Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  22 THE LOOSE ENDS

  She stayed in Paris until 1947, seeing a lot of Tardivat and Denis, then she was transferred for some months to the Embassy in Prague.

  There she liked the Czechs and grew, through first-hand experience of it, to loathe Communism.

  ‘I’d rather be killed by an atom bomb than accept the life these people have to live,’ she growled.

  Most vividly of all she remembered the occasion when a British friend decided to hold a dinner party and asked her to bring to it two once-wealthy Czech women. Nancy rang them up and arranged to collect them in an Embassy car.

  The first woman, when she called, scurried swiftly across the pavement in her evening gown and leapt into the car. Then they drove to the house of the second woman.

  She appeared at her door dressed in the drabbest of day clothes and carrying a large brown paper parcel under her arm. She also got into the car, not looking at all as if she were going to a party.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised, ‘but nowadays one dares not appear in the street dressed in a gown. People would inform on you, say you were a capitalist.’ So she changed her clothes at her host’s home . . . and changed back again just before Nancy drove her back to her own apartment.

  ‘I just couldn’t live that way,’ Nancy said – and was not sorry, shortly afterwards, to be posted back to Paris.

  There, life was normal – a gay life in a city she loved with the people she loved. But nevertheless there was a restlessness in her heart because, after ten years abroad, Nancy Wake, the Australian, wanted to go home.

  She resigned from the Foreign Office and wangled a passage to Sydney on a Norwegian vessel, on which she was to serve, of all things, as ship’s nurse! Denis laughed till he was helpless at the thought of Nancy nursing a crew of Norwegians. Nevertheless, she did very well and was, before the end of the trip, even elevated to the rank of ‘Sister’ by the men she managed very successfully not at any time, on the whole voyage, to treat for anything. She merely looked coolly confident whenever they were well and vanished whenever they reported to the surgery with cuts and sprains. Being a good Resistance worker she always had a perfect excuse for these absences, so the doctor happily did her first aid for her and her reputation as a sort of nautical Florence Nightingale was left intact.

  In January of 1949 she disembarked at Sydney. She had been a nurse (of a sort) when she left there; she returned a nurse (of a sort). That much had happened in the intervening years, we all now know. There are, however, a few loose ends that might interestingly be knit together.

  The most remarkable feature of Nancy Wake’s story is the way fate ordained that anyone who once entered her life should always return to it again later on – usually dramatically.

  Thus Micheline Digard left England with her in 1939 and returned there from Gibraltar with her in 1943. Garrow, whom she met by chance in Marseille and helped to escape from imprisonment was later to be largely responsible for the fact that, early on the morning of 1 March 1944, she parachuted back into France. O’Leary was introduced to her by Garrow and was to return to the scene in 1945, looking for Roger, Gestapo agent Number 47. And through O’Leary, directly or indirectly, Nancy had been released from jail, fled to Spain and lost her husband. Roger himself, having once nearly brought her circuit to disaster, was to return to another circuit of hers, a year later, and die at its hands.

  So it was with all her friends and all her enemies. Mme Sainson was highly decorated after the War by all the Allied governments. She continued to run her late husband’s garage and was proud of the fact that, in memory of him, Nice named one of its streets Rue Sainson. Marseille paid the same compliment to the memory of Henri Fiocca.

  Monsieur Comboult, the Macaroni Man, stayed in Nice after the War and became editor of the Nice Matin . He too received many well-deserved decorations.

  Miracca went back to his role as General Catering Manager of the Palm Beach Casino at Cannes. Briefly he had once told Denis and Nancy his own wartime story.

  ‘In 1941 this one,’ he’d said, pointing at Rake, ‘would come to my house late in the night and knock on my door. “Miracca, let me in,” he would say. I would let him in and know nothing! I not know what he did, you understand? Not my business.’ His eyes twinkled as he spoke because he had known quite well that Rake was a British agent working against Germany. For him, an Italian subject in Vichy France, the situation had been a curious one.

