Nancy Wake

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Studio shot of Nancy Wake (1945) (AWM P00885.001)

Nancy Grace Augusta Wake AC , GM (born August 30, 1912 in Roseneath, Wellington , New Zealand ; died August 7, 2011 in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames , London ) was the most decorated female military member of the Allies . During the German occupation of France in World War II , she was a British escape helper and a member of the French Resistance .

Life

youth

Wake was the youngest daughter of six children by Ella Rosieur and Charles Augustus Wake. Her great-grandmother - a Māori  - had married a British missionary , another line of her ancestors were French Huguenots . The family, which the father soon left, lived in Sydney , Australia from 1914 .

Wake left her strictly religious mother at the age of 16 and worked as a nurse until she received £ 200 from an aunt  and traveled to London . In the 1930s she worked in Paris as a journalist and later as a European correspondent for the Hearst press. In Vienna , when Austria was annexed in March 1938 , she witnessed the invasion of German armed forces .

In the summer of 1936 she met the French entrepreneur Henri Fiocca . At the beginning of 1939 Fiocca, who was 13 years her senior, proposed to her, and the two married at the end of 1939. At the time of the German occupation of northern France in June 1940, she lived in a luxurious apartment in Marseille .

Resistance

Soon afterwards she became a courier for the Resistance and smuggled messages and food into (until November 1942) unoccupied southern France (southern zone) . She borrowed an ambulance vehicle and transported refugees to the Spanish border as part of the Pat O'Leary Resistance network , which was easier for her as the wife of a wealthy businessman. In addition, she had false papers that enabled her to stay and work in the unoccupied zone ("Vichy France").

The Gestapo soon monitored Wake's telephone and mail traffic. Through various identities (nickname or code name White Mouse ) she managed to evade arrest several times. The Gestapo offered a bounty of 5 million francs for their capture . In 1943 she was on the wanted list of the German authorities in France. In December 1943 she fled Marseille; she was arrested by the Vichy police in Toulouse , but released four days later.

The Resistance decided that Wake should go to London. It took five or six attempts to get to Spain via the Pyrenees . In the UK, she joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and received agent training from the British Ministry of Defense in Scotland . There she completed survival training, learned how to transmit messages, parachute jumping, silent killing and how to handle plastic explosives , various weapons and grenades . Along with 430 men, she was one of 39 women in the French section of the SOE, whose activities remained secret until the post-war period. Officially, they belonged to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry .

On the night of April 29th to 30th, 1944, she jumped with Major John Farmer over the Auvergne in central France. The two were received by an agent. They organized local maquis groups and equipped them with weapons. The resistance network was expanded from 3,000 to 7,000 members. Wake directed attacks on German facilities and military transports in preparation for the hinterland for D-Day . In one action, she covered 500 km in 71 hours on a bicycle in order to stabilize radio traffic by re-assigning code words , since her wireless operator had to destroy all codes in the course of a German attack. She crossed several German checkpoints. Wake coordinated the ammunition and weapons drops, which took place four times a week.

After the SS had found out that the main area of ​​operation of the resistance force was a plateau above Chaudes-Aigues , they fought hard with the SS there (on Mont Mouchet ) in June 1944 on the side of the Maquis fighters.

Wake led the attack on the Gestapo office in Montluçon and threw hand grenades in the building. 38 Germans died in the attack. According to her own statements, she killed the guard of a German arms factory with a blow in the neck in another attack, had to shoot her way back and fatally hit a German spy.

After Paris surrendered on August 25, 1944, Wake led her group to Vichy France. There she learned that her husband Henri Fiocca had been executed by the Germans on October 16, 1943.

post war period

Nancy Wake worked for the secret service at the British embassies in Paris and Prague until 1949. In doing so, she developed a deep aversion to communism.

From 1951 to 1956 she worked in Whitehall for the Secret Service Department of the British Aviation Department (Assistant Chief of Air Staff at the Air Ministry). In 1957 she married John Forward, a British RAF officer. In 1960 they moved to Port Macquarie , Australia. She received numerous awards from the Allies, including the British George Medal , the Médaille de la Résistance , the Officer's Cross of the Legion of Honor , the Croix de guerre with two palm branches, the US President's Medal of Freedom , the Commander's Cross of the Order of Australia (2004) and the New Zealand RSA badge in gold.

In Australia she wrote her memoir, which appeared in 1985 under the title Nancy Wake and became a bestseller. In 1987 they were made into a film for television.

In 1997 her second husband died, and in 2001 Wake returned to London. In 2003 she moved to the Star and Garter forces retirement home near Richmond Park (in southwest London); there she lived until her death.

Honors

The main belt asteroid (17038) Wake , discovered on March 26, 1999, was named after her.

See also

literature

  • Russell Braddon: Nancy Wake. Cassell, London 1956; New edition 2010 (English).
  • Margaret Collins Weitz: Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France 1940–45. John Wiley & Sons, New York 1995.
  • Peter Fitzsimons: Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine. Harper Collins, 2001.
  • Michael Jürgs : Code name Hélène: Churchill's secret agent Nancy Wake and her fight against the Gestapo in France. Bertelsmann, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-570-10142-1 .
  • Imogen Kealey: The Spy . Rütten & Loening Berlin 2020. ISBN 978-3-352-00946-4 , original title Liberation . 2020 at Sphere , London.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Was heroine Nancy Wake this up on dailytelegraph.com.au
  2. ↑ a b Nancy Wake (obituary) on telegraph.co.uk
  3. ^ A b Margaret Collins Weitz: Sisters in the Resistance. P. 12.
  4. ↑ Henri Edmond Fiocca at de.findagrave.com, accessed on August 28, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Wake, Nancy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wake, Nancy Grace Augusta (full name); White Mouse
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand military, member of the Resistance
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Roseneath
DATE OF DEATH August 7, 2011
Place of death Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames