At dawn on the 29th of April 1944, a woman dropped from the belly of an Allied aircraft into the darkness of central France. She landed in the Auvergne region, a landscape of rolling hills and dense forest that would soon become her battleground. Her name was Nancy Wake, and to the Gestapo she was already known by another name: the White Mouse, a woman so elusive that a five-million-franc bounty had been placed on her head. Now she was back in France, not as a fugitive fleeing across the Pyrenees, but as a soldier of the British Special Operations Executive, sent to arm and lead the resistance fighters who were preparing for the invasion that would change the course of the war.
It was a long and improbable road that led her there. Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on the 30th of August 1912. Two years later her family moved across the Tasman Sea to Sydney, Australia, where she spent her formative years. She was, by every account, a free-spirited and independent young woman, and at the age of sixteen she left home to work as a nurse.
In 1928, a deceased aunt left her a £200 inheritance, which she used to book passage abroad. She traveled through New York, Paris, and Berlin, spent time in London training as a journalist, and eventually settled in the French capital in the 1930s, working as a European correspondent for Hearst newspapers. Paris suited her. She worked hard by day and spent her long, glamorous evenings in the cafes and clubs the city was famous for.
But the political storms gathering across Europe were impossible to ignore. A friend, a former socialist member of the German parliament who had fled after Hitler seized power in 1933, told Nancy and her circle of friends about the dire situation in Germany. In 1934, Nancy and a few colleagues decided to see for themselves, traveling to Vienna to observe the political developments and sell some articles. They witnessed the maltreatment and persecution of the local Jewish population.
On a later trip to Berlin, she saw the SA—the Stormtroopers, the brownshirts—and their brutal treatment of the Jews firsthand. These experiences shaped her convictions. She was determined to fight against Nazi tyranny. For a time, though, her life remained relatively carefree.
She adopted a wire-haired terrier named Picon, and the two became inseparable. In October 1934, she traveled to Marseille hoping to write about King Alexander of Yugoslavia’s visit to France, and instead witnessed his assassination along the Canebière. In the chaos that followed, she retreated into a nearby bar, where she met a beautiful young Yugoslavian woman named Stephanie. They became lifelong friends, shared a flat in Paris for a few years, and spent their evenings courting many suitors while Picon loyally awaited their return.
As the situation across Europe grew ever more dire, Paris became a hub for refugees fleeing not only Nazi Germany but also the fighting in the Spanish Civil War. All-out war seemed less a question of if than of when. In 1936, at a nightclub in Montmartre, Nancy met a wealthy French industrialist named Henri Fiocca. She had been dating an American man at the time, and Henri had an attractive blonde on his arm that evening.
Nancy was initially unimpressed by his playboy persona. But as they spent more time together, she grew to appreciate his charm, wit, and intelligence. The two soon fell deeply in love. Fiocca, born in Marseille in 1898, was the heir to a prominent shipping company, a man of considerable wealth and social standing despite his reputation as a playboy, known for his generosity and warm heart.
Their courtship was carefree and romantic, filled with pastis, dinners at popular bistros, and holidays in Cannes and Sainte-Maxime. They did not realize how soon things would change. In 1939, with war looming over Europe, Henri asked Nancy to marry him. The proposal was unexpected, and after keeping him in suspense for a few days, she accepted.
She left her beloved Paris flat and moved south to Marseille to join him. They planned to marry in 1940, circumstances permitting. Nancy, who considered herself as much British as Australian or Kiwi, decided to spend a month in England before the wedding. As fate would have it, she stepped off her train at Paddington Station on the 3rd of September 1939, and was greeted by the news that the war had begun.
She abandoned her plans at once and beat a hasty retreat back to France. Henri and Nancy brought the wedding forward, holding their reception on the 30th of November 1939 at the Hôtel de l’Europe et de la Paix. After a brief honeymoon in Cannes, they returned to Marseille, where Nancy settled into life as a French housewife during the so-called Phoney War. They stocked up on tinned goods, coffee, sugar, tea, and cigarettes, anticipating rationing and shortages.
