palm, and the French Medaille de la Resistance.

The date was February 29, 1944, and a British Liberator bomber was circling low over Montlucon, France.  In the bowels of the bomber a pretty woman with dark tresses pushed under a tin hat was throwing up.  The crew had never before dropped a woman into enemy-occupied France, so as a token of their admiration, they had given her a spam sandwich, which she was now losing.

The woman was attired in bulky overalls with loaded revolvers tucked in her pockets.  A heavy camel-hair overcoat draped over her shoulder. But all was not as it seemed.  Beneath her cumbersome attire she was wearing a chic dress and silk stockings.  Stylish heels were on her feet and her slim ankles were skillfully wrapped with bandages to protect a high-heeled fall.

The small woman was Nancy Wake, a daring resistance fighter who had achieved legendary status to all who had previously fought with her, and those who had trained by her side as Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents.

Despite her nausea and the extreme danger drawing ever nearer with each passing moment, Wake was impatient to return to France.   Born a New Zealander, raised in Australia, strongly attached to England, and in love with her adopted country of France, she loathed Hitler and his Nazi goons with an unfulfilled desire for revenge.  Since the Germans had defeated and occupied France, she had lost many good friends to the Nazi brutes.

Wake desired nothing more than to pick up her life where she had left it, to discover the fate of her beloved husband, the wealthy French industrialist Henri Fiocca, and her adored dog, Picon.  But first she would do everything possible to help destroy the German occupiers, and to reassume her status as the woman on the Gestapo’s #1 most wanted list in France.  The German army had a standing 5,000,000 Franc reward offered for the capture of Wake, whom they had named “The White Mouse”.

After more than a year’s absence, Wake was set to parachute into France to help organize French Resistance, and to unsettle the German Army through sabotage.  With D-day only a short time away, the British needed the best and most reliable agents to lead the local resistance, to create as much disruption as possible.  Captain Nancy Wake was one of the best, and she would succeed in a most spectacular way.

* * *

Wake’s desire for adventure came early in life, so she left Australia to travel to New York, London and Paris when she was twenty years old.  With an instinctive and natural love for everything French, she settled in Paris, working as a journalist.  After Hitler came to power in 1933, Paris filled with German refugees fleeing the Nazi regime.  Wake’s  dislike for the Nazis began when she heard firsthand from refugees in Paris what it meant to live under the ruthless regime.  Her dislike turned to hatred when she joined a group of French journalist friends who wanted to see the Nazi life for themselves and to write a few articles about Hitler and the Nazis.  In 1934, they traveled to Vienna and witnessed horrifying scenes of brutality against Jewish-Austrian citizens.  Shortly thereafter, Wake travelled to Berlin and saw more of the same.  Wake never forgot standing numb and horrified as she watched Nazi Stormtrooper Brownshirts strutting through Berlin city streets, entering Jewish shops, and dragging out Jewish shopkeepers to publicly whip them.  Feeling sick at heart, she fled the city, vowing that given the opportunity, she would fight against the Nazis and all that they represented.  She had her chance sooner than she could have ever imagined.

After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, France and England declared war, but nothing much happened between the three great powers, creating a “phony war”.  But real war came soon enough in March 1940 when the Germans invaded the Low Countries, including France.

By this time, Nancy and Henri were married.  Wake had agreed to leave the exquisite city of Paris to move to her husband’s home in Marseille.  After Henri was drafted into the army, the gutsy Wake could not bear to sit out the war, so she convinced Henri to buy her an ambulance.  She took her personal ambulance and joined a voluntary ambulance unit.  The situation was dangerous and chaotic, but Wake revealed her grit and determination early, never failing to drive through the most dangerous zones to transport wounded soldiers and civilians.

The war did not go well for the French.  By mid-June, the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned and Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain replaced him.  Petain requested Germany Armistice terms on June 17, 1940.  That’s the same day that the government made a surprising broadcast to the French people, “With a heavy heart I tell you today that it is necessary to stop the fighting.”

* * *

All of France was shocked and demoralized, but Wake was furious to be living under the thuggish Nazis.  She knew that she would never give in to the occupiers.  Her defiance against the hated Nazis quickly developed into direct confrontation.  After meeting a French Army officer involved in the resistance, Wake became an eager courier for the resistance.  Her involvement in the budding guerrilla movement increased after she met a captured British Army captain who was free on parole.  (In the early days of the war the French were in charge of the British prisoners in the Free Zone, and prisoners were often allowed parole during the daylight hours.)   Wake and her husband agreed to help the British in any way possible, and they did, delivering packages and providing the British soldiers with money.  Although the British had promised the French they would not use their paroled freedom to escape, one day they all disappeared from Marseille.

All those runaway prisoners wanted to return to England, to rejoin the war.  All required escorts familiar with France and with the French language to guide them out of the country.  Wake obtained several sets of false papers and became heavily involved in leading more than a thousand escaped prisoners of war and downed Allied pilots out of occupied France and into Spain over the Pyrenees Mountains.

No resistance job was too big or too small for Wake.  She traveled all over southern France with false documents, cash and clothing for escapees.  No resistance fighter was as bold or as successful as Wake, although she later admitted that her femininity helped her evade capture.  She never hesitated in using all her feminine appeal to flirt her way out of danger with her Germans pursuers, many of whom were seeking female companionship.  All were left disappointed when Wake failed to show for agreed upon romantic trysts.

Wake pulled off so many successes against the Gestapo that she became the most sought after resistance fighter in France.  The Gestapo named her “The White Mouse” although they did not know Wake’s identity.  In their determination to locate the effective resistance fighter, the Gestapo began surveillance on many women living in the area.  Nancy and Henri’s telephones were bugged, but Wake was far too clever for the Nazis, playing  the dangerous spy game successfully time after time.  But when locals warned that her movements were being followed, Henri insisted that she leave France.

Wake had traveled the Pyrenees escape route so many times while saving others that she knew the entire rugged trail by heart.  But bad luck intervened time and again and during one of six attempts to flee France, she was captured.  The Gestapo brutalized her for four days.  Never contrite, a super cool Wake performed so effectively that when a double agent was sent to spring her from jail, he was able to convince the Gestapo that Nancy was his mistress.  The Gestapo foolishly released the most wanted resistance fighter in all of France.

After surviving torture by the Gestapo, leaping from a moving train, fired upon by machine guns, losing her precious jewels and money, being starved for eight days, becoming infected with disease, and being caught in the open during a blizzard, Nancy finally made a triumphant climb over the Pyrenees.  To her dismay, she was quickly arrested by the Spanish authorities, some of whom were known to cooperate with the Gestapo.  Kept in chains and without food, once again she outwitted her captors and was soon released and put on a British ship to England.

The second part of her war life as a trained saboteur was in her future.

* * *

After months on the run, an exhausted Wake quickly settled in London, hoping that Henri and Picon could join her.  She started looking for an acceptable flat for her little family.  Although she heard nothing from her husband, he appeared in her dreams.  On the night of October 16, 1943, Wake was awakened by the most realistically gruesome nightmare.  Henri had come to her as a dead man.  Hysterical at the thought that Henri had been murdered by the Gestapo, she was inconsolable.  Friends tried to convince her to treat the dream as a dream, but she remained haunted by the idea, and suddenly, she was determined to return to France.

Wake knew that she could and should use her skills to hurt the Nazis.  After asking around, she was sent to the British Special Operations.  The SOE had been secretly formed in 1940 to work with resistance forces in German-occupied Europe.  Wake’s reputation preceded her so she was quickly accepted as a SOE operative.  The only woman in a class of men, she was sent to Scotland for training.  All received training in radio operation, night parachuting, and survival skills including traveling with false identity cards, silent killing, operating guns, grenades and plastic explosives.  After graduation from one of the most arduous schools in the military world, Wake was finally on her way back to her dearly loved France.

