Nancy Wake
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, , also known as Madame Fiocca and Nancy Fiocca, was a New Zealand-born nurse and journalist who joined the French Resistance and later the Special Operations Executive during World War II, and briefly pursued a postwar career as an intelligence officer in the Air Ministry.
The official historian of the SOE, M. R. D. Foot, said that "her irrepressible, infectious, high spirits were a joy to everyone who worked with her." Many stories about her World War II activities come from her autobiography, The White Mouse, and are not verifiable from other sources.
Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Wake grew up in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. By the 1930s, Wake was living in Marseille with her French industrialist husband, Henri Fiocca, when the war broke out. After the fall of France to Nazi Germany in 1940, Wake became a courier for the Pat O'Leary escape network led by Ian Garrow and, later, Albert Guérisse. As a member of the escape network, she helped Allied airmen evade capture by the Germans and escape to neutral Spain. In 1943, when the Germans became aware of her, she escaped to Spain and then went to the United Kingdom. Her husband was captured and executed.
After reaching Britain, Wake joined the Special Operations Executive under the code name "Hélène". On 29–30 April 1944 as a member of a three-person SOE team code-named "Freelance", Wake parachuted into the Allier department of occupied France to liaise between the SOE and several Maquis groups in the Auvergne region, which were loosely overseen by Émile Coulaudon. She participated in a battle between the Maquis and a large German force in June 1944. In the aftermath of the battle, a defeat for the Maquis, she claimed to have bicycled 500 kilometers to send a situation report to SOE in London.
Wake was a recipient of the George Medal from the United Kingdom, the Medal of Freedom from the United States, the Légion d'honneur from France, a Companion of the Order of Australia from Australia, and the Badge in Gold from New Zealand.
Early life and education
Born in Roseneath, Wellington, New Zealand, on 30 August 1912, Wake was the youngest of six children. She was Māori through her great-grandmother Pourewa, believed to be of the Ngāti Māhanga iwi, who was reportedly one of the first Māori women to marry a European. In 1914, her family moved to Australia and settled at North Sydney.Shortly thereafter, her father, Charles Augustus Wake, returned to New Zealand and her mother, Ella Wake raised the children.
In Sydney, Wake attended the North Sydney Household Arts School.
At the age of 16, she ran away from home and worked as a nurse. With £200 she had inherited from an aunt, she journeyed to New York City, then London where she trained herself as a journalist.
In the 1930s, she worked in Paris and later for Hearst newspapers as a European correspondent. She witnessed the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement and "saw roving Nazi gangs randomly beating Jewish men and women in the streets" of Vienna.
The Pat O'Leary Line
In 1937, Wake met wealthy French industrialist Henri Edmond Fiocca, whom she married on 30 November 1939. She was living in Marseille when Germany invaded. During the war in France, Wake served as an ambulance driver. After the fall of France in 1940, she joined the escape network of Captain Ian Garrow, which became the Pat O'Leary Line. In reference to Wake's ability to elude capture, the Gestapo called her the "White Mouse." The Resistance exercised caution with her missions; her life was in constant danger, with the Gestapo tapping her telephone and intercepting her mail.In November 1942, Wehrmacht troops occupied Vichy France after the Allies' Operation Torch had started. This gave the Germans and the Gestapo unrestricted access to all parts of Vichy France and made life more dangerous for Wake. When the network was betrayed that same year she decided to flee France. Her husband, Henri Fiocca, stayed behind. He was later captured, tortured, and executed by the Gestapo. Wake described her tactics: "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."
In early 1943, in the process of getting out of France, Wake was picked up with a whole trainload of people and was arrested in Toulouse, but was released four days later. The head of the O'Leary Line, Albert Guérisse, managed to have her released by claiming she was his mistress and was trying to conceal her infidelity to her husband. She succeeded in crossing the Pyrenees to Spain. Until the war ended, she was unaware of her husband's death, and she subsequently blamed herself for it.