  Eventually he was warned that to stay at Cannes any longer was too dangerous. Although wholly sympathetic to France and the British, he was nevertheless a loyal Italian supporter of his king, and the Resistance were beginning to look at him askance.

  So he decided to move north to Paris which, with a certificate of protection from Senator Dreyfus, he did. ‘It was very uncomfortable then,’ he told Nancy. ‘The French were after me and the Germans were after me. But I am still here.’

  Françoise Dissard, after Nancy escaped from France, reopened the escape circuit and took command in O’Leary’s place. Bossy and argumentative as ever, she ran the circuit till the War ended.

  Then the British government offered to reward her with a very lowly decoration. Her eyes glinting behind her steel-rimmed glasses, a cigarette clamped into its bamboo holder between her broken old teeth, she refused it.

  ‘My friend de Gaulle always said that the British were mean,’ she declared. ‘This would prove it.’

  Eventually Britain gave her an OBE which she graciously accepted. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I can tell de Gaulle that the British aren’t as mean as he thought.’

  Commander Busch, who introduced Nancy to his Resistance group in Toulon, was deported, with his son, by the Germans and died in a slave camp. Louis Burdet, who told Nancy the story of Hâche and Pioche, ran the Stafford Hotel in St James’s, London – an elegant man, full of vitality and humour, one of whose pleasures in life was to entertain Mme Fiocca to lunch.

  Denis Rake remained a friend, and occasionally, if he could recall her address, he wrote to her. If he couldn’t recall the address, he drew her house on the envelope and hoped that his note would reach her nevertheless.

  Reeve Schley and John Alsop, when I wrote to them and asked for their recollections of Nancy, replied not by letter but by Dictaphone. They sat down together, with a bottle of Scotch, and talked into a microphone for almost two hours, then they sent five red plastic ‘belts’ and made arrangements for me to play them back at the head office of the Dictaphone Company in London. They completed their recording by singing, for Nancy especially, the ‘Entente Cordiale International Anthem’! She replied to them, also on a Dictaphone ‘belt’, and started her message, ‘Hullo, you two darlings . . .’ Both Americans married and had families – but Schley dropped Law and became a gentleman farmer.

  Tardivat married a woman called Susan and had extensive business interests on the Gold Coast – cocoa beans. His daughter was christened Nancy and was Mme Fiocca’s godchild. He had some glasses in his Paris flat, each of which held a complete bottle of brandy, and it was his custom, when visitors arrived, to give them a full glass.

  When I visited him he told me to call at 6.30. At 7.30 he arrived and found me sitting on the staircase outside his apartment on the third floor. ‘Ah,’ he greeted me cheerfully, ‘I am late, yes?’ and laughed. He took me in, presented me with the inevitable tumblerful of brandy and began to talk about Nancy. I poured the brandy into an elegant bowl of flowers (which was sacrilege and killed the flowers, but kept me sober enough to remember what he told me) and later we drove at terrifying speed to one of his favourite restaurants for dinner.

  ‘Here there is no speed limit,’ he’d shouted gleefully, ‘and the brakes are good! Besides, during the War I drive much faster.’

  Bazooka (René Dusacq) returned to America and was not heard of again by his friends except in two respects. They learnt that the captain’s bars he wore (when he fired that single perilous shot at the German armoured car near Clermont-Ferrand) were jus
t a hoax. In fact, he was a lieutenant. And both Schley and Alsop at the time, although they didn’t know it, had already been promoted; so actually they outranked Bazooka, and not the other way round, and they could have abused him for his rashness with impunity.

  Fournier returned to the business of hotels. Mme Fournier, after the War, revisited Freydefont, on the once embattled plateau, and there dug up a suitcase full of Nancy’s clothes which she had found and buried in June 1944, just before the Maquis had withdrawn at night. (It was at the same time as Denis had discovered Nancy’s short-lived eau-de-cologne.) Mme Fournier sent the suitcase to Nancy in Marseille in 1945. After an interment of almost a year, the clothes were still in perfect condition.

