Nancy Wake
Based on Wikipedia: Nancy Wake
The White Mouse
She killed a Nazi sentry with her bare hands. When asked about it decades later in a television interview, Nancy Wake simply drew her finger across her throat and said, "They'd taught this judo-chop stuff with the flat of the hand at SOE, and I practiced away at it. But this was the only time I used it—whack—and it killed him all right. I was really surprised."
That matter-of-fact recollection captures something essential about Nancy Wake: she was capable of extraordinary violence when necessary, yet approached even the darkest moments with an almost unsettling cheerfulness. The Gestapo—Nazi Germany's secret police—called her "the White Mouse" because she kept slipping through their traps. They put a five million franc bounty on her head. They never caught her.
From Wellington to Vienna
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on August 30, 1912, the youngest of six children. Her ancestry included Māori blood through her great-grandmother Pourewa, believed to be of the Ngāti Māhanga iwi, reportedly one of the first Māori women to marry a European settler.
When Nancy was two, her family moved to Australia and settled in North Sydney. Shortly after, her father returned to New Zealand—essentially abandoning the family—leaving her mother Ella to raise six children alone. This early desertion may have planted the seeds of Nancy's fierce independence.
At sixteen, she ran away from home.
She worked as a nurse, saved money, and then did something remarkable for a young woman in the late 1920s: she used a £200 inheritance from an aunt to journey first to New York City, then to London, where she taught herself journalism. By the 1930s, she was working for Hearst newspapers as a European correspondent, traveling across a continent that was beginning to convulse.
In Vienna, she witnessed something that would define the rest of her life. She saw roving Nazi gangs randomly beating Jewish men and women in the streets. The casual brutality of it, the way ordinary people turned into monsters when given permission, burned itself into her memory. She decided then that if war came, she would fight.
Marriage, War, and the Escape Network
In 1937, Nancy met Henri Edmond Fiocca, a wealthy French industrialist. They married in November 1939, just two months after Germany invaded Poland and plunged Europe into war. The couple settled in Marseille, in the south of France, where Nancy expected to wait out whatever came next in relative comfort.
That expectation lasted eight months.
In June 1940, France fell to the German blitzkrieg with stunning speed. The northern half of the country came under direct German occupation, while the south—where Nancy lived—became the nominally independent Vichy France, a puppet state that collaborated with the Nazis. During those chaotic weeks, Nancy served as an ambulance driver, her first taste of the war she'd vowed to fight.
Soon after, she joined the Pat O'Leary escape network, named after the alias of one of its leaders, Albert Guérisse (a Belgian doctor). The network's mission was elegantly simple and extraordinarily dangerous: help Allied airmen who had been shot down over occupied Europe escape to neutral Spain, from where they could return to Britain and fly again.
Nancy became a courier. Her job was to guide these airmen through checkpoints, past German patrols, to safe houses where they could rest before the next leg of their journey. She described her tactics with characteristic bluntness: "A little powder and a little drink on the way, and I'd pass their posts and wink and say, 'Do you want to search me?' God, what a flirtatious little bastard I was."
The flirtation was calculated camouflage. Who would suspect this charming, fashionable woman of being a resistance operative? Certainly not the German soldiers at the checkpoints, who were probably relieved to encounter something other than sullen hostility.
The Net Tightens
But the Gestapo were not ordinary soldiers. They were professionals, and they were patient. They tapped her telephone. They intercepted her mail. They began to build a file.
In November 1942, everything changed. American and British forces invaded North Africa in Operation Torch, and in response, German troops flooded into Vichy France, ending even the pretense of independence. The Gestapo now had unrestricted access to Marseille, and life for Nancy Wake became genuinely deadly.
That same year, someone betrayed the network. Nancy decided she had to flee France. Her husband Henri refused to leave. He told her to go, that he would follow later. It was the kind of brave, foolish promise that people make when they don't yet understand how bad things will get.
Nancy never saw him again.
