Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  There was another woman on the course and her name was Violette Szabo. She and Nancy became firm friends and shared a room. Being more accustomed to cooking than the men, a strong spirit of rivalry developed in the old manor house between the males and females of the bomb-making species. Practical jokes grew daily more numerous – and Nancy and Violette, more often than not, were the target of these pranks.

  Finally they retaliated. Employing all their knowledge of hand-to-hand combat and surprise attack, they fell on their instructor. Whilst he fought back bitterly, all the men on the course watched the battle with professional interest. But he could not match the trained skill of the two women. Triumphantly Nancy waved aloft his trousers. The instructor had been de-bagged, the women had won their battle and blue-striped underpants were his crestfallen acknowledgement of defeat. Honour, for the women, had been restored.

  A little time later the instructors and staff at the manor house held a party – for instructors and staff only. The ‘course’ were a little incensed, not because they felt that they had any right to be invited but simply because they hated missing a party. Nancy and Violette, being particularly incensed, decided to take action.

  They stripped their conducting officer’s bedroom of every piece of furniture and clothing except his tin hat. After an excellent evening the officer padded unsteadily up the hall and flung open his door. Bewilderment spread over his face. He was sure he had followed his normal route home, but this was not, he knew, his home. He bellowed for his batman, who came running.

  ‘Where’s my room?’ he demanded drunkenly. ‘Take me to my room.’ The batman gave him an odd glance, retreated to a safe distance and explained that this was his room.

  ‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ the officer roared. ‘How can this be my room? Nothing in it but a tin hat.’ Irritably he scooped up the hat and examined it. It was, he saw, his own tin hat. His forehead rutted as he compelled his beer-drenched brain to think. Then his face cleared. ‘Aah,’ he pronounced ominously. ‘Those ruddy girls!’

  He led a counter-attack on their room, but they had prepared for it skilfully. A barricade of chairs, beds, tables and wardrobes made the door impenetrable, and Nancy and Violette, looking dangerously confident, made entry via the windows unthinkable. The onslaught was repelled and finally the old house subsided into quiet sleep.

  At last the course came to an end. The group were fully trained. Any day now the office in Wimpole Street might tell them: ‘Tonight you leave for France’, and every day, regularly, they must call in to the office to collect their orders . . . to inquire had they yet been ‘posted’?

  Whilst Nancy and two young French colleagues ‘did the town’ with Violette, Buckmaster discussed with his assistant Vera the potentialities of Ensign Wake after she had been parachuted back into France. Vera expressed frank doubts that Nancy would be successful.

  She admitted that Nancy had done a wonderful job in Marseille between 1940 and 1943. But, she pointed out with considerable logic, in Marseille Nancy had always possessed a ready-made background in the home and life of Mme Fiocca; she had always been able to get strength and means from her husband. How would she fare now, Vera wondered, when she would be compelled to live against a background that was false – a mere cover story – and when she would be compelled to seek her finances and weapons only where the RAF might care to drop them? Frankly, Vera was not confident that Nancy would survive long.

  On the other hand, no one could doubt Nancy’s ability to fight nor, if she were captured, to keep her mouth shut – her behaviour when arrested by the Vichy people in Toulouse had proved that. So Buckmaster, relying on Nancy’s progress reports and his own intuition, decided to send her to France at once. Nancy was the first of her group to be posted.

  Clothes were made for her by a French tailor in London. Elizabeth Arden face cream, her favourite, was packed for her in French cosmetic jars. She was given her cover story and interrogated fiercely in an attempt to shake her on it. She was given her code name and required to write it down fifty times, Hélène , Hélène , Hélène , she wrote, over and over again. Then came the matter of her own personal code. It was to be based on any quotation or verse she cared to choose as one she couldn’t forget.

  ‘Bible, Shakespeare, anything you like,’ it was suggested to her. Nancy grinned evilly. ‘I know a verse the Germans will never suspect,’ she announced.

  ‘Tell me,’ the coding officer suggested. Nancy told him.

  ‘She stood right there,

  In the moonlight fair

  And the moon shone through her nightie.