  Laurent, whose true name was Antoine Llorca, returned to his occupation as a mechanic. He always loved cars and could miraculously bring to life again even those vehicles which the Maquis seemed to have murdered.

  Frank Arnal, whose information, after he was released from imprisonment in Fort St Nicholas, led Nancy to plan Garrow’s rescue from Meauzac, became a deputy in the French Parliament, representing the department of Var.

  Toni, the woman in the Mad House who discussed with Nancy the craziness of the psychiatrist’s blots, married one of the Canadians with whom they both trained and lived in Quebec.

  And Nancy herself? Well . . . first of all she was a fiend to interview. Her approach to the subject of her wartime exploits was matter-of-fact to the point of despair.

  ‘What did you do next?’ I would ask.

  ‘Oh,’ she would answer vaguely, ‘blew up a bridge, I think.’ And that would be all! Then the inquisition would start – for a chapter that reads merely ‘ Next she blew up a bridge ’ is hardly satisfactory.

  ‘What month?’ I would ask.

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘What were you wearing?’

  ‘Just slacks and shirt. Must’ve been summer, otherwise I’d have been cold.’ So, a little later, we would arrive at the exact month.

  ‘Anything happen?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Any Germans?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Well, what did you do about them?’

  ‘Shot our way out, of course.’

  ‘How’d you get there?’

  ‘By car.’

  ‘Where’d you get the cars?’

  ‘Stole them!’ Thus, painfully and modestly, the chapters grew. She had to recall all of six years crammed with action – and yet she had no notes or diaries. She had to explain (and it must have been most tedious to her) every detail of an agent’s life so that I could understand it and live it with her.

  To her (for the hundreds of hours she made available to me with my silly questions); to Colonel Buckmaster, who introduced me to her; to Tardivat, who saw me in Paris; and Mme Sainson, who saw me in Nice and also introduced me to Monsieur Comboult; and to Louis Burdet in the Stafford Hotel; and Miracca in the Palm Beach Casino; and Schley and Alsop in the States; and Scavino in Marseille and Dissard in Cannes and Bill Sellars in London – to all of these, who pieced together her story for me and brought back for me what they had known of her, go my thanks for this book.

  But particularly my thanks must go again to Nancy. Imagine the difficulty of explaining to you , my reader, the difference between an ‘evader’ and an ‘escaper’ . . . or why ‘Time Schedules’ had nothing to do with wireless ‘codes’ . . . or the distinction between a gendarme and a Milicien . . . or how a coming parachutage was evidenced by such a bald and extraordinary statement over the BBC as ‘ the cow jumped over the moon ’ or ‘ Andrée has a horse in the bathroom ’.

  You might think yourself silly about these things. Believe me, I was much sillier. And yet, step by step, Nancy made everything clear. She worked as hard on this book as I have, and all the time, as with everything she did, the task was full of laughter.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ she commanded me, ‘write me one of those miserable war books full of horror. My war was full of laughter and people I loved.’

  Now, to conclude her story, here is the balance of her life between 1949 and today 5 .

  It has already been stated that she was awarded heavy compensation from the German government, but after two small instalments of thirty-five pounds each, the payments stopped and the balance was never received. Seventy pounds . . . in exchange for a fortune, a home and a marriage.

  After she returned home to Australia she was persuaded, in 1949, to enter politics, representing the Commonwealth Liberal Party. Her opponent was Doctor Herbert de Vere Evatt, who at that time held his seat by a majority of 23,000 votes. He was the leader of the Australian Labour Party and his was the safest seat in the land.

  Knowing nothing of politics, Nancy applied the same rules of common sense and initiative to electioneering as she had to Resistance work. Dr Evatt’s majority of 23,000 was shattered. He eventually limped back into Parliament in 1951, with a hollow victory over his inexperienced woman opponent of a mere 127 votes.

  After that Nancy returned to Britain. She was unaffected by her high military awards and it was actually about the French Resistance Medal that she spoke most proudly.