In March 1940, Henri received his call-up to join the French army. Nancy decided she needed to make herself useful. She convinced Henri to buy her a vehicle, which she had converted into an ambulance, and joined a voluntary ambulance unit. Until June 1940 she ferried fleeing refugees and injured soldiers and civilians to hospital.
The horrors she saw—machine-gunned civilians, children among them—made her resolve to oppose Nazi Germany all the firmer. When Paris fell, Nancy was compelled to return to Marseille, where she was soon joined by Henri returning from military service. Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French World War I hero, was installed as the head of the Vichy government, a puppet regime that collaborated with the Nazis. He signed the Armistice with Germany at Compiègne, dividing France into the German-occupied zone and the so-called free zone.
The situation for France was made even bleaker by the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in May and June 1940, and the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir on the 3rd of July put further strain on Anglo-French relations. The French pinned their hopes on General Charles de Gaulle. After the Armistice he fled to London, and on the 18th of June 1940 made his famous radio address urging the French people to resist and join him in the fight for freedom. His leadership laid the foundation for the French Resistance.
Nancy found herself drawn to that cause, fueled by her passionate hatred of the Nazis and her love for her adopted country. She was in the fortunate position of having enough funds and social connections to buy black-market goods and food, but like everyone else, she lived in constant fear of being denounced. The only thing worse than falling into the clutches of the Vichy police was coming face to face with the Gestapo. Later that year, she met a French army officer who had remained in France as a resistance organizer in league with de Gaulle.
He asked her to take an envelope with her the next time she traveled to Cannes, where it would be picked up at a hotel by another member of the resistance. Nancy persuaded Henri to agree, and so she became a courier, delivering letters and parcels around the regional resistance networks. The Hôtel de l’Europe et de la Paix, where Nancy and Henri had held their wedding reception, was like a second home. One evening, as she entered the bar, Nancy noticed an out-of-place blonde man sitting alone.
He turned out to be an English officer interned on parole by the French. Nancy and Henri quickly befriended him and began supporting a group of English army officers allowed out of their prisoner-of-war camps on parole. Using their social connections and Henri’s considerable wealth, Nancy spent the first three years of the war sheltering downed Allied soldiers and airmen. Her base of operations was a safe house Henri had purchased outside Marseille.
At great risk to herself and her husband, she arranged new clothes for the men along with forged papers and false identification cards, then organized for them to be ferried across the Pyrenees into Spain and back to Britain. It was in this way that Nancy met Scottish army officer Ian Garrow, who was organizing an escape route for British men interred in French prison camps. He was shortly joined by a Belgian who went by the name of Patrick O’Leary—his real name was Albert Guérisse—who would eventually take over leadership of Garrow’s organization, which became known as the O’Leary Line. With the continued support of her husband, Nancy began working in earnest as a courier for the French Resistance, smuggling documents, distributing pro-resistance leaflets, and helping downed Allied airmen escape from France.
In 1942, Nancy and Henri received troubling news: Garrow had been arrested. He was to serve three months’ solitary confinement, then be transferred to the Mauzac concentration camp to serve a ten-year sentence. Garrow wrote to Nancy asking for her support and assistance. He was starving and anxious over his transfer.
O’Leary had engaged a prominent Marseille lawyer to defend Garrow, but the lawyer did nothing to help his client and, through either inaction or incompetence, lost Garrow’s appeal. Nancy felt compelled to act, but Henri was reluctant, knowing the risks her involvement would present. She eventually persuaded him. Her plan was to pose as Garrow’s cousin, send him food parcels, and visit him once he was transferred to Mauzac.
