‘I hate wars and violence, but if they come I don’t see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.’
NANCY WAKE
IN 1944, JUST after the liberation of France from the Nazis, a very beautiful young woman was dining at the British Officers’ Club in Paris. Weeks previously, it had been called the German Officers’ Club. Not any more.
A waiter, as he was serving her, muttered something under his breath in French. ‘I prefer the Germans any day, to you rotten English.’
Unfortunately for the waiter, he didn’t realize that the young woman spoke perfect French.
Even more unfortunately, he didn’t realize that she was Nancy Wake. One of the toughest, bravest, most ruthless Allied operatives of the Second World War.
Nancy followed him out of the dining room and gave him a piece of her mind. Followed by a piece of her pretty fist. He crumpled, unconscious, to the floor.
Nancy Wake later stated that she was never brought up to be a violent person. Determined? Certainly. Rebellious? Without question. But violent? Not until the war started. It changed her, like it changed so many people.
Few of them, though, had a story to tell that was quite so remarkable as Nancy Wake’s.
Nancy had an unhappy childhood. After moving the family to Australia when Nancy was 20 months old, her father walked out on them. Her mother showed her very little affection, and Nancy became a rebellious kid. The rebellion that flowed through her veins would prove to be a major asset to the Allied war effort.
She ran away from home when she was 16 to work as a nurse, but she clearly had a wanderlust. When her aunt sent her the substantial sum of £200, she was off. She travelled to London, and then across Europe, working as a journalist. She lived life to the full, and in 1937, at the age of 25, she found herself in Vienna.
There, in a picturesque Viennese square, she was about to see something that would change her view of the world – and perhaps the course of the coming war – for ever.
A group of Nazi stormtroopers had gathered together some of the local Jewish population. The stormtroopers had chained their prisoners to enormous metal wheels. As they rolled these wheels round the square, the Nazis were whipping the captives violently, inflicting great, bleeding welts on their already crumpled bodies as the desperate prisoners screamed and clung to each other in agony.
Nancy was witnessing, first hand, how the Nazis would ultimately brutalize, torture, degrade and attempt to destroy an entire race of men, women and children – for nothing more than the peaceful faith they professed, the community values they lived by and the heritage that ran through their veins.
This cruel and sickening scene had an immediate effect on Nancy. She decided there and then that she would do whatever it took to make life more difficult for the loathsome Nazi party.
Over the coming years, she certainly did that. And some.
Nancy was a very beautiful woman – she looked more like a film star than a war hero. In 1939 she married a wealthy French businessman called Henri Fiocca and settled down to live a life of glamour in Marseilles.
Except, of course, things didn’t turn out like that. When war was declared, her husband received his call-up papers. It would have been assumed that Nancy would stay at home and wait for him.
But Nancy Wake wasn’t made that way.
Henri used some of his wealth to provide an ambulance, and Nancy joined a voluntary ambulance unit. She drove to northern France to help the Belgian refugees who were pouring over the border. Her hatred for the Nazi regime only increased when she saw German bombers strafing bullets down on elderly women and young children as they fled south.
Nancy didn’t have to see the wounded, dying bodies of many kids to make her decide to do something about it.
Her time was coming.
In 1940 Paris fell to the Germans. Nancy wept for her adopted homeland. But she knew that crying wouldn’t achieve anything. And she hadn’t forgotten her vow.
She became a courier for the embryonic French Resistance. Because of her status as the wife of a wealthy businessman, she could travel around France with more freedom than most women, at least at first. She used that freedom to smuggle messages and food to members of the Resistance in southern France.
This was highly dangerous work. The Gestapo – Hitler’s secret police – punished with brutal severity any members of the Resistance and anyone suspected of helping them. Resistance members were routinely and horrifically tortured, and then coldly executed.
Gestapo methods of torture included almost drowning their victims in bathtubs full of ice water, fixing wires to their bodies and blasting them with electrical charges, burning flesh, beating the prisoners with whips, tying their hands behind their backs and hanging them by their wrists in order to dislocate their shoulders …
Very soon, the Gestapo started to suspect Nancy. They started tapping her phone. Opening her mail.
It didn’t put her off. Far from it.
It simply meant she had to start fighting a little smarter.
In order to continue her work with the Resistance it was important that Nancy could move around France. She acquired several fake identities to enable her to do this. But she had something more important than false papers. She had nerve.
She would flirt outrageously with German guards to get past their checkpoints and road-blocks. She would keep a couple of old turnips in the basket of her bicycle, so she could pretend she was on her way to or from the market if she was questioned.