  It lit right on . . .’

  ‘All right, all right,’ the officer laughed. ‘I know the rest.’ He quoted the last two lines. ‘Correct?’

  ‘Correct.’ Nancy nodded. ‘Let the Boche try and crack that!’ Soberly the vulgar limerick was entered in SOE’s official list of code keys.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll do well, Nancy,’ Buckmaster told her. ‘You’ve got excellent reports.’ He scuffled through a pile of papers and then glanced up at her. ‘ Her morale and sense of humour ,’ he read, ‘ encouraged everyone .’ He paused again and then said quietly, ‘You’ll leave, we hope, on Friday.’

  A tremendous party was thrown on Thursday night. After it, Violette returned home with Nancy. They parted on Friday morning.

  ‘Au revoir, Violette.’

  ‘Au revoir, Nancy. Merde! ’ They kissed and Nancy watched her walk lightly along Baker Street. She was never to see her friend again. Beautiful and fragile, Violette was ambushed in a field in France; her ankle was too badly injured to move. Carefully she shot it out with the searching German troops, wasting not a single bullet. When she fainted they captured her. She was executed at Ravensbrück, still calm, having betrayed no one.

  At Buckmaster’s office that Friday there were last-minute and frantic changes in the plans. An entire new series of orders, ‘safe houses’ and lies had to be committed to memory. Nancy retired to the flat bathroom and studied desperately. But it was no good. After the party of the night before she could learn nothing, so it was decided that she, and her colleague Hubert, should leave instead on Saturday.

  The following evening she reported back again, her story and orders at last safely committed to memory. She knew her targets, her contacts, her dropping point, her safe houses, her codes and her cover story – knew them all perfectly. Her cover story, back to the time of fictitious grandmothers and great uncles, was a masterful fabrication of the probable and the uncheckable. It contained deliberate but convincing inconsistencies, because life itself is inconsistent. It was supported fully by all the documents required of a Frenchwoman in Occupied France.

  Buckmaster handed her a silver powder compact. ‘A going-away present,’ he said gently.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Kissing her, he wished her ‘ Merde! ’ in the French fashion.

  The other men in the flat kissed her warmly as she left. They looked very glum. They hated seeing women go to what they knew lay ahead. One especially, an American trainee called René Dusacq (once a Hollywood stuntman), was almost in tears.

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ Nancy laughed at him, piling into a car with Hubert and Vera. Quickly they drove to the airport. There a security officer wanted to search them both. Hubert agreed, was searched and pronounced free of such incriminating possessions as London theatre tickets or English labels. He nevertheless parachuted into France with a British regimental badge in his overcoat pocket which he discovered, to his horror, days later.

  Nancy refused to be searched. She wore a smart civilian outfit, silk stockings and three-quarter-heeled shoes. On top of them, for warmth and pocket room, were a pair of overalls. Next came a large camel-hair overcoat, very full in the back for concealing anything she might need to conceal. Over that was her parachute harness. To check all of this would have taken hours.

  ‘Look,’ she raged. ‘I’ve got nothing on me except what you people have made me and the money and pa
pers you’ve given me.’ They compromised by binding her ankles to provide some support against the shock of a fast parachute landing in high-heeled shoes.

  All sorts of inconsequential thoughts now filled her head. The London flat was one of them. She had forgotten to make arrangements about the rent while she would be away.

  She sat down and dashed off a note to her bank manager, asking him to settle monthly but giving him no explanation.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ the security officer demanded.

  ‘Writing to the Germans to tell ’em I’m coming,’ she replied. ‘Here – post this when you get back to London.’ Then she was ready to go.

  At ten o’clock they were out on the strip. Nancy looked bulky with her huge handbag (which contained their plans and about a million francs in cash) against her seat, revolvers in each of her trouser pockets, a parachute on her back and a tin hat over her shoulder-length black hair.

  Clumsily she was handed up into the belly of the Liberator that was to fly them to France and Hubert was hauled up after her. Her code name for the trip was to be Witch.