In early 1943, while trying to escape, she was arrested with a trainload of other people in Toulouse. She spent four terrifying days in custody before Albert Guérisse—the network leader—managed to secure her release through an audacious lie. He claimed Nancy was his mistress, that she was trying to hide her infidelity from her husband, and that her suspicious behavior had nothing to do with the Resistance. The Gestapo, perhaps amused by this tale of adultery, let her go.
She succeeded in crossing the Pyrenees mountains into Spain—a brutal journey over high passes, often in winter conditions, that killed many who attempted it. From Spain, she made her way to Britain.
Henri Fiocca was captured, tortured, and executed by the Gestapo. They wanted him to reveal his wife's location. He refused. Nancy didn't learn of his death until after the war ended, and she blamed herself for it for the rest of her life.
The Special Operations Executive
The Special Operations Executive, or SOE, was one of Britain's most unusual military organizations. Created by Winston Churchill in 1940 with the instruction to "set Europe ablaze," its mission was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance behind enemy lines, and to support local resistance movements.
The SOE was different from traditional military intelligence. It wasn't interested in simply gathering information—it wanted to blow things up. It trained ordinary people to become saboteurs, assassins, and guerrilla leaders, then dropped them into occupied Europe to wreak havoc.
When Nancy Wake reached Britain, she immediately volunteered.
Vera Atkins, the senior woman in the SOE who oversaw agents going into France, remembered her vividly: "A real Australian bombshell. Tremendous vitality, flashing eyes. Everything she did, she did well." Training reports noted that Wake was "a very good and fast shot" with excellent fieldcraft—the skills needed to survive in hostile territory. One instructor wrote that she "put the men to shame by her cheerful spirit and strength of character."
She was assigned the code name "Hélène."
Tangled in a Tree
On the night of April 29-30, 1944, Nancy Wake parachuted into the Auvergne region of central France as part of a three-person SOE team code-named "Freelance." The team leader was John Hind Farmer, code name "Hubert." The third member was Denis Rake, a radio operator whose job was to maintain contact with London.
Parachuting at night into occupied territory was terrifying under the best circumstances. The planes flew low to avoid radar, the drop zones were often marked only by a few flashlights held by resistance fighters, and landing wrong could mean death—or capture, which was often worse.
Nancy's landing was not elegant. A resistance leader named Henri Tardivat found her tangled in a tree.
"I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year," Tardivat remarked.
"Cut out that bullshit and get me out of this tree," she replied.
The Freelance team's mission was to serve as a liaison between London and the local Maquis—the French resistance fighters who lived rough in the countryside, sabotaging German operations and preparing for the Allied invasion that everyone knew was coming. The particular Maquis group they were assigned to was led by Émile Coulaudon, code name "Gaspard."
The relationship started badly. Gaspard wanted money and weapons from the Allies but was reluctant to follow their directions. He had his own agenda, his own vision for the liberation of France, and he didn't appreciate being told what to do by London. It took direct orders from the French Forces of the Interior—the umbrella organization for resistance groups—to get him to cooperate.
Once he did, the SOE began dropping massive quantities of supplies: weapons, ammunition, explosives, radio equipment, and money. Nancy's job was to identify drop zones, organize the collection of materials, and distribute them among the Maquis groups. She also carried a list of targets that the resistance was supposed to destroy before the Allied invasion—communication lines, bridges, railways, anything that would slow the German response when the attack finally came.
Disaster at Mont Mouchet
On June 6, 1944—D-Day—Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy. But in the Auvergne, things had already gone badly wrong.
Two weeks earlier, on May 20, Gaspard had done something reckless. He declared a general mobilization of resistance fighters, gathering about 7,000 men divided into three groups. His objective was to prove that the Resistance could liberate areas from the Germans using its own forces—to show that they didn't need the Allies to do it for them.
This was exactly the kind of premature uprising that London had warned against. The Maquis were lightly armed irregulars. They were excellent at sabotage, at ambushes, at melting into the countryside before the Germans could respond. They were not equipped to hold territory against the Wehrmacht.