* * *

Wake’s heart plunged when she peered from the bomber to see huge bonfires burning.  She had heard that the French resistance could be careless and she knew that if she could see her welcoming party, so could the Nazis.  But there was nothing to do but to jump into the fray.  Wake’s co-saboteur, a man code named “Hubert,” jumped first.  Wake, who hated parachute jumps, followed.  She landed in a thick hedge with her parachute tangled in a tree.  Hearing loud voices, she thought there was a Nazi raid.  She thought fast, quickly detaching herself from her parachute, slipping off her overalls, removing the bandages around her ankles, and dashing to find a bushy shrub where she hid.

The loud voices were excited Frenchmen.  Her partner soon arrived, along with a good looking Frenchman named Henri Tardivat.  The fighter was astounded to learn that his superior was a woman.  By this time the various bands of Maquis (resistance fighters) were in a struggle for power.  None wanted to be led by a female agent.  In short order the resistance fighters discovered that Wake was superior to their toughest warriors.  She quickly disciplined the disorderly hordes into unified action.

The rest is history.

Wake arranged nightly parachute drops of arms and ammunition from England, established arms and ammunition drops, and led the 4,000 Maquis in battle.  Following such success, more men clamored to join the resistance, nearly doubling their numbers.  Wake led her men in guerrilla warfare and inflicted such severe damage on German troops and facilities that the SS turned their full focus on Wake’s group.  During the month of June 1944, German troops assembled for what they thought would be a final attack to destroy Wake’s group.  But Wake personally led her small resistance force to victory, losing only 100 men to the German’s approximately 1,500.

Wake says that the most exciting sortie she ever made was an attack on the German headquarters in Montlucon. That’s when Wake boldly entered the village, dashed through the back door into the German occupied building, raced up the stairs, opened the front door along the passage way and threw in her grenades before closing the door and “running like hell back to my car which was ready to make a quick getaway.”  The headquarters was completely wrecked, leaving dead Nazis in the rubble.  Wake laughingly recounted that the hardest part of the raid was to convince nearby residents of the town that the “Allies had not landed and that they must return immediately to their homes and remain indoors.”

Wake admitted that when asked what she is most proud of doing during the war, she always says, “the bike ride.”  This amazing feat occurred when Wake cycled 500 kilometers over mountainous terrain in seventy-two hours in order to replace her code book and wireless radio lost during a German raid.  Without codes, she would be unable to receive her orders for the Allied invasion soon to come.  She talked her way through German checkpoints and towns swarming with the SS and Gestapo.  She saved the day with one of the boldest and most physically challenging feats of the war.

After Paris was liberated, Wake led her troops into Vichy to join the celebration.    Sadly, during the midst of her happiness over Allied victory in France, she learned  that her beloved husband Henri had been arrested, tortured and killed in October of the previous year, dying on the same night that Wake had suffered her nightmare and saw her husband dead.   She was heartbroken and shattered when told that Nazi torturers had actually peeled the flesh of his back to expose his kidneys.  The Gestapo had promised him life if he would only tell where his wife had gone.  Henri died a hero, never divulging any information about his wife, or the secrets he knew about the resistance.

Wake did find her sweet dog Picon, who had been protected by caring neighbors after Henri was arrested.  Picon was so excited when reunited with his mistress that he was given sedatives to calm him.

The heroine Nancy Wake remained in the SOE until 1960, revered by all who had known her.  Henri Tardivat, her former French comrade, described his resistance chieftain in this way:  “Nancy Wake is the most feminine woman I’ve ever known, at least until the fighting starts.  Then, she is like five men.”

When Wake was asked how she faced fear during her many exploits, she laughed and replied, “Hah!  I’ve never been afraid in my life.”  No doubt many of Hitler’s best feared facing the fearless Nancy Wake.

The world will not soon meet another Nancy Wake.  Let us all pray that there is no need to do so.

 

Recommended reading: 

Nancy Wake, The White Mouse.  The autobiography of Australia’s wartime legend.

Nancy Wake: SOE’s Greatest Heroine by Russell Braddon