Nancy Wake was an Australian woman living in France when the Nazis invaded. She helped 1,037 people escape. The Gestapo put a 5 million franc bounty on her head. They called her the White Mouse. They never caught her. She killed an SS soldier with her bare hands. She cycled 500 kilometres through German checkpoints in 71 hours. She led 7,000 resistance fighters. She was the most decorated servicewoman of World War II. Her husband was tortured and killed by the Gestapo because he refused to tell them where she was. She never remarried. She lived to 98.
In 1944, a woman in rural France got on a bicycle and rode 500 kilometres through occupied territory, past military checkpoints, under the eyes of soldiers who were searching for her by name, carrying radio codes that would decide whether the D-Day operations in her region succeeded or failed. She did it in 71 hours without sleep. When she got off the bike she could not stand. Could not sit. Could not stop shaking.
Her name was Nancy Wake. The Gestapo called her the White Mouse. They had a 5 million franc bounty on her head. She was the most wanted person in France.
She was an Australian housewife.
The making of a legend
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was born in New Zealand in 1912 and raised in Sydney from the age of two. Her father left when she was young. At sixteen she ran away from home. Worked as a nurse in rural New South Wales. Scraped together enough for a steamship ticket to New York, then London, then Paris.
By her early twenties she was a journalist. European correspondent for an American wire service. In 1933 her editor sent her to Vienna to interview a rising politician named Adolf Hitler. She got the interview. Got the official party line. Then she walked outside and watched Nazi gangs dragging Jewish families from shops and beating them in the street.
She never forgot it. “I resolved then and there that if I ever had the chance, I would do everything in my power to fight them.”
Filed her copy. Moved on. But Vienna stayed with her.
In 1939 she married Henri Fiocca, a wealthy French industrialist, and settled into life as a socialite in Marseille. Dinner parties. Silk dresses. A penthouse apartment on the Cours Pierre Puget. Nancy Wake had landed hard in the good life.
Then Germany invaded France.
The mouse that roared
Wake did not volunteer for the Resistance in any formal sense. She just started doing it. When the Germans occupied southern France in November 1942, her Marseille apartment became a way station. Escaped Allied prisoners. Downed airmen. Jewish refugees. She drove them to safe houses, forged papers, arranged crossings over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain.
She helped 1,037 people escape occupied France.
One thousand and thirty-seven.
The Gestapo noticed. They codenamed her the White Mouse, for her ability to slip through every trap they set. They placed a 5 million franc bounty on her head and distributed her description across every checkpoint in France.
They never caught her. Nobody ever betrayed her.
“In my opinion, the only good German was a dead German, and the deader, the better. I killed a lot of Germans. I’m not sorry.”
The escape, the training, the return
In 1943 the network was betrayed. Wake had to run. It took her six attempts to cross the Pyrenees into Spain. She was captured once. Talked her way out. Made it to England, walked into the offices of the Special Operations Executive, and volunteered to go back.
The SOE trained her in explosives, hand-to-hand combat, weapons, radio operation, fieldcraft. She was one of 39 women to serve in the SOE’s French section. Thirteen of those women did not come home.
On the night of 29 April 1944, Nancy Wake parachuted into the Auvergne region of central France. She landed in a field, gathered her parachute, walked into the nearest village and introduced herself to the local Maquis leaders.
She was thirty-one years old. She had a Gestapo bounty on her head and 7,000 resistance fighters under her command.
The ride. The kill. The war.
Eleven months of sabotage followed. Weapons drops coordinated with London. Ambushes on German convoys in mountain passes. Bridges blown. Railway lines cut. Wake organised all of it.
During one raid, a German sentry spotted her team and reached for his rifle. Wake closed the distance and killed him with a single judo chop to the throat. The SOE had taught her the technique. She used it once, on a man who was about to raise the alarm and get everyone killed.
“They’d taught this judo-chop in SOE training with Major Fawcett,” she said later. “I never had the chance to use it before or after. But it was very effective.”
Then the radio codes were destroyed.
A German raid hit a Maquis camp. Wake’s wireless operator had to destroy his codes and equipment to keep them out of enemy hands. No codes meant no contact with London. No contact meant no weapons drops, no coordination, and the D-Day operations in her sector would fall apart.
Wake borrowed a bicycle.
She rode more than 500 kilometres through central France, bluffing her way through multiple German checkpoints, past soldiers who were actively hunting the White Mouse, carrying replacement codes. Seventy-one hours. She later called it the most useful thing she did during the entire war.
When she finally got off that bicycle, she could not stand.
What happened next
The war ended. Wake went back to Marseille to find Henri.
Henri Fiocca had stayed behind when she fled in 1943. The Gestapo captured him. Tortured him. He refused to tell them where Nancy was.
They executed him.
She did not find out until after the liberation. Two years of fighting a war, parachuting into occupied France, cycling through enemy lines, and Henri had been dead since 1943. He died protecting her location. She never remarried.
”In my opinion, the only good German was a dead German, and the deader, the better. I killed a lot of Germans. I’m not sorry.”
After the war she received the George Medal from Britain. The Medal of Freedom from the United States. The Croix de Guerre from France, three times. The Medal of the Resistance. She was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. The most decorated servicewoman of the Second World War.
She returned to Australia. Ran for federal parliament twice. Lost both times. Moved back to London and lived at the Stafford Hotel in St James’s Place, where she sat at the bar drinking gin and tonic and told war stories to anyone who asked.
Her autobiography, The White Mouse, came out in 1985. Bestseller.
Nancy Wake died on 7 August 2011 in Kingston upon Thames. She was 98.
By the numbers
- People smuggled to safety: 1,037
- Gestapo bounty: 5 million francs
- Maquis fighters under her command: 7,000
- Bicycle ride through enemy territory: 500km in 71 hours
- Attempts to escape France: 6
- Times captured: 1
- Times betrayed: 0
- SS soldiers killed with bare hands: 1
- Countries that decorated her: 5
- Age at death: 98
Sources
- Nancy Wake - Wikipedia
- The National Archives (UK) - Nancy Wake
- The Guardian - Farewell to Nancy Wake (2011)
- New York Times - Nancy Wake Obituary (2011)
- National Archives of Australia - Nancy Wake
- WW2 Escape Lines Memorial Society - Nancy Wake
- Mick Joffe - Interview with Nancy Wake
- Australian War Memorial
- Wake, Nancy. The White Mouse. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 1985.
- FitzSimons, Peter. Nancy Wake. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2001.
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