On June 2, German forces launched a probing attack against Gaspard's base at Mont Mouchet. On June 10, they attacked in greater force. On June 20, they encircled the Maquis positions. The resistance fighters were forced to flee, taking heavy casualties.
Nancy Wake and the Freelance team retreated with the Maquis, covering 150 kilometers over three days through rough country to reach the village of Saint-Santin. It was a desperate march, constantly under threat of German patrols.
And then things got worse.
The Bicycle Ride
During the chaotic retreat, Denis Rake—the radio operator—had left his radio and codebooks behind. Without them, the Freelance team had no way to contact London. They couldn't report their situation, couldn't request supplies, couldn't coordinate with the larger war effort. They were blind and mute.
The nearest SOE radio was in Châteauroux, roughly 250 kilometers away as the crow flies—much farther by the winding rural roads that offered the only chance of avoiding German patrols.
Nancy Wake borrowed a bicycle.
What followed became one of the most legendary exploits of her war. She pedaled 500 kilometers—310 miles—in 72 hours, found the radio operator near Châteauroux, transmitted a situation report to London, and then bicycled all the way back to Saint-Santin.
Five hundred kilometers. On a bicycle. In three days. Through occupied France.
Years later, when asked about it, she would say only that she was lucky—there were few Germans in the areas she passed through. She didn't mention that she must have averaged nearly 70 kilometers per day, on roads that were often little more than dirt tracks, in a body that was already exhausted from the retreat. She didn't mention the terror of every crossroads, every village, where a German patrol could have ended everything.
She simply did what needed to be done.
Summer of Blood
After her bicycle ride, the Freelance team joined up with Henri Tardivat's resistance group—the same Tardivat who had found her in the tree. Two American instructors, Reeve Schley and John deKoven Alsop, joined them in July. Neither spoke much French, and Schley was nearly blind without his thick-lensed glasses, but he impressed the Maquis with his immaculately tailored uniform, and both proved effective at training the resistance fighters.
The summer of 1944 was a time of increasing violence. Nancy and Tardivat initiated a series of attacks on German convoys. They fought off an assault on their camp that killed seven French fighters. Almost every other night, supply drops arrived—weapons, ammunition, explosives—and Nancy's primary job remained organizing these deliveries and distributing them to the various resistance groups.
She claimed to have participated in a raid that destroyed the Gestapo headquarters in Montluçon, killing 38 Germans, though this has never been confirmed by other sources.
She also claimed to have dealt with a German spy. The story goes that she discovered the Maquis men were keeping three young women as prostitutes and mistreating them. She forced them to release the women, gave them clean clothes, and set two of them free. But she suspected the third was an informer.
After interrogating the woman and confirming her suspicions, Nancy ordered the resistance fighters to execute her. They refused—they couldn't bring themselves to kill her in cold blood. Nancy said she would do it herself. Faced with this, they relented. According to Wake's account, the spy stripped naked before the firing squad in a final act of defiance.
Nancy showed no regret for the execution. "She was a spy," she said simply.
The End of the War
On August 15, 1944, American forces invaded southern France in Operation Dragoon. The German occupation began to collapse. Resistance groups harried the retreating enemy, picking off stragglers, ambushing convoys, liberating towns.
Henri Tardivat was badly wounded during this period. He would lose a leg to amputation—a reminder that even in victory, the cost of war is paid in flesh.
During a celebration in Vichy—the same city that had given its name to the collaborationist regime—Nancy learned the truth about her husband. Henri Fiocca had been dead for over a year. The Gestapo had tortured him, trying to make him reveal her location. He never did.
In mid-September 1944, Nancy Wake and the other members of the Freelance team returned to Britain. Their job was done. France was being liberated. The White Mouse had slipped through every trap.
After the War
Immediately after the war, the decorations piled up. Nancy received the George Medal from Britain, the Medal of Freedom from the United States, the Médaille de la Résistance, and the Croix de Guerre three times over. She worked for British intelligence at the Air Ministry, attached to embassies in Paris and Prague.
