top of page
Nancy Wake.png

Nancy Wake

Codename ' The white mouse '

​

Refusing to sit idly by as the Nazis dominated Europe, Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, the well-off wife of an industrialist became a secret agent in World War II. Her upbringing belied the outcome of her life. She spent her youth in Roseneath, Wellington, New Zealand with her parents and five older siblings. Her father, a journalist, abandoned the family shortly after moving them to Sydney, Australia, leaving her mother struggling.

While attending North Sydney Household Arts School at age 16, Wake ran away from home. She enrolled in nursing school, planning to work and support herself. But after inheriting £200 from her aunt, she left for New York at age 20. Shortly after arriving, however, she went to London and pursued a career in journalism. After freelancing, she landed a job in Paris, rising to become a European correspondent for Hearst newspapers, which allowed her to travel through Europe for stories. She described herself as a young woman who loved nothing more than “a good drink” and handsome men, “especially French men.”

As Wake worked and enjoyed the cultural amenities of Europe, she observed and reported on what she observed: the Nazi Party spreading anti-Semitic propaganda, German people adopting Nazism, and Hitler’s increasing power. Wake witnessed Nazi gangs in Vienna beating Jewish citizens and party members chaining Jewish men and women to wheels, whipping them as the wheels rolled through the city square. The scenes haunted Wake, who vowed that “if ever the opportunity arose, I would do everything I could to stop the Nazi movement…. My hatred of the Nazis was very, very deep.”

As she saw all this, Wake met and married a French industrialist named Henri Edmond Fiocca. They settled in Marseilles, living among high society as they traveled and hosted lavish dinner parties. Yet six months after their wedding, German troops invaded their home country.

Upset by the evil around her, Wake joined the French Resistance. She first served as a courier, smuggling food and secret messages to underground groups opposing the Nazis in southern France. The Nazis restricted travel for most French citizens, but the status of Wake’s husband allowed her the freedom to come and go as she pleased. “It was much easier for us, you know, to travel all over France,” she told one interviewer after the war. “A woman could get out of a lot of trouble that a man could not.” She purchased an ambulance, used to safely shuttle fleeing refugees out of France from 1940 to 1943.

When her ambulance shuttle trips ended, Wake secured fake legal papers allowing her to work in German-occupied Vichy, where she escorted more than 1,000 escaped prisoners-of -war and downed Allied air crews to safety in Spain. “I was never afraid,” she said. “I was too busy to be afraid.”

Wake risked her life with every escape she facilitated―and the Gestapo wasn’t blind to her work. It tapped Wake’s phone and opened her mail, trying to catch and imprison her. In response, she became a master of fake identities, going by many different names, frustrating the Gestapo so that she earned the nickname “White Mouse.” By 1943, Wake was the Gestapo’s number one most-wanted person, with a price on her head of five million francs.

Her husband told her to leave and never return for her own safety. After trying and failing five times, Wake successfully left France on the sixth attempt. Once in England, she trained at a British Ministry of Defense camp in Scotland, learning survival skills, Allied codes, night parachuting, and how to kill silently and operate everything from grenades and plastic explosives to rifles and pistols.

Wake then joined the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a team of 469 Allied individuals working with resistance groups throughout Europe to sabotage the Germans in occupied territories. She was 1 of 39 women in the organization. To ensure secrecy, the SOE assigned Wake and the others to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry―obscuring the group’s true objectives.

One of the group’s first and most memorable missions took place on April 29, 1944. Together, Wake and Major John Farmer were sent to gather the Maquis, rural guerrilla bands of French Resistance fighters; establish ammunition and arms caches to be dropped each night; and organize and prepare the French Resistance for D-Day. At night, Wake and Farmer parachuted into Auvergne in central France. The drop left Wake tangled in the branches of a tree. But she and Farmer managed to enlist 3,000 fighters for the Maquis, while collecting weapons and training new recruits in guerrilla warfare. Under Wake’s leadership, the Maquis successfully attacked German troops in several locations. But their efforts resulted in the Nazis’ raiding resistance buildings and destroying crucial orders, codes, and supplies. Wake responded to one raid by riding a bicycle 500 kilometers for 71 hours through German security checkpoints to replace all that was lost. If she hadn’t made the ride, the resistance would have had neither weapons, supply drops, nor hope. Her efforts involved months of sleepless nights, constant traveling to train new Maquis groups, hiding in forests and brush, and motivating resistance fighters.

Wake battled the enemy, as it took hostages, executed opponents, burned buildings and encampments, and conducted surprise attacks. Yet the Maqui force’s stronghold on Auvergne was unrelenting, referred to by the Nazis as “the Fortress of France.”

The SS hatched a plan to demolish the fortress, building up its army and weaponry, and in June 1944, surrounded Auvergne with 22,000 troops, artillery, mortars, and mobile guns. It planned to unleash a hellish attack on a mere 7,000 Maquis. But the resistance fought viciously, and when the dust settled, 1,400 German soldiers lay dead; only 100 Maquis were lost. Wake went on to fight against the Germans even more visibly, leading a raid on the Gestapo headquarters and killing a Nazi SS officer with her bare hands during a raid on a German weapons factory.

On June 6, 1944, D-Day, Allied forces finally routed the German army from France. On August 25, Paris was liberated; Wake, the Maquis, and her Allied colleagues celebrated in Vichy.

As the war ended, Wake stayed with the SOE, leaving France to work within the Intelligence Department at the British Air Ministry. She continued her work in England until 1960, when she married John Forward, a former prisoner-of-war. When they began their life together, they moved to Australia.

For leadership and bravery under fire, Wake received the George Medal from England; the Resistance Medal, Officier of the Legion d’Honneur, and Croix de Guerre from France; and the Medal of Freedom from the United States. Sixty years after D-Day, Australia finally awarded her the Companion of the Order of Australia. Two years later, New Zealand honored her with the Returned Services Association’s Badge in Gold. Her story has inspired documentaries, television shows, and films. Wake shared her life’s work when she took part in the film, Nancy Wake Code Name: The White Mouse.

Nancy Wake passed away in a retirement home on August 7, 2011, in London at age 98. For years, she had expressed the wish that her ashes be scattered over central France, the land on which she fought with the resistance.

bottom of page