  ‘Thank heavens these things are warmed,’ she muttered to Hubert as the American bomber rumbled across the aerodrome. The dispatcher, a lean good-natured Texan, sidled up to her.

  ‘Say,’ he asked, ‘are you really “Witch”?’

  ‘I am. And don’t get your letters mixed.’

  ‘Gee,’ he muttered, ‘a woman! We ain’t never dropped a woman before.’

  As a tribute to her femininity, he brought her a Spam sandwich and a cup of coffee. Their Liberator droned on through the night. After she had finished her meal she lay on her side and tried to sleep. Hubert did the same and they both failed miserably. Then they hit bad weather and were flung about by the explosions of ack-ack. Nancy abruptly got rid of the Spam sandwich and the coffee. For the next three quarters of an hour she continued being extravagantly airsick. The dispatcher gazed at her compassionately.

  ‘Look, Witch,’ he urged, ‘if you don’t wanna leave we can easily take you back.’

  ‘And do this lot again,’ Nancy moaned. ‘Brother, you just get me to our dropping point and let me get out of this thing.’ It was, she felt, a very unheroic beginning to her life as a saboteur.

  At five past one in the morning of 29 February 1944 they arrived over their dropping point. Hubert and Nancy peered through the hatch as they whirled 400 feet above it. Bonfires blazed, torches winked, faces were clearly visible.

  ‘My God,’ Nancy murmured. ‘It looks like the Blackpool Illuminations! Every German between here and Russia will know we’re coming.’ Hubert did not reply.

  ‘I wonder if Maurice Southgate is there?’ she asked. Southgate was an agent in Montluçon who was to introduce them to the leaders of the Maquis in this area. London had said that he would contact them. Hubert said he didn’t think so.

  ‘Sure you don’t wanna come back?’ the dispatcher offered anxiously.

  ‘Sure!’ she snapped. The plane lurched wickedly, a light flickered on and the dispatcher, thumping Hubert on the back, shouted, ‘OK – JUMP.’

  Hubert vanished. Nancy felt a slap. ‘JUMP.’

  ‘Elbows in,’ she thought – and vanished through the trap. There was a jerk as the chute opened off the static line and then, fast and smoothly, she was sailing down.

  ‘Legs together,’ she muttered as the ground rushed up towards her. And then, ‘Blast. I’m going too far over.’

  She whistled down beyond the remotest fire and landed comfortably in a hedge. With some difficulty she extricated herself from her parachute, which had been caught in a tree, and bolted into the neighbouring field. She could see no lights, no reception committee, only black, silent night.

  Then shouts and screams rent the air. ‘An ambush,’ she decided, frantically shedding her overalls and ankle bandages. But even as she started to slink away into the bush she heard Hubert’s voice.

  ‘Here’s her parachute.’

  She broke through the hedge and observed a short, good-looking Frenchman who examined her disembodied parachute curiously. The Frenchman saw her coming and greeted her formally, not quite disguising his disappointment that she was a woman when he had expected a man.

  ‘Madame Andrée?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tardivat,’ he introduced himself.

  ‘Where’s my friend?’

  ‘Don’t worry. He is safe.’

  Nancy laughed in relief and he smiled back. He looked humorously up at the parachute.

  ‘I hope all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year,’ he declared, bowing gallantly towards her. She began to drag her parachute down out of the tree.

  ‘Careful,’ he warned, ‘you will tear it.’

  ‘Going to destroy it anyway,’ she grunted.

  ‘No, Madame Andrée,’ he protested, ‘such beautiful nylon is not to be destroyed.’ In spite of all her arguments he refused to allow her to carry out this fundamental step in parachutage security. Remembering the fires and noise and activity that had awaited her reception, Nancy decided that the stories she had heard about the Maquis lack of security were all lamentably true. To make things worse, there was no sign anywhere of their contact, Southgate.

  ‘Be it on your own head,’ she warned. ‘Isn’t it time we left this funfair?’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course,’ he agreed, folding her parachute carefully. ‘Come, we have a car for you.’