Then she did something unexpected: she went into politics.
In 1949, she stood as a Liberal candidate in the Australian federal election for the Sydney seat of Barton. Her opponent was Herbert Evatt, then deputy prime minister and one of the most prominent politicians in the country. Despite being a political unknown running against an entrenched incumbent, Wake recorded a 13 percent swing against him. Evatt held on with 53 percent of the vote.
She ran against him again in 1951. This time, Evatt won by fewer than 250 votes. It was agonizingly close, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, not elections.
Nancy returned to England, continued working in intelligence until 1957, and then married John Forward, an RAF officer. They moved to Australia in the early 1960s, and she made one more unsuccessful run for Parliament in 1966.
The Long Goodbye
In 1985, at age 73, Nancy finally published her autobiography, The White Mouse. It became a bestseller and introduced her story to a new generation.
John Forward died in 1997 after forty years of marriage. They had no children. Nancy, now 85 and alone, did something characteristically pragmatic: she sold her war medals to fund her living expenses. "There was no point in keeping them," she said. "I'll probably go to hell and they'd melt anyway."
In 2001, she left Australia for the last time and returned to London. She took up residence at the Stafford Hotel in St. James's Place, a building that had served as a British and American forces club during the war. The general manager who had introduced her to her first "bloody good drink" there decades earlier had also worked for the Resistance in Marseille.
In the mornings, she could usually be found in the hotel bar, sipping her first gin and tonic of the day and telling war stories. The hotel owners absorbed most of the cost of her stay. She celebrated her ninetieth birthday there.
In 2003, she moved to the Royal Star and Garter Home for Disabled Ex-Service Men and Women in Richmond, where she remained until her death.
Honors Refused and Accepted
The French had made her a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1970 and promoted her to Officer in 1988. But Australia's relationship with Nancy Wake was more complicated.
Shortly after the war, she had been recommended for Australian decorations but was turned down. Decades later, when Australia finally offered to honor her, she refused. Her response was vintage Nancy Wake:
"The last time there was a suggestion of that I told the government they could stick their medals where the monkey stuck his nuts. The thing is if they gave me a medal now, it wouldn't be love so I don't want anything from them."
Eventually, she relented—somewhat. In February 2004, she was made a Companion of the Order of Australia. In April 2006, New Zealand awarded her its highest honor, the RSA Badge in Gold.
Nancy Wake died on August 7, 2011, at Kingston Hospital in London. She was 98 years old. A chest infection had finally done what the Gestapo never could.
She had requested that her ashes be scattered at Montluçon—the French town where she claimed to have destroyed the Gestapo headquarters. On March 11, 2013, her remains were scattered near the village of Verneix, not far from Montluçon, in the heart of the Auvergne region where she had once parachuted out of a night sky and ended up tangled in a tree.
What Made Nancy Wake?
It's tempting to look for a simple explanation: the abandoned child who learned early that she could only rely on herself, the witness to Nazi brutality who vowed to fight back, the widow seeking revenge for her husband's murder. All of these were true, but none of them fully explain a woman who could kill a man with her bare hands and then order a gin and tonic.
M. R. D. Foot, the official historian of the SOE, wrote that "her irrepressible, infectious, high spirits were a joy to everyone who worked with her." This was not a grim avenger. This was someone who genuinely enjoyed life—who loved good food, good drink, good company—and who simply refused to let the Nazis take any of that away from her or anyone else.
Perhaps that's the key. Nancy Wake fought not out of hatred, though she had plenty of reason to hate, but out of an absolute refusal to accept a world where fascists could beat people in the streets, where occupied meant subdued, where the strong could do whatever they wanted to the weak.
When the New York Times included her obituary in a collection titled The Socialite Who Killed a Nazi With Her Bare Hands, they captured something essential about her. She was glamorous and deadly, charming and ruthless, a woman who could flirt her way past checkpoints and then bicycle 500 kilometers without complaint.
She was, in short, exactly what was needed.