Nancy was then visited by a fellow prisoner of Garrow’s who had been acquitted and released. He sought her out at Garrow’s behest and told her that the men in the prison had heard talk of a guard at Mauzac who was open to being bribed to help with an escape plan. Nancy barely gave it a second thought before agreeing to do all she could to free Garrow. Leaving Marseille on the 11th of November 1942, she headed toward the Mauzac camp, located outside the small town of Bergerac.
Under the pretense of being cousins, she managed to visit Garrow but could not identify the friendly guard. On her second visit, the rumored guard approached her in a bar. In exchange for his help, he demanded payment of 500,000 francs, with an upfront deposit of 50,000 francs, and a guard’s uniform that Garrow would wear as a disguise for his escape. The problem was that Nancy was short by 40,000 francs.
She was compelled to ask Henri to telegraph the balance to the nearest post office, which she collected and promptly paid to the guard. The next day she had a close call. The Vichy police, tipped off about the large sum she had received, interrogated her. Ever silver-tongued, Nancy talked her way out of it, convincing the authorities that for a woman of her status, forty thousand francs was only a small sum, and very necessary to settle her drinks bill.
After a prison guard’s uniform was smuggled into the camp, Garrow slipped out in his disguise during the changing of the guard, jumped into a waiting car, and was whisked off to Toulouse to regain his strength. He later trekked over the Pyrenees into Spain and from there made it back to England. When a French gendarme called at Nancy’s home to inform her of the escape of her cousin, she did the only thing a naive French housewife would do: she called Henri with delight, saying how joyful she was to receive the news. She suspected the Gestapo was listening in on the phone tap, so it was the most inconspicuous, in-character thing she could do.
It was soon after that Nancy began hearing rumors that the Gestapo were searching for a woman they called the White Mouse. She knew it was her they were after. Making matters worse, Nazi Germany invaded the so-called free zone in November 1942, and the presence in Marseille of not only the Vichy police but also the Gestapo made resistance activity all the more dangerous. As Christmas 1942 approached, Nancy continued to smuggle Allied men out of France and act as a courier.
She was determined to enjoy as normal a Christmas as wartime circumstances would allow. Henri owned a chalet in Navasse, and as was customary before the war, Nancy purchased a piglet and a small plot of land to grow potatoes to feed it. A local farmer was commissioned to fatten up the pig for Christmas. When it was ready for slaughter, Nancy traveled to Navasse by bus and collected the black-market pork.
But the locals warned her that the Gestapo were on the lookout for a young woman who had recently caught the Navasse bus. She chose instead to return to Marseille by train, lugging a heavy suitcase filled with roughly sixty kilograms of choice pork cuts into the luggage compartment. To her consternation, she was joined in the compartment by a young man who looked suspiciously like a German officer. Putting her wiles to good use, she flirted with him and ultimately convinced him to carry her suitcase off the train upon arrival in Marseille.
When they were stopped by customs to check the suitcase, he gallantly pulled out his Gestapo papers, and they were promptly whisked through without a search. To show her gratitude, Nancy promised to meet him for a drink. Needless to say, she stood him up. She and Henri put on a splendid meal for their friends that Christmas.
The year 1943 brought further pain and suffering to the French people with the establishment of the Milice, the cruel and sadistic French auxiliary of the German army formed to hunt down members of the Resistance. Nancy began to suspect she was being watched. She thought she heard faint clicking sounds when she used the telephone, and assumed, rightly, that her phone was tapped. A friend then informed her that a man had been spotted digging through her mailbox.
A third tip-off came from the proprietor of the cafe on the corner of her street, who said he was sure he saw a man following Nancy when she left home. It became clear she would have to leave France for her own safety. With a heavy heart, she made the agonizing decision to leave her beloved husband behind, knowing their separation might be permanent. She packed her bags, carrying her best jewelry in her handbag and a wad of notes in her bra.
Because the Vichy police commissioner lived next door, Henri and Nancy could say only a casual goodbye. Nancy would never see him again. Her intention was to travel to England via the same escape route through the Pyrenees that she had arranged for so many Allied servicemen. Her luck as the White Mouse, however, was about to run out.
