Nancy Wake

On March 1, 1944, French Resistance Captain Henri Tardivat found Nancy Wake tangled in a tree. As he looked up at her hanging from the branches, he remarked on her beauty.

“I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year,” he said.

Wake, who’d gotten stuck in the tree after parachuting from a B-24 bomber, was holding classified documents. On her way to the local maquis resistance group, she had no time for Tardivat’s chatter.

“Don’t give me that French sh*t,” she said as she untangled herself from the tree.

Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was born Aug. 30, 1912, in Wellington, New Zealand, the youngest of six children. Her father, a journalist, left the family shortly after moving them to Sydney, Australia.

Wake left home at 16, worked briefly as a nurse, and managed with the help of a small inheritance from an aunt to leave Australia at age 20.

She traveled to London, New York and Paris, and decided Paris was the place that suited her best. She found work as a freelance journalist.

There, in 1936, she met a man named Henri Fiocca, whom she married and settled with in Marseilles three years later.

When working as a freelancer for a Parisian newspaper, the she was asked to travel to Vienna to interview the new German Chancellor – a man named Adolf Hitler.

In Vienna, Wake witnessed firsthand the horrific treatment of Jewish men and women at the hands of devoted Hitler followers. Immediately, she vowed to oppose Hitler by whatever means necessary.

With the German invasion of France, Ms. Wake’s wealth and social standing gave her a certain cover as she began helping members of local Resistance groups.

In 1940, the Nazis invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Rather than leave her home, Nancy Wake remained in Paris and joined the French Resistance with her husband, Henri Fiocca, a wealthy French industrialist.

For two years they worked as couriers for the resistance, later becoming part of an escape network to get downed Allied soldiers back to safety. The Gestapo knew, in part, of the resistance occurring right under their noses and were working tirelessly to stop it, searching Wake’s mail and staking out her home.

Eventually, it became too dangerous for Nancy Wake to continue her work from inside France’s borders. Leaving Fiocca behind to continue their work from Paris, she planned to travel to Britain. Shortly after she departed, her husband was captured and tortured for information on her whereabouts, but he kept her secret – which eventually cost him his life. Wake didn’t learn of Fiocca’s death until after the war was over.

On her way to Britain, Wake earned her nickname of the White Mouse as she evaded capture by SS guards and Gestapo officers several times.

She would later remark on her tactics, which usually consisted of flirting or talking her way out of precarious situations.

“A little powder and a little drink on the way, and I’d pass their (German) posts and wink and say, ‘Do you want to search me?’” she said. “God, what a flirtatious little bastard I was.”

When she was picked up on a train outside of Toulouse, she spun a wild tale of deceit, claiming she had to be let go because she was the mistress of one of the guards and that she had to conceal her identity from her husband. The German guards let her go, and she eventually escaped through the Pyrenees into Spain, and later into Britain.

Once in Britain, Nancy Wake joined the Special Operatives Executives and was trained in several combat and intelligence programs. Her training officers all noted that she was a quick learner, a fast shot, and could “put the men to shame.”

Before long she was a high ranking officer for the SOE in charge of organizing and allocating arms to 7,500 men. She herself led several attacks on the Gestapo in Montluçon and at one point offered to personally execute a German spy that her men were too scared to kill themselves.

Wake was a great asset in the war, and proved how strong woman are.

“I was never afraid,” she said. “I was too busy to be afraid.”

By most accounts, Ms. Wake never figured out what to do with her life after the war.

“It’s dreadful because you’ve been so busy, and then it all just fizzles out,” she told an Australian newspaper in 1983.