Female Agents Behind Enemy Lines: Part Four

In this series of three articles, I’ll talk about a few of the female agents who were sent to France by the F Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during WWII. F Section (French Section) was part of SOE, set up as a clandestine organization “to set Europe ablaze”, as Winston Churchill once said.

Part 3 and Part 4 of this series of Female Agents Behind Enemy Lines, will focus on two women who both had a hatred of the Nazis and yet thrived on the adventure of war. It suited both their personalities, whereas some agents were quiet, unassuming people who hardly moved around as these women did, yet still played a vital role.

After all, a young woman sitting at a window while knitting, their stitches denoting military movements, was extremely important, but that sort of thing was not for these two ladies. Both women were extremely beautiful and glamorous, something they put to good use when needed to charm the enemy.

Read Part 1 – Violette Szabo
Read Part 2 – Odette Sansom Hallowes
Read Part 3 – Christine Granville
Read Part Four – Nancy Wake

Nancy Wake – Part Four

Nancy Wake, aka ‘Madame Andrée‘ and the ‘Witch’, was codenamed ‘White Mouse’ by the Germans. She was the most decorated servicewoman of World War II.

Before the outbreak of WWII, Nancy, who was born in New Zealand in 1912, moved to London where she worked as a journalist and was posted to Paris in the 1920’s eventually marrying the wealthy industrialist, Henri Fiocca, who died after being tortured by the Gestapo in Marseille where the couple lived, for not revealing the whereabouts of his wife.

Nancy Wake with Henri Fiocca

Nancy Wake: Fascism and the Resistance

It was while on an assignment in Vienna that Nancy developed her hatred of Fascism after viewing the brutality of the Nazi regime. The SS had tied several Jews to a wheel and were whipping them.

Nancy’s first involvement with the Resistance was in France in 1940 helping people escape over the Pyrenees, a route she would be forced to use herself after her network was blown.

Special Executive Network (SOE) Recruitment

She was then recruited in London by the Special Executive Network (SOE) and parachuted into the Auvergne in April 1944, to work with the Maquis and the Resistance. As a woman in a man’s world, she soon gained the respect of the men when she ordered the execution of a female French spy.

One of the most wanted agents in France, she is also known to have killed a guard with her bare hands to prevent him from raising the alarm during a sabotage raid, participated in the sabotage of German installations, organised parachute supply drops, and maintained radio contact with SOE. When the radio codes were lost, she cycled about 500km in 72 hours to organise replacement codes. It took its toll on her, but through sheer determination, she did it.

Nancy was a spirited, outspoken, and adventurous woman prepared to take risks. In this way, she was like Christine Granville in my previous article. She once commented:

I don’t see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas”.

When asked to remember her code poem by Leo Marks, the man in charge of the SOE agents and their codes said that unlike certain other agents such as Violette Szabo, Nancy never had a problem remembering her code as she deliberately made it pornographic. As she said:

We had certain codes to use, but we had to have the key to a code. And some people used a verse from the Bible or from Shakespeare, and I’m not a great authority on the Bible nor on Shakespeare. I thought well I'm going to have my own code which only SOE knew and myself, or the person decoding. Mine was very very simple.

It was:

She stood right there in the moonlight fair
The moon shone through her nightie
It bit right on the nipple of her tit
Oh Jesus Christ almighty!”

The man looked quite surprised when I gave him this. He didn’t say a word but he was surprised. And I said “Well I don’t think the Germans will know that, do you?” and he said “No, I don’t think so.”

Nancy Wake had a hatred of war, but she hated fascism enough to put her life on the line. She was dedicated in her training and once recalled her days learning silent killing with SOE. Like most, I think she was dubious about whether it would work in the field. When it did, she later told people she was most surprised, saying:

“it actually worked!”

“I was not a very nice person,” Nancy once told an Australian newspaper in 2001.

“And it didn’t put me off my breakfast.”

Post War Life

After the war, Nancy worked as a clerk for the British and then returned to Australia in 1948 and later she stood unsuccessfully as the Liberal Party candidate for a federal parliamentary seat. In 1951, she left Australia for Britain and remarried in 1957. She returned to Australia with her second husband in 1960 and after the death of her husband, she returned to London to live in 2001.

Nancy and Henri Fiocca

Living out her twilight years at the Stafford Hotel in Piccadilly, she couldn’t pay her bills.

When the Royal Family heard of this she was invited to afternoon tea with Prince Charles. After presenting him with her book, he donated money from the Prince of Wales Trust to see that she lived out her days in comfort. She died in hospital at the age of 98 in 2011. She was awarded the France Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1970, the Officer of the French Foreign Legion d’Honneur in 1988, and in 2006, she was awarded the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services Association Badge in Gold.

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