“I have only one thing to say: I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn’t kill more. [on her wartime exploits] Freedom is the only thing worth living for.”
— SOE agent Nancy Wake

Australian beauty Nancy Wake, married a French millionaire and adroitly played the part of a society lady, but comes across as having been more comfortable shooting Nazis and blowing up trains and bridges than trading bon mots at cocktail parties.

If ever there was a female James Bond, Wake is the real deal.

Born in New Zealand in 1912 and raised in Australia, Nancy ran away at sixteen to chase adventure, first as a nurse, later as a journalist. In Paris, she saw fascism rise and vowed to resist it at any cost.

Her career as a spy began when she enlisted as a courier for the nascent French Resistance in Marseille in 1940.

As the wife of a powerful Frenchman, Wake was able to travel with a freedom that not many were granted following France’s surrender to Germany in 1940.

She began trekking through the Pyrenees as a human courier for the resistance movement in France often transporting food and messages to underground fighters.

Soon, however, she began to aid the escape of evaders and allied soldiers into Spain.

Over the months, her stature in the underground network grew, and her role evolved from courier to organizer. She engineered several diabolically clever and daring escapes from both French and Nazi prisons.

Word would spread throughout the German Gestapo of a mysterious dark-haired woman operating the southern escape.

She was known to the Maquis as “Madame Andrée,” but the Gestapo came to call her “the White Mouse” because she kept eluding their traps. She would adopt the moniker as the title of her autobiography four decades later.

Ultimately, Wake was responsible at least in part for moving more than a thousand downed Allied pilots, Jewish fugitives, hunted partisans, and other refugees to safety across the border in Spain.

She was tough — during a raid on a German arms factory, Wake killed a sentry with a judo-chop to the neck. — prickly, profane, disdainful of fools, and at times very, very funny.

She later said, “They’d 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 — whack — and it killed him all right.”

She was also a hard drinker who could (and did) drink the partisans she led under the table. An SOE officer she worked with in France said, “I had never seen anyone drink like that ever, and I don’t think the Maquis had either. . . In my long life, it remains one of the most extraordinary things I have seen.”

She would eventually be apprehended in 1942 and spent four days being interrogated. But the Germans didn’t realize they had caught the White Mouse.

Albert Guérisse, a Belgian doctor and Resistance member (Code name O’Leary) told the German officer she was his mistress, the Germans believed him and set her free.

O’Leary would be tortured to make him reveal the names, duties and whereabouts of the other members of the line. He was put in a refrigerator for several hours and then beaten continuously but did not disclose any information of use to the Germans.

He was then held under the Nazis’ infamous Nacht und Nebel procedure in a series of concentration camps, beginning at Natzweiler and ending at Dachau.

He was again tortured at Dachau and sentenced to death. Fortunately the war ended before the sentence was carried out. Even the SS had failed to break his irrepressible spirit.

In 1943, Nancy’s husband Henri was captured and executed by the Germans. This tragedy only strengthened Nancy’s resolve.

When Wake’s Marseille-based network was betrayed by a Gestapo spy, she fled to Spain herself — on the seventh attempt, and only after six months of trying — and subsequently by ship on to England.

There, she attempted in vain to join General Charles de Gaulle‘s Free French. When the French declined to allow her into their ranks, she connected with Britain’s new Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Following months of intensive training to prepare her for combat, Wake parachuted into the mountains of central France in the belly of a Liberator bomber to equip and lead a force of Maquis partisans that grew to thousands as the Allied invasion of Normandy grew near.

“I was hardly Hollywood’s idea of a glamorous spy.

“Over civilian clothes, silk-stockinged and high-heeled, I wore overalls, carried revolvers in the pockets, and topped the lot with a bulky camel-haired coat, webbing harness, parachute and tin hat.

“Even more incongruous was the matronly handbag, full of cash and secret instructions for D-day. My ankles were bandaged for support when I hit the ground.

“But I’d spent years in France working as an escape courier. I’d walked out across the Pyrenees and joined the Special Operations Executive in England, and I was desperate to return to France and continue working against Hitler.

“Neither airsickness nor looking like a clumsily wrapped parcel was going to deter me…”

Upon a less than graceful landing, Nancy released herself from her parachute that was tangled in a tree.

Quickly, stripping her overalls she hid in a near-by bush until she heard a friendly voice from the distance.

She arrived as he, along with a good-looking young Frenchman named Henri Tardivat were removing her parachute from the branches of the tree.

Gallantly and in a manner typical of the French, Nancy recalls Tardivat commenting, “I hope all trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year.”

In 1944, in a final effort to break up the French Marquis, 20,000 Germans descended on Nancy’s 7,000 fighters. In the confusion, her radio operator buried his wireless set and codes to ensure they remained out of the wrong hands.

Out of desperation to communicate with England, Wake began what she described as “that bike ride of mine.”

Setting off North, Wake rode through enemy occupied territory passing numerous German checkpoints. Women according to Wake, have a unique power in times of combat. She once explained her reasoning:

“I don’t see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas. A woman could get out of a lot of trouble that a man could not.”

She reached her destination and organized with England where the next airdrop of ammunition, food and supplies would be and ensured a replacement radio and codes were included. Riding day-and-night, Wake rode 500 kilometres in just 71 and half hours.

Soon after the completion of her marathon bike ride, Nancy re-connected with the Frenchman she met when she parachuted back into France. Tardivat suggested that if Nancy desired ‘a bit of fun’ she should join his attack on the Gestapo headquarters in Montucon.

“The most exciting sortie I ever made. I entered the building by the back door, raced up the stairs, opened the first door along the passageway, threw in my grenades and ran like hell.”

After the war, Nancy received numerous awards and accolades for her bravery and service. She was awarded the George Medal, the Croix de Guerre, and the Légion d’honneur, among many others. However, despite her achievements, Nancy remained modest and down-to-earth, never seeking the spotlight.

Wake died on 7 August 2011, aged 98, at Kingston Hospital after being admitted with a chest infection. She had requested that her ashes be scattered at Montluçon in central France.

— with files from Mal Warwick & Chloe Curran