Nancy Wake, a much-decorated second World War spy and Resistance heroine known as “the White Mouse” for her ability to remain undetected, has died in London at the age of 98.
Born in New Zealand, Wake moved to Australia as a toddler, where she was raised. After a brief stint as a nurse, she worked as a journalist in Europe and then married a French businessman, Henri Fiocca, in 1939.
Trapped in France when the Nazis invaded, she became a Resistance courier and later a saboteur and spy. Betrayed, she escaped to London, but her husband was tortured and murdered by the Gestapo.
In April 1944 Wake was dropped by parachute into the Auvergne region along with Maj John Farmer. She was a woman of exceptional energy, he said, with “very clear ideas of how she wanted everything done”.
On landing, her parachute got stuck in a tree. One of the Frenchmen greeting her said he hoped all trees could bear such beautiful fruit. “Don’t give me that French shit,” she replied with her customary bluntness – or so she liked to chuckle when retelling the story.
Her resistance group’s orders were to help organise and arm the local maquis (resistance), and soon Wake was fighting alongside them in pitched battles with the Germans.
“I liked that kind of thing,” she said, although she had to prove herself first as an honorary man, a feat easily accomplished by regularly drinking her French comrades under the table. “I had never seen anyone drink like that,” confessed Maj Farmer, “and I don’t think the maquis had either.”
In an interview she gave in latter years she said: “In my opinion, the only good German was a dead German, and the deader, the better. I’m only sorry I didn’t kill more.”
Her lengthy collection of awards included Britain’s George Medal, the US Medal of Freedom and the French Croix de Guerre.
Wake’s second husband died in 1997. Well into her 90s, perched on a bar stool in the Stafford hotel in London, gin and tonic in hand, she remained as feisty and outspoken as ever. There was little she enjoyed better than “a bloody good drink”, and to fund her lifestyle she had sold her war medals. “There was no point in keeping them,” she said. “I’ll probably go to hell and they’d melt anyway.”
“When I die,” she once said, “I want my ashes scattered over the hills where I fought alongside all those men.” .