  ‘A car!’ Cars, they had been taught, must never be used. They were the exclusive province of the Germans and for anyone else to be seen driving them was to invite disaster.

  ‘Certainly. At least, a gazogène. Come. I will take you to your friends.’ He guided her across the field to a waiting car and introduced her to the driver and his wife.

  Bouncing off into the darkness in the charcoal-burning car, Nancy looked across at Hubert and smiled reassuringly. Alarmed though she was, she felt as if she were back home. But how must he be feeling, faced with all this fearful lack of security?

  ‘Well,’ she announced cheerfully, ‘we’re here.’ For years in France she had been Mme Fiocca; for months in England she had been Nancy Wake; now, back in France again (for how long?) she had become Mme Andrée to the Maquis and Hélène to London and she had at least three other pseudonyms as well for emergencies. To a normal person all of this could well have been confusing, but women like Mme Andrée had not been trained by SOE to become normal persons.

  ‘I wish we had our wireless operator with us,’ Hubert grumbled. ‘What can we do without a wireless operator?’

  ‘He’ll be here soon, Hubert. With his feet you couldn’t expect him to jump in; and you couldn’t expect any plane to land in these awful mountains. Don’t worry. He’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Why should he be? The Lysander was going to land him somewhere near Châteauroux. That’s a hundred and twenty miles away. He’ll probably be weeks.’

  Hubert was very depressed by it all and Nancy had to admit that things were less encouraging than she had hoped. No Southgate to introduce them to the Maquis and no wireless operator to keep them in contact with London. But she did have her bagful of money and their D-Day plans and she was full of confidence. The car lurched darkly on.

  PART THREE: WITH THE MAQUIS D’AUVERGNE

  12 A MURDER IS PLANNED

  Nancy and Hubert had dropped near Montluçon, between Hérisson and Cérilly, and were now being driven by their hosts to their home in Cosne-d’Allier. They travelled about ten miles, during which time their hosts told them their life stories, including the fact that they had been refugees from the north in the earlier days of semi-occupation and that now it was safe enough for them to drive because they could always see the headlights of a German car approaching them. Since they themselves drove without headlights of any kind, the road ahead of them just inky darkness, the two British were prepared to believe that any approaching German vehicle would easily be identified. Nevertheless, they felt happier when they
reached their destination.

  Their hosts’ home was over a radio shop. ‘Hope our operator isn’t too long catching up with us,’ Nancy remarked, reminded of him by the radio sets she saw as they went upstairs.

  ‘Nothing we can do till he gets here, anyway,’ Hubert repeated. They went into the kitchen and were given a large meal.

  ‘I’ve never been so empty,’ Nancy vowed.

  ‘After your behaviour on the flight across, I’m not surprised,’ Hubert laughed.

  They rounded off the meal with coffee and brandy – a pousse-café. Then, since it was about four in the morning, Nancy suggested that they might all get some sleep.

  She and Hubert were led proudly to the main bedroom and there shown a large double bed.

  ‘Do they think we’re going to sleep together?’ she demanded in English.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Hubert declared.

  ‘Well,’ said Nancy, ‘we’re not! You’d better find a sofa or something.’

  But their hosts had no sofa and they could not understand this British reluctance to share a bed. Every time Hubert dossed down on the floor, the French couple would burst into the room again and chide him for his shyness in avoiding the attractive English girl. Finally, too tired to argue any more, Nancy slept under the bedclothes and Hubert, covered with everyone’s overcoats, slept on top of them. Discovering them like this in the morning, their hosts showed the most obvious symptoms of surprise but made no comment.

  For several days they hung round Cosne-d’Allier waiting for the arrival of either Southgate or their radio operator. On the first day, distrustful of everything, they did not even leave the upstairs rooms. On the second morning, however, Nancy peered through the shutters at the clear sunlight outside.

  ‘Better get out and get used to it,’ she announced finally, and so, feeling decidedly strange, she went downstairs and walked through the small village where everyone greeted her and everyone knew who she was and where she had come from and why. This in no way added to her self-confidence.