  ‘That means,’ she said, ‘that I was officially in the Resistance. That’s all . . . that I was there in France. That’s what’s most important to me.’

  She paused to give you that extraordinarily candid and perceptive stare of hers, and then went on – and whilst she talked, one remembered that, of 560 SOE agents who were sent to Europe, 133 failed to return.

  ‘You see, I was lucky. I was in France at the beginning, when the Germans were right on top. And I was still in France at the end when we saw the Germans on the run . I know how Frenchmen felt all that time. I’d been part of their existence for a long while. I love France – people just don’t realise how much she suffered. Six hundred thousand French people died because of World War II : two hundred and forty thousand of them in prisons and concentration camps. And yet there were always escape routes and “safe houses” for our men shot down over there and trying to get away. There was always a Resistance movement. Churchill says it shortened the War by six months. I know how they fought. And, because I know, I’m proud of them and love them, just the same as I’m proud of what we did and love my own country.

  ‘I’m glad I was there. I’m glad I did what I did. I hate wars and violence but, if they come, then I don’t see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.

  ‘And if I had to choose now whether I’d have my wealth, or the four years that caused me to lose it, all over again, I know what I’d say. I’d want the four years all over again. You see, in those days we knew what we were fighting and we had a job to do. We did it. I may have lost a lot during the War, especially Henri, but I made a lot of friends and I did what I felt I had to do. And plenty of other people lost more, or did more, than ever I did.’

  Those were Nancy Wake’s last words to me on the subject of her war. It is only right that they should conclude this book.

  * * *

  5 1956, the year of original publication.

  APPENDIX I

  At the time when Captain Nancy Wake was to have been invested with the George Medal, His Late Majesty King George VI was ill. Consequently, the British Ambassador in Paris made the presentation instead.

  The French government awarded her two Croix de Guerre with Palm and a third Croix de Guerre with Star. Also they gave her the Resistance Medal – an honour granted sparingly even to Frenchmen and practically never to foreigners.

  The United States government sent her an invitation to attend a ceremony at which she was to be invested with the Medal of Freedom with a Bronze Palm. She had no idea what the merit of this decoration might be until she found that, in order of precedence, she was to follow immediately after the awards made to eight generals. As with the French Resistance Medal, she was one of the very few foreigners to hold this decoration.

  Here below, for
those who like their facts cloaked in the vaguest officialese, are Nancy Wake’s American and British citations. The French give no citations but allow three Croix de Guerre and the Resistance Medal to speak for themselves.

  Ensign Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, FANY

  George Medal

  Citation

  This officer was parachuted into France on March 1st, 1944, as assistant to an organiser who was taking over the direction of an important circuit in Central France. The day after their arrival she and her chief found themselves stranded and without directions, through the arrest of their contact, but ultimately reached their rendezvous by their own initiative.

  Ensign Wake worked for several months helping to train and instruct Maquis groups. She took part in several engagements with the enemy, and showed the utmost bravery under fire. During a German attack, due to the arrival by parachute of two American officers to help in the Maquis, Ensign Wake personally took command of a section of ten men whose leader was demoralised. She led them to within point-blank range of the enemy, directed their fire, rescued the two American officers and withdrew in good order. She showed exceptional courage and coolness in the face of enemy fire.

  When the Maquis group with which she was working was broken up by large-scale German attacks, and W/T contact was lost, Ensign Wake went alone to find a wireless operator through whom she could contact London. She covered some 200 kms on foot, and by remarkable steadfastness and perseverance succeeded in getting a message through to London, giving the particulars of a ground where a new W/T plan and further stores could be dropped. It was largely due to these efforts that the circuit was able to start work again.

  Ensign Wake’s organising ability, endurance, courage and complete disregard for her own safety earned her the respect and admiration of all with whom she came in contact. The Maquis troop, most of them rough and difficult to handle, accepted orders from her, and treated her as one of their own male officers. Ensign Wake contributed in a large degree to the success of the groups with which she worked, and it is strongly recommended that she be awarded the George Medal.