Nancy Wake - the woman the Gestapo called the White Mouse

Nancy Wake (1912-2011) was born in the New Zealand city of Well­ing­ton, last child of Charles Augustus Wake and Ella Rosieur. The fam­ily moved to Sydney when Nancy was a toddler. Shortly afterwards, her father abandoned the family, so she rebelled and ran away as soon as she could leave home. With financial help from an aunt in 1932, Nancy sailed for Europe and trained as a journal­ist in London. Two years later she settled in Paris, starting work for the Hearst group of newspapers as a journalist.

I don’t think this New Zealand-Australian knew much about Fascism. In 1935 she was a tourist in Vienna and Berlin, having a pleasant time, when the violent anti-Semitism of Nazism became crystal clear to her for the first time.

In November 1939 she married Henri Fiocca, a cute and weal­thy industrialist. It was a great life in Marseilles, filled with love, champagne, caviar and travel.

Nancy Wake's autobiography, published in 1985.

Six months later in 1940 Germany in­vaded France, so Fiocca and Wake joined the fledgling Resistance. Their growing involvement in the Res­istance saw the couple helping Allied servicemen and Jewish ref­ug­ees escape from France, across the north of Spain and onto the Portuguese coast.

After Henri was called up for service, Nancy enrolled as an ambul­ance driver. She began to help British soldiers trapped in Occupied France to escape back home, and this led to her risky undercover work with the famous escape line organised by Pat O'Leary.

Ms Wake was placed at the top of the Gestapo's most wanted list so she planned to flee France for England, as advised by husband Henri in May 1943. After several failed escape attempts and 4 days of inter­rog­ation in a Vichy prison, Wake escaped across the Pyrenees. The White Mouse, a nickname given to Nancy by the Gestapo for her slipperi­n­ess, had escaped their clutches again.

Husband Henri promised to leave France as well. But he was picked up by the Gestapo and shot in August 1943. For decades she blamed her­self for his death, given she was more hated by the Gestapo than Henri was.

In June 1943 she reached Britain and began training in the Fr­en­ch Section of the Special Operations Executive/SOE as a spy and cour­ier. Her training reports record that she was a very good and fast shot.

Wake then returned to Nazi-occupied France to work with the Resist­ance in pre­paration for the D-Day landings in Norm­an­dy on 6th June 1944. Parach­uted back into France, Wake's job was to dis­tribute arms among Resistance fighters hiding in the mountains. She was in the Auverg­ne region along with Major John Farmer, leader of the Free­lance resist­ance circuit. Her orders were to help organise and arm the local maquis/a band of rural guerrilla French Resistance fight­ers, and soon Wake was fighting alongside them in pitched battles against the Germans.

A fortnight after D-day in June, a major attack by 10,000 Germ­ans in tanks and aircraft was made on their positions, during the time when they became separated from the group's radio operator. To try to re-estab­lish contact with London, Wake rode 500 kms by bike to make contact with a radio operator from another SOE group. Later, working with two Amer­ican officers when the Germans launched an attack on another maquis group, she took command of a section whose leader had been killed and coolly got the rest of the group out safely. This was not a woman who worried about her nail polish being chipped or her lipstick smudged.

Henri Fiocca and Nancy Wake in the happy days, 1937

Post war

Nancy Wake was regarded as an absolute heroine in France, the nation that dec­orated her with its highest military honour, Legion d'Honneur, as well as three Croix de Guerre and a French Resistance Medal. After the lib­eration of France, Wake returned to London, where she was awarded the George Medal. The Americans awarded her the Medal of Freedom. [So why did it take 60 years for Australia to honour her service, awarding her the Companion of the Order of Aust­ralia only in 2004??]

Nancy never quite adjusted to peace. She worked at the Air Min­istry in Whitehall, but was bored witless. She resigned in 1957 and immed­iately married John Forward, an Australian bomber pil­ot. He liked a drink or five, and they were well matched. They returned to Aust­ral­ia and had a sociable and sporty life with trips back to Europe and interviews with journalists about WW2 history.

This ex-resistance fighter became a member of the conserv­ative party’s NSW executive and stood for Parliament in the 1949 federal election. She stood for the seat of Barton, held by the Chif­­ley Labour govern­ment External Aff­airs Minister Dr Herbert Evatt, unsuccessfully. In 1951 she again stood for parliament against Dr Evatt - who was by then deputy opposition leader, unsuc­cessfully. After a per­iod living over­seas, Wake again unsuccessfully contested the seat of Kingsford Smith for the conservatives at the 1966 federal election. Finally the couple retired to Port Macquarie.

Wake’s own book, The Autobiography of the Woman the Gestapo Called the White Mouse, was published in 1985, leading to a television drama in the late 80s. Several serious histories have been written about her since. Appropriately Wakes' med­als are on public display in Austral­ia’s most important War Memorial Museum, in Canberra.

John Forward sadly died in 1997, so Nancy returned to live in Lon­d­on. Well into her 90s, seated on her res­erved bar stool in the Staf­ford Hotel bar, she remained as energetic and gutsy as she had been when fighting for women’s action back in her younger years.

Nancy Wake was undoubtedly the bravest women I know. She must have understood that her chances of survival were small, when she chose to return to France during the war as a resistance leader. But she was so energetic, so committed to women playing a full role in the war and so adventurous.. that she seemed oblivious to the risks.