Her first stop on the journey west was Toulouse, where she intended to link up with other members of her resistance circuit. She stayed at the Hôtel de Paris and continued her work as a courier while waiting for her Pyrenees crossing to be arranged. Returning to Toulouse from Perpignan, her train was suddenly stopped, and everyone on board was arrested by the Vichy police. Hustled into the back of a truck, Nancy and several others took the opportunity when the truck stopped to jump out and make a dash for it, bolting down the nearest side street.
Unluckily, they ran straight into the path of protesting students fleeing from police in the other direction. The two groups collided, cut off on both sides by the authorities. The escaping train passengers were recaptured and taken to jail. During her interrogation, Nancy decided her best course of action was to rely on the fact that she had been traveling under her real name.
She asserted she was Madame Fiocca of Marseille, on a business trip with her husband. But the Vichy police had already decided they intended, come what may, to charge her with a crime. First she was accused of being a prostitute from Lyons. When that didn’t stick, she was accused of involvement in the bombing of a cinema in Toulouse by members of the Resistance.
Nancy felt it futile to deny the accusations; her captors seemed to have already decided her fate. Over the next four days she spent her time either being interrogated or beaten up by the Vichy police, who continued in vain to extract a confession. Then one morning she was dragged from her cell and told to wait in the corridor. Glancing up, she locked eyes with none other than Patrick O’Leary.
Thinking he too had been arrested, she quickly averted her gaze to avoid the two being associated and causing even more trouble. In truth, O’Leary was there to rescue her. After three days in captivity, members of the O’Leary Line had become convinced that Nancy had not given anyone up, and so they decided to get her out of the clutches of the Vichy police. O’Leary posed as a senior member of the Milice and a close friend of its head, Pierre Laval.
His story was that Nancy was his lover and they had been traveling together when they were separated in the commotion on the train. He said she had kept silent for fear of incurring the wrath of her jealous husband. After a few tense moments, the police commissioner was convinced. O’Leary and Nancy walked arm in arm out of the jail.
The White Mouse had slipped through the enemy’s fingers once again. Upon her release, Nancy went to stay with a woman named Françoise, where she was to lie low pending her mountain escape. Françoise was a chain-smoking, black-coffee-drinking resistante stalwart who provided food and shelter to all those hoping to make it across the mountains to freedom. Nancy and the others in her party made several unsuccessful attempts to cross the Pyrenees owing to a heavy Nazi and Milice presence along the frontier.
A sixth attempt was postponed when Françoise began planning the escape of ten men from Castres prison. A friendly guard made it possible by offering his fellow guards a spiked bottle of wine on the evening in question, sending them promptly off to sleep and allowing the prisoners to slip out without raising any alarms. The nine prisoners, along with the guard, joined Nancy and Françoise, and a few days were spent lying low and scrubbing their muddy clothes clean enough to wear in public without arousing suspicion. The party was divided into two groups and set off by train for Perpignan along the French frontier.
Nancy’s group also comprised O’Leary, a French radio operator, a New Zealand airman, and a French ex-policeman. The train journey went smoothly until a railway official threw open the doors to their compartment to warn the escapees that the Germans were stopping the train for a search. There was nothing for it but to jump from the moving train as it slowed. As they landed in the dirt, they were greeted by a hail of gunfire from the approaching Germans.
The party scattered, darting into the vineyards in an attempt to escape their pursuers. They eventually regrouped atop the nearest mountain, where Nancy discovered, to her sorrow, that she had dropped her handbag containing her jewels. She would have to make do with the francs she still had stuffed in her bra. The party spent two freezing nights in a deserted barn, hiding by day and walking by night to O’Leary’s safe house in Canet-Plage.
From there they caught a train back to Toulouse to start all over again. By this stage Nancy was convinced their resistance circuit had been compromised. They were having too many close calls, being boxed in by the Gestapo at every turn. O’Leary, however, did not agree—a stance that ultimately cost him his freedom.
