The (Lost) History of Women at War Part Two: Nancy Wake

Good Morning. Say hello to Nancy Grace Augusta Wake. You might not already know who she is. Don't worry. You will.

Let's Rewind. 1916. New Zealand. A girl is born to the Wake family, the last of six children, and named Nancy. Two years later, their family (minus the father for his own reasons) moves to Australia. Fourteen years after that, she runs away from home to become a nurse, then to New York and London and Paris to become a freelance journalist.

If you are some kind of prophet, you are starting to spot a pattern now. If not, kwantinue reading.

Mid-1930s. The young journalist Nancy Wake, working all over Europe by now, starts to witness the actions of Adolf Hitler and the rising force of the Nazi party, including the savage actions they took on Jews. One such incident that would shape her destiny was when she saw Jews tied to a wooden wheel that was then rolled down the street. On top of that, the Jews were being flogged by the Nazis as they rolled along. In her own words:

"I stood there and thought, 'I don't know what I will do about it, but if I can do anything one day, I'll do it."

The opportunity would soon come for her to live up to those words.

1939, World War 2 begins. She's living in France with her wealthy husband, Henri Fiocca, living by all standards the good life. 1940. The Germans arrive in France. All hell breaks loose. Her moment has come.

Nancy Wake's first entry into the war was reusing her prior training as a nurse. She and her husband acquired an ambulance, which she used to ferry injured people, British spies, escaped prisoners of war, crashed British pilots and anyone else who needed help and/or was working against the Germans -- and she didn't stop there. Soon they were fabricating fake papers and ID cards for those pilots and British spies and so on to help them get out of France alive, in effect running her own private French Resistance. That would not last too long because France was defeated. Next move? Join the actual French Resistance.

What followed was a career of brilliant daring spy moves and countermoves and near-misses with the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police) and the Milice (pro-Nazi Vichy French police) to the point where she acquired a code name: "The White Mouse."

You know you have arrived as a badass when your enemies give you a superhero name because you're so good at escaping them again and again.

Eventually, even she could only dodge the odds for so long. The Milice captured her and tortured her for four days. She told them NOTHING. Even her real name, she did not tell.

Eventually, a clever rescue plan was arranged where another resistance fighter (a World War II superspy in his own right, known as "The Scarlet Pimpernel of WW2") posed as a high-ranking Milice officer and took her off their hands. Her career in the resistance continued, with her earning a Most-Wanted ranking from the actual Gestapo and a five million franc bounty on her head.

1943, things are getting tougher and tougher. A traitor betrays their resistance network. Even she is forced to consider escaping France. It takes six tries for her to succeed, the last of which involved jumping out of a speeding train with bullets flying after her. Next stops, Spain and then Britain.

Unknown to her, her husband was captured, tortured and killed shortly after.

The British seem to see her potential so they put her into their new wartime spy agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and give her the training best suited for the natural talents of a delicate lady like herself: guns, knives, martial arts and parachuting.

Oh yes.

With her training complete, the legend of Nancy Wake truly begins. She is sent back into France by parachute to organize and upgrade the resistance there. This she did very well by recruiting many new agents and operatives till they were up to 7500. Clearly, her leadership and organization was amazing because they killed up to 1400 Nazi enemies while losing 100 of their own people. Wake herself was fully involved in the fighting, going on multiple raids against the SS and Gestapo in Occupied France. Once during a raid, she killed a Nazi SS guard with a karate chop to the throat before he could raise the alarm. The raid was successful.

One of her craziest achievements was when their radio communication codes were destroyed during a German raid on their camp. These codes were important because it was the only way she and the resistance could communicate with the British and the SOE. So what did Nancy Grace Augusta Wake do? She grabbed a bicycle and rode it for 250 miles to reach where she could contact the British for new codes. Through a warzone. Occupied by the enemy. It took her 72 hours.

She succeeded of course. That's just how Nancy Wake does things.

By 1944, France was free and she lead her troops in a well deserved victory parade in Paris, only to learn the sorrowful news that her husband had been killed shortly after her escape. Tortured and killed because he refused to tell them where to find her.

Life went on. A year later, the war was finally over, Nazi Germany was defeated and Nancy Wake went to work for the SOE, married again and retired eventually, the most decorated female military operative of WWII with a ridiculous number of medals. She lived to the ripe old age of 98 and in 2011, as per her wishes, she was cremated and the ashes scattered over the mountains where she had operated with the Resistance during the war.

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Part One of this series about women making history in wartime can be found here

Part One of my other series about women making history in computing (human and otherwise) can be found here