SOE
After reaching Britain, Wake joined the Special Operations Executive and was trained in several programs. Vera Atkins, who was the senior female in the SOE overseeing the agents going into France, recalls her as "a real Australian bombshell. Tremendous vitality, flashing eyes. Everything she did, she did well." Training reports record that she was "a very good and fast shot" and possessed excellent fieldcraft. She was noted to "put the men to shame by her cheerful spirit and strength of character."On 29–30 April 1944 as part of the three-person "Freelance" team headed by John Hind Farmer, Wake parachuted into Auvergne province, France. Resistance leader Henri Tardivat discovered Wake tangled in a tree. He remarked, "I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year," to which she replied, "Cut out that bullshit and get me out of this tree." Denis Rake, a radio operator, was the third member of the team.
The team was to be a liaison between London and the local maquis group headed by Émile Coulaudon. The team's initial relationship with Gaspard was frosty. He wanted money and arms from the allies but was not cooperative until the French Forces of the Interior in London, the umbrella organization for the disparate resistance groups in France, instructed him to cooperate. SOE began sending in large amounts of arms, equipment, and money.
Wake's duties were pinpointing locations at which the material and money were parachuted in, collecting it, and allocating it among the maquis, including pay to individual soldiers. Wake carried with her a list of the targets the maquis were to destroy before the invasion of France by the Allies. The destruction of communication lines and other facilities throughout France would hinder the German response to the invasion.
Disaster. The reach of the maquis exceeded their grasp. On 20 May, Couloudon declared a general mobilization of resistance fighters, collecting in total about 7,000 men divided into three groups. His objective was to demonstrate that the resistance was able to liberate areas from the Germans with its own forces. On 2 June, the Germans launched a probing attack on Couloudon's base at Mont Mouchet; on 10 June the Germans launched a larger attack, and on 20 June encircled Couloudon's positions and forced the resistance fighters to flee after taking heavy casualties. Wake and the members of her team accompanied groups of maquis in a three-day, retreat westward to the village of Saint-Santin.
The bicycle ride. During the flight from the Germans, Rake, the radio operator, had left his radio and codes behind and the SOE team needed to be in contact with London. The nearest SOE radio and operator were in Châteauroux, Wake said she borrowed a bicycle and rode it to Châteauroux, found a radio near there, updated London on the situation, and then bicycled back to Saint-Santin, traveling in 72 hours. Fortunately for her, there were few Germans in the areas through which she bicycled.
With Henri Tardivat. After her bicycle ride, the Freelance team, with another recently arrived operator named Roger, a 19-year-old American marine, returned to Allier Department to join the resistance group of Henri Tardivat. In July two more Americans, Reeve Schley and John deKoven Alsop, joined their team as instructors. Neither spoke much French and Schley was nearly blind if not wearing his thick-lensed eyeglasses, but he impressed the maquisards with his immaculately tailored military uniform. Both proved to be effective instructors. Wake said that she and Tardivat initiated a series of attacks on German convoys and fought off an attack on their camp by the Germans in which seven French maquisards were killed. Her principal job, however, continued to be to organize the reception and distribution of arms and material for the resistance groups which was parachuted into Allier nearly every other night.
Wake claimed that she participated in a raid that destroyed the Gestapo headquarters in Montluçon, killing 38 Germans. At one point Wake said she discovered that the men were using three girls as prostitutes and mistreating them. She coerced the maquis to release the women, to whom she provided a wash and new clothes. Nancy Wake set two of the girls free, but she suspected that a third was a German spy. After interrogating and exposing her, Wake ordered the resistance group to shoot the informer. They did not have the heart to kill her in cold blood, but when Wake insisted that she would perform the execution, they capitulated. Nancy Wake claimed that the spy girl spat and stripped naked in front of her before facing the firing squad. Wake showed no regrets for the execution. Wake also said that she killed an SS sentry with her bare hands to prevent him from raising the alarm during a raid.
During a 1990s television interview, when asked what had happened to the sentry who spotted her, Wake simply drew her finger across her throat. "They'd taught this judo-chop stuff with the flat of the hand at SOE, and I practised away at it. But this was the only time I used it – whack – and it killed him all right. I was really surprised."
After the invasion of southern France by American military forces on 15 August, the Resistance groups harried the retreating Germans. Her friend Tardivat was badly wounded and would lose a leg to amputation. During a victory celebration in Vichy, Wake learnt of the death of her husband. In mid-September, she and other members of the Freelance team, their job completed, returned to Great Britain.