While the escape party bided their time before making another attempt to cross the Pyrenees, O’Leary agreed to meet a new recruit within their circuit. This recruit had asked specifically to meet Nancy, whom he described as “the amusing girl from Marseille. ” Nancy wisely did not attend the meeting. Upon arrival at the cafe where the meeting was to take place, O’Leary was promptly arrested by the Gestapo.
The new recruit was in fact agent number 47 of the Gestapo, a man named Roger Le Neveu, also known as Roger the Legionnaire. O’Leary was sent to Dachau and sentenced to death, though the camp was fortunately liberated by the Allies before his sentence was carried out. With O’Leary’s arrest, the entire resistance circuit was compromised. Françoise’s apartment had to be immediately vacated.
Nancy traveled to another safe house owned by a woman named Madame Signac in Nice. It was decided there was nothing for it but to take their chances once again, head back to Perpignan and over the mountains. Before the next attempt could even get going, another hurdle presented itself: nobody knew the identity of the man who was to arrange their guides across the mountains, nor the password he required. Industrious Nancy, following a few clues, marched right up to the door of the house belonging to the man she suspected was the right one.
When her knock was answered, she announced herself forthrightly as Nancy Fiocca and told the man that they both worked for O’Leary and that she needed to get to Spain. Her direct approach worked. The man quickly ushered her in to discuss the arrangements. Nancy’s party consisted of herself, one New Zealander, two Americans, and a former Air France pilot named Bernard Gohan.
They were smuggled in the back of a coal lorry to where they would start their hike across the mountains, met their Spanish guides, and immediately began the journey across the high peaks, where the Germans patrolling with police dogs were less likely to be. The trip, which was to take approximately forty-eight hours, required the party to march for stretches of two hours with a ten-minute break in between. Despite the grueling hike, freezing temperatures, and being caught in a blizzard, they eventually crossed a river into Spanish territory. Two days later they were provided with a hot meal and spent two nights recovering at a local safe house.
The night before Nancy and company were to be driven to Barcelona, the Spanish authorities raided the safe house. The luckless escapees were rounded up and sent to a local jail, where they spent three nights without food or water. They were eventually tried for illegal entry into Spain, but the British government pulled a few strings and paid a few bribes, securing their release. Nancy made her way to Barcelona, where she was finally out of danger.
From there she traveled to Madrid, then by boat back to England, where she met up with Ian Garrow. Nancy knew her work wasn’t yet done. Her husband, her dog, and her adopted nation remained under Nazi captivity. It wouldn’t be long before she returned to France—this time as a soldier.
In London, she hoped she would soon be joined by her beloved Henri and Picon. But she was plagued by nightmares that her husband had been killed. She refused to let bad dreams get the better of her and so planned for Henri’s return, securing a flat and buying him a dressing gown and slippers. She quickly tired of waiting around and socializing in the pubs.
She wanted to get back to France to continue the fight and be reunited with her husband. Calling on the connections she had made during her trip through Spain, she asked to join the Free French movement but was rebuffed. Undeterred, she was soon put in touch with the Special Operations Executive, formed in 1940 by Winston Churchill, and was quickly recruited. Its chief aim was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in occupied Europe and support local resistance movements.
In a strange twist, Nancy had a run-in with one of the instructors the evening before she was to leave for a six-week training course in Scotland and was fired on the spot. Fortunately, the SOE realized their folly and rehired her a short time later. She went off on various rigorous training courses during which she learned weapons handling, homemade explosives, hand-to-hand combat, parachuting, and other essential skills required for clandestine operations. As an SOE agent, she would be parachuted back into France to help coordinate, re-arm, and support the French Resistance fighters in their struggle against the Nazis.