France was full of prisoners of war and downed British airmen. They needed to escape if they were to avoid brutal incarceration by the Nazis. But it wasn’t easy. To the north: German forces. To the east: Mussolini. To the west: the Atlantic. To the south: the Pyrenees.
Those mountains, which formed a natural barrier between France and the safety of neutral Spain, are formidable and not passed easily even today. But between 1940 and 1943 Nancy helped more than 1,000 POWs and downed British airmen cross them. In total, she traversed the Pyrenees on foot seventeen times. Just goes to show that pretty and gritty can go hand in hand.
Nancy became supremely adept at whisking Allied servicemen out from under the Nazis’ noses. And try though they might, they simply couldn’t catch her. The Gestapo gave her a nickname – the White Mouse. They put a price on her head.
Five million francs.
But still the Nazis couldn’t catch her.
And all the time she spent dodging the agents of the Gestapo, was time spent using up their resources.
By 1943 Nancy was number one on their most wanted list.
A bad place to be.
But Nancy Wake wasn’t scared.
She would later say that she’d never felt a moment’s fear in her life.
The Resistance, however, knew that France was becoming too hot, even for Nancy. So did her husband. They persuaded her that the time had come to make her own escape across the Pyrenees.
Reluctantly, she agreed.
She never said a proper farewell to Henri. She just walked out the door, saying she had some shopping to do.
In fact, she had a lot more than groceries on her mind.
Nancy attempted to cross the Pyrenees six times. Now that she was trying to make her own escape, the elements got the better of her. On one occasion the terrifying, pro-Nazi Vichy police captured her. They subjected her to four days of brutal interrogation.
They beat her continually – heavy blows across her head. But then, in a feat of extraordinary daring, the Belgian Resistance fighter Albert Guérisse – better known by his pseudonym Patrick O’Leary – walked straight into the police commissioner’s office. He announced that he was a member of the Vichy police, and that Nancy was his mistress. He then showed them false papers to support his claim.
Astonishingly, Nancy and O’Leary pulled it off and she was released.
Goes to show what a bit of nerve can do.
On her final march over the Pyrenees, Nancy climbed for forty-seven hours solid. Temperatures were freezing. On her feet, she wore only espadrilles and two pairs of socks. The wet pair she wore for climbing; the dry pair was for the brief minutes of rest she took every few hours, so that she could avoid frostbite.
She had a few companions with her and, when a young girl called Jean said she couldn’t go on any further, Nancy had a direct way of dealing with it. She pushed the girl into a freezing stream then gave her two options: stay here and freeze to death, or keep going.
She kept going.
Nancy’s seeming brutality probably saved the young girl’s life.
A blizzard raged around them for hour after hour. Biting ice blasted against their numb faces, soaking their sub-par clothing. Halfway through the climb they realized they were also suffering from food poisoning from some lamb they’d eaten beforehand.
It never rains but it pours, eh?
It didn’t stop Nancy Wake.
She drove herself and her companions on and up, over those unforgiving mountains with relentless courage and determination.
They eventually made it to Spain. Just.
From there, she continued to England, where she was finally safe and secure.
But safe and secure wasn’t the way Nancy liked it.
*
The Special Operations Executive: Churchill’s ‘Secret Army’. Its brief: espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe. Top secret. Highly dangerous. You get caught, you die.
It was tailor-made for someone like Nancy Wake. Given her exploits with the French Resistance, it’s hardly surprising that the SOE got their hands on her.
Only thirty-nine women joined the French section of the SOE. Like the others, Nancy did so under the auspices of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, nicknamed the FANYs.
She was taken to a training camp in Scotland. It would have suited her. She might have been beautiful, but she was also hard-drinking, foul-mouthed and ruthless. She could more than hold her own in the male environment of the SOE.
In Scotland she was trained in the use of weapons and munitions.
They taught her survival skills.
Codes and ciphers.
Communications.
Parachuting.
And they taught her how to kill silently.
All the essential skills of an undercover special forces operative.
She was also an excellent shot. Her fieldcraft was second to none, and she could move across country without anyone detecting her. In just a few months, she had been turned from a brave Resistance fighter into a lethal weapon.
In April 1944, still determined to wreak havoc with the Nazis, she parachuted back into France.
Nancy Wake landed in a tree in central France. It was an inauspicious start.
Her Resistance contact found her dangling from the tree branches. He turned on the charm. ‘I hope all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year.’
‘Don’t give me that French sh*t,’ Nancy replied.
And then she got to work.
There were many local bands of rural Resistance fighters. They were called the maquisards. Nancy’s objective was to locate and organize them. That way they could become a much more effective threat to the occupying Germans. She helped bump their numbers up to 7,000. And she helped arm them.
