Nancy
Wake played a vital role in the French Resistance during World War II; she was born
on August 30, 1912 in New Zealand as the youngest of six children. After she ran
away from home at the age of 16, Nancy soon found herself in London as a journalist; she told the executive of the newspaper that she was fluent in Egyptian, knowing
that he was very fond of Egypt. In the early 1930s, she moved to France, and in
1939, she married Henri Edmond Fiocca a French industrialist. With the fall of
France in 1940, Nancy soon joined the French Resistance and became an organizer
for the resistance fighters, she smuggled messages and food to the underground
in the south of France; she also led an army of 7,000 Maquis troops. She
purchased an ambulance to help transfer refugees fleeing from the Germans occupied
in France. During that time she was able to obtain false paperwork which
allowed her to help transport escaped prisoners of war to Spain. She became the
most wanted person by the Gestapo, and they code named her “the White Mouse”,
because of her ability to elude capture from the enemy.
Wake described her tactics: "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?' God, what a flirtatious little bastard I was.”
With a 5 million -franc
price placed on her head, she attempted six times to get out of France, and she
was finally able to escape to Britain from the Pyrenees. Unaware of her husband’s
whereabouts, she stated the last thing Henri said:
"You
have to leave’, and remember going out the door saying I’d do some shopping,
that I’d be back soon. And I left and I never saw him again. “
She did not know of his
death until the liberation of Paris in June 1945.
She
arrived in Britain in June 1943, where she was as recruited as one of 39 women
who served as British Special Operations Executives that worked with local
resistance groups to sabotage the German defenses. She was sent to a defense
camp in Scotland where she was trained in various tactics, such as decoding,
radio operation, night parachuting, plastic explosives, survival skills and gun
handling.
After
eight months of preparing and training, Nancy and another SOE operative parachuted
into central France in April 1944; they were there to prepare and organize the
French Resistance in preparation for the D-Day attack. Nancy successfully
trained 7,000 men in guerrilla warfare and distributed weapons throughout
France; she even rode her bike 500 km through several German checkpoints none-stop for 71 hours to replace codes that had been previously destroyed. Nancy
was also in charge of making important decisions that affected the Resistance
and was not partial to making tough dictions when necessary. One example she
explained of this was a situation in which she had to interrogate three French women
who were spies; after the interrogation, she was convinced that one of them was
a true spy
“I
was not a very nice person”, Wake told an Australian newspaper in 2001. “And it
didn’t put me off my breakfast. After all, she had an easy death. Shed didn’t suffer.
I knew her death was a lot better than the one I would have got.”
“And
if I hadn’t done it”, she added, “and she had got away and reported to the
Germans what the Maquis were up to, how could I have ever faced the families of
the maquisards we lost because of it? It was definitely the right thing to do.”
Once the World War II
ended, Nancy remained at the Intelligence Department at the British Air
Ministry. In 1957, she remarried a former prisoner of war, OfficerJohn Forward.
Nancy was awarded the George Medal, The United States Medal of Freedom for her services
in the War. After the death of her husband in 1997, she sold her war medals to pay for
living expenses; when asked why she commented:
“There
was no point in keeping them. When I die, I’ll probably go to hell and they’d
melt anyway. My only condition is when I die, I want my ashes scattered over
the hills where I fought alongside all those men.”
On August
7, 2011, Nancy Wake died at the age of 98.
Nancy
Wake, “white Mouse” of World WarII, Dies at 98, Washington Post. Bernstein,
Adam, August 9, 2011.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/nancy-wake-white-mouse-of-world-war-ii-dies-at-98/2011/08/08/gIQABvPT5I_story.html
(accessed March 14, 2014)
Nancy
Wake, Resistance Fighter, The Global Life of new Zealanders. Sweeny, Brian,
April 19, 2000.
http://www.nzedge.com/nancy-wake/ (accessed
March 14, 2014)
Nancy Wake, Biography, Spartacus
Educational. Simkin, John, September 1997- June 2013.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SOEwake.htm
(accessed March 14, 2014)
Nancy Wake, Proud Spy and Nazi Foe,
Dies at 98, The New York Times. Vitello, Paul, August 13, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/world/europe/14wake.html?_r=0
(accessed March 14, 2014)