On the night of April 29th, 1944, Wake and her fellow SOE agent Hubert—a British army officer whose real name was Major John Farmer—were dropped into the Auvergne region of central France. Nancy worked under the code name Hélène. Her mission was to help organize, arm, and train the local Maquis resistance fighters in the lead-up to the Allied D-Day landings. There they were to meet up with a man named Hector, who was to connect them with Gaspard, the leader of the Maquis, believed to be leading an army of three to four thousand men.
While they managed to meet Hector, he didn’t have the information Nancy and Hubert needed. Hector said a courier was on his way with everything they needed, but he never turned up, and Nancy and Hubert would never see Hector again. To make matters worse, the radio operator SOE in London had arranged to work with Nancy and Hubert chose to spend the week with a local boyfriend instead of linking up with them. They were thus unable to communicate with London to coordinate supply drops.
There was nothing for it but for Nancy and Hubert to use their own resourcefulness to find Gaspard. When they managed to meet him, it did not go well. Gaspard had no knowledge of Hector and was not expecting the arrival of any SOE agents. With no radio and no money, the SOE agents were useless to him, and so he sent them to meet a man called Henri Fournier, who was in charge of the Maquis in the Château-sur-Allier region.
There they waited until eventually the SOE’s radio operator emerged from his tryst and joined up with Nancy and Hubert. The radio operator, whose name was Denis, contacted London and arranged for Allied planes to airdrop supplies atop a nearby mountain plateau. For nights on end, Nancy and Hubert worked to collect the supply drops, unpacking and degreasing the weapons that were then handed out to the Maquis soldiers. Nancy and Hubert were then joined by another SOE operative named René Dusacq, one of the agents Nancy had trained with.
He was nicknamed Bazooka because that was his favorite weapon. While the writing was already on the wall for Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich by 1944, Nancy and the Maquis knew they would still be in for a fight before France was liberated. Barely a day went by without skirmishes between the Maquis and the German army. On the 6th of June 1944, the Allied troops landed at Normandy, but this brought no end to the fighting in central France where Nancy was based.
On the 10th of June 1944, a large force of 11,000 German troops, accompanied by tanks, artillery, and armored cars, attacked Gaspard’s three-thousand-strong force at Mont Mouchet. The Maquis fought bitterly, inflicting enormous losses on the German side, but were eventually forced to withdraw from the area and linked up with Fournier’s forces. The Germans remained in hot pursuit, and it wasn’t long before the Maquis found themselves beset by a German force comprising 22,000 men. By the end of the fighting, approximately 1,400 German soldiers lay dead, whereas the Maquis suffered losses of only 100 men.
Nancy and the Maquis withdrew to the northwest of their position. The journey took four days, all the while pursued by German forces supported by the Luftwaffe. In the rush to evacuate, Nancy’s wireless operator buried his radio and destroyed his code books in case he was captured. Nancy and Hubert were back to square one, with no way of communicating with London or the outside world.
With time running out and the need for assistance more urgent than ever, Nancy decided to take on the seemingly impossible task of re-establishing contact with the SOE herself. Armed with little more than her determination and a bicycle, she set off on a grueling 500-kilometer journey through enemy territory. The roads were heavily patrolled by German troops, and Wake was forced to avoid checkpoints and confrontations at every turn. Despite the immense physical and mental strain, Nancy pushed on, using her knowledge of the local terrain and her instincts to navigate the perilous landscape.
For two days and nights she rode without sleep or rest, battling exhaustion, hunger, and the ever-present threat of capture. Finally, after traversing the treacherous distance, she arrived at her destination and was able to send a situation report to the SOE in London, including a request for another wireless transmitter. Her objective complete, she faced the daunting prospect of the return trip on the bicycle. Physically exhausted and with her inner thighs in a terrible state, she pushed through and made it back to her camp safely.
Nancy said after the war that looking back on her achievements, the 500-kilometer bicycle trip was what she was most proud of. Nancy and a smaller group of Maquisards then set up a camp not far from Château-sur-Allier in the Allier region. The SOE also sent in a young American Marine to serve as Nancy’s radio operator and re-establish reliable communication. Tiring of sleeping rough on the cold, hard ground, Nancy managed to do a deal whereby she secured additional supplies of Bren guns in exchange for being provided with a small bus in which she could lay a mattress.