It was dangerous and tough work. She moved, night by night, from rebel group to rebel group. Her fieldcraft was put to the test continually, as she had to spend many nights hiding in the forests of the Auvergne while the Nazis tried to track, hunt and kill her.
Three or four times a week, the Allies would perform parachute drops of weapons and ammo. It was Nancy’s job to organize them, and to keep finding new drop points.
Her work ensured that the Auvergne caused the Nazis more trouble than any other part of France.
This, in turn, meant they planned to do something about it.
The Germans bolstered their forces in the region. They armed themselves with heavy artillery and aircraft. They surrounded the stronghold of the maquisards. And they prepared to wipe out the rebels. Ruthlessly.
There were 22,000 German troops. There were 7,000 maquisards.
Nancy and her fighters didn’t stand a chance, right?
Wrong.
Between April 1944 and the liberation of Paris in August of that year, the battle raged. The Germans lost 1,400 men. The maquisards, 100. And at the centre of the fighting was Nancy Wake.
She wasn’t afraid to kill Nazis by the dozen. In fact, she seemed to revel in it. On one occasion, she led an incredibly audacious attack on the Gestapo headquarters itself in Montluçon.
They knew the German commanders would be congregating for their pre-lunch drink around noon. Nancy screamed up in a Resistance car and sprinted into the headquarters from the rear of the building. She bolted up the stairs and opened the door to the room where the Germans had congregated.
Then she threw in several grenades.
Thirty-eight key Gestapo officers were killed.
On another occasion, she crept up behind an SS guard, intending only to knock him unconscious. But then the guard turned and saw her. Her SOE silent-kill reflex kicked in. The guard opened his mouth to shout out. But before he could get any noise out, Nancy whacked her forearm up under his chin. There was a sickening crunch as the guard’s neck broke.
He slid, dead, to the floor. Nancy Wake had just killed a man with her bare hands.
Courageous action by anyone’s standards.
And she wasn’t afraid to make difficult decisions. When it transpired that some of her maquisards had been sheltering a young girl who turned out to be a German spy, Nancy was the only one with the guts to execute her.
You hesitate, you die. She knew that all too well.
Perhaps her finest moment came just before D-Day. A German raid had forced one of her radio operators to burn his top-secret code books. But these codes were essential. Without them, the maquisards could expect no fresh supplies or weapon dumps.
Unthinkable. The codes needed replacing. The only way to do this was to make contact with another Resistance cell in Châteauroux, 500 kilometres away.
And so Nancy Wake got on her bike.
It was an incredible and ambitious plan. She not only had to cycle her way through occupied territory, but she completed the epic journey in a staggering seventy-two hours. Talk about a Tour de France, and, believe me, Nancy Wake wasn’t riding a carbon-fibre bike. She was riding an old boneshaker, with turnips in the basket.
When she finally arrived in Châteauroux, Nancy couldn’t stand up. Or walk. In fact she couldn’t even speak. She could only cry quietly in pain. But she’d done what she set out to do. Against the odds. And it enabled the Resistance to continue with their vital mission.
Looking back on the war, she would recall that bike ride as being among her proudest moments.
*
There’s no doubt that the French Resistance played a massive role in the defeat of Hitler. And in the middle of the maquisards, calling the shots and leading them with unbelievable courage, was Nancy Wake.
And yet, for her, the liberation of France was bittersweet. She revelled in the sudden excitement in the streets, and enjoyed the sight of the Nazi occupiers fleeing the scenes of their crimes. But there was sadness too. She learned that her husband, Henri, had been captured by the Germans after her escape from France in 1943. They demanded information about Nancy.
He refused to give it to them.
They tortured him.
He still refused to give it to them.
And so they tortured him until he was dead.
Nancy Wake would always blame herself for his death. But from the end of the war until she died, in 2011, she never once regretted her ruthless actions against the Germans.
She knew that if she was caught, she could expect the same treatment as twelve of her fellow female SOE agents in France finally received: torture and execution.
She later recalled, ‘There had been nothing violent about my nature before the war, yet the years would see a great change. The enemy made me tough. I had no pity for them, nor did I expect any in return.’
Once the war ended, Nancy continued to work for the SOE until 1960. She was honoured with many medals and awards, including the George Medal from Britain, the Légion d’Honneur from France and the Medal of Freedom from America. But, as always, medals only tell half the story.
For me, Nancy Wake’s wartime contribution is best summed up in the words of one of her Resistance comrades.
‘She is the most feminine woman I have ever known, until the fighting starts. Then, she is like five men.’