Nancy had managed to hang on to a few of her lace nighties from before the war and slept in them each night, much to the amusement of the Maquisards. The plan of action for Nancy’s group was to continue sabotaging and fighting the Germans while staying mobile. The Germans held an overwhelming numerical advantage, and so the Resistance had to stay on the move and engage in guerrilla warfare tactics. After one of the skirmishes, Nancy learned that among the German prisoners taken by the Resistance were three women.
When she heard they were being used as prostitutes by the men, she demanded they be released into her custody. Two of the women were French and were later released. The third woman was a German and a committed Nazi. Nancy reluctantly accepted that this woman would have to be shot.
The German spy spat at Nancy and stripped naked when she faced the firing squad, shouting “Heil Hitler” as she was shot. Nancy recounted in her autobiography that the Nazis had made her tough; the atrocities she witnessed made her feel no pity for her enemy. One of the most famous anecdotes from this period involves Nancy’s participation in a daring raid on a German gun factory. Entering through a back door, she threw a bunch of grenades into the factory before slamming the door behind her and bolting back to their getaway vehicle.
It is said the factory was completely wrecked, and the grenades wiped out a fair share of German soldiers. Nancy also claimed in a post-war interview that she silently killed a sentry with her bare hands by giving him a judo chop to the back of the neck. She said: “They taught this judo chop stuff with the flat of the hand at SOE and I practiced away at it, but this was the only time I used it and it killed him all right. I was really surprised.
”
On the 15th of August 1944, the Allied invasion of the south of France began. As the Allies advanced toward victory, Nancy continued to lead her team of Maquis fighters in a series of successful guerrilla warfare campaigns against the Nazis, playing a significant role in undermining German control of the region and contributing to the eventual liberation of Paris on the 25th of August. In September 1944, the Germans evacuated Vichy. The French Resistance, including Nancy as one of their foremost leaders, marched into the city to great celebration, the French Nazi collaborators having all but vanished into thin air.
However, amidst the celebrations of victory, a devastating personal tragedy awaited Nancy. She learned that her husband Henri Fiocca had been captured in 1943 and then tortured and executed by the Gestapo. The news was understandably devastating, but Nancy found solace in the knowledge that Henri had remained true to their cause and their love until the very end. After the war, Wake returned to Britain and continued her work with the British Air Ministry’s Intelligence Department before moving back to Australia in the 1950s.
She ran twice unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal candidate. In 1957 she remarried, this time to an Australian ex-serviceman named John Forward. They were married for forty years, until John’s death in 1997. Nancy’s extraordinary wartime exploits earned her numerous accolades, including the George Medal from the United Kingdom, the Medal of Freedom from the United States, and from France the Médaille de la Résistance three times, the Croix de Guerre, and the Légion d’honneur, among many others.
Nancy said she always felt underappreciated by her childhood nation, with successive Australian governments refusing to confer upon her any honors. It was only in 2004 that she was made a Companion of the Order of Australia. Despite the accolades, it wasn’t until 1985, with the publication of her autobiography, that her story truly captured the public imagination. The book became an international bestseller and cemented Wake’s status as a World War II heroine.
Nancy said that she always felt responsible for Henri’s death, but never regretted the decisions she made or the life she lived. It is believed she aided in the rescue of as many as 1,000 Allied servicemen from behind enemy lines. In 2001 Nancy returned to London, where she lived in the Stafford Hotel in Piccadilly. She could be found at all hours sipping gin and tonics at the hotel bar and entertaining all those who stopped to chat.
She passed away in 2011 at the age of 98. Nancy’s ashes were scattered in the hills of the Auvergne, the region where she had once led her team of Maquis fighters in their courageous fight against the Nazis.
