An ANZAC Reflection: Nancy Wake

Like many in our nation, I stood with my wife in our driveway early today holding our candles and rosemary, with the livestreaming of an ANZAC Day service not quite synchronising up and down the street. At the end of the service two ‘warbirds’ flew overhead, and a drone unfurled the Australian flag a hundred metres or so above the houses in our neighbourhood. We chatted for a while with our neighbours (observing the social distancing rule), then got on with our day. So ended our Covid-19 ANZAC commemoration.

Technology aside, I imagine this ANZAC Day parallels the same day in 1919 when public ceremonies were cancelled on account of a different virus, the Spanish flu. That flu killed some 15,000 people in Australia. Estimates of the global toll range from 30 to 100 million – explained by inaccurate, incomplete or non-existent records. (Unlike the Covid-19 and 1891 flu pandemics, the Spanish flu affected people in the prime of their lives more than the elderly and many deaths occurred within hours of contracting the virus.) Interestingly, many of the government responses to Spanish flu were similar to Covid-19 – shutdown of social gatherings (including schools, theatres, dance halls, hotels and churches); closure of border crossings; and urging of personal hygiene measures (coughing etiquette, handwashing and disinfection). There were desperate efforts to produce a (live virus) vaccine using a mixture of victims’ sputum, streptococcus and staphylococcus. 

Australia’s and the world’s death tally from Covid-19 is mercifully much lower at this time (78 and 196,000 respectively). There were multiple ‘waves’ of the Spanish flu and it remains to be seen if this is our experience with Covid-19.

The original source of the Spanish flu is not known with certainty, but we do know that it was not Spain. Spain just happened to be a neutral country with no news censorship and so there was widespread reporting of the disease in Spanish media.

War often turns ordinary people into heroic figures. One such ordinary person was Nancy Wake (1912-2011), ‘The White Mouse’. Nancy was born in Wellington, NZ but, before her second birthday, she moved with her family to Sydney where she was educated. She was much younger than her brothers and sisters and strongly independent. Her father deserted the family and her embittered mother brought up Nancy, who adored her father, without affection.  She ran away from home at 16  and worked as a nurse. Not long afterwards an aunt from New Zealand sent her £200 which she used to travel to England and Europe in 1932, where she worked as a journalist. She settled in France and married wealthy French businessman, Henri Fiocca in November 1939, reportedly because he was good at the tango. 

In the 1930s, during visits to Berlin and Vienna, Nancy witnessed the rise of Hitler, Nazism and anti-Semitism. She was forever determined to work against the Nazis when she witnessed utterly inhumane torture in Vienna – stormtroopers whipping Jews who were chained to giant wheels rolled around the streets. 

Not long after Germany invaded France, Nancy and her husband joined the French Resistance but worked independently. Between 1940 and 1942 she worked as a courier delivering messages and supplies and she bought an ambulance that she used to help Jewish refugees fleeing the German advance. She managed to obtain false papers that allowed her to stay and work in the Vichy zone in occupied France and helped at least a thousand Allied prisoners of war and downed Airmen to escape through Spain. It was not too long before she became a Gestapo suspect. They code-named her ‘The White Mouse’ because she was so good at evading them. She ended up with a five-million franc price on her head.

Eventually, it became too dangerous for her to stay in France. She made six attempts to exit France through the Pyrenees and into Spain, once being captured by the Vichy militia and interrogated for four days. With the help of Patrick O’Leary, ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel of World War II’, she tricked her captors into releasing her. 

Upon successful repatriation to Britain in June 1943, she trained in the French section of the British Special Operations Executive which worked with local resistance groups to sabotage the Germans. In April 1944 she was parachuted into the Auvergne region in central France with Major John Farmer. Their orders were to locate and organise the bands of Marquis, establish arms and munitions caches (parachuted in four nights each week), and arrange wireless communication with Britain. The ultimate goal of her work was to organise the Resistance for D-Day.

Nancy led the Marquis in guerrilla warfare and ensured that the radio operaters maintained contact with Britain. Once, after her radio operator was forced to destroy codes in a German raid, she cycled 500 klm in 71 hours through several German checkpoints to obtain fresh codes without which there could have been no further night-time air drops of weapons, munitions and supplies. She believed that this was her most important single contribution during the war.

The Germans referred to the Auvergne sector as the Fortress of France. After much planning the SS moved against the Marquis in June 1944. There were 22,000 Germans against 7,000 Marquis. In the battle that ensued 1,400 German troops died. Only 100 of the Marquis were killed.

Nancy’s war continued. She led a raid on Gestapo headquarters in Montucon and used her silent killing training to despatch a guard during a raid on a German gun factory. She also killed a female German spy.

On 25 August 1944, Paris was liberated and Wake led her troops into Vichy to celebrate. Sadly, she learnt that Henri had been interrogated and killed by the Gestapo in August 1943, apparently because he refused to give them any information about her. The biggest price she paid for her activities in the war was the loss of the ‘love of my life’. She left the Resistance in September 1944 and went to SOE Headquarter in Paris and from there to London a month later.

After the war, Nancy continued to work with the British Special Operations Executive in the Intelligence Department of the British Air Ministry. She found life difficult in post-war Europe and returned to Australia in January 1949. Shortly afterwards she attempted to enter federal parliament for the Liberal Party but was (only just) unsuccessful in defeating Labor’s ‘Doc’ Evatt. She had a second attempt in 1951, again unsuccessful. She returned to Britain in 1957 where she married former RAF POW, John Forward, and returned to Australia to live in 1959.

Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was one of the most decorated women of World War II. She was awarded the George Medal, 1939-45 Star, France and Germany Star, Defence Medal, British War Medal 1939-45, French Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, French Croix de Guerre with Star and Two Palms, US Medal of Freedom with Palm and French Medaille de la Resistance. She was never honoured by Australia despite being recommended by the Returned Services League, probably because she was a New Zealand citizen.

Nancy lived most of her retirement in Port Macquarie, NSW, but after the death of John Forward in 1997, she returned to the United Kingdom where she died in 2011.

This extraordinary woman was shaped by her experiences in Europe in the 1930s and lived out her convictions during the war. It appears that she never quite came to terms with civilian life after the war and she was bitterly disappointed that the Australian government never honoured her (she was given some assistance by the Howard Government in 2004 to move out of a nursing home and be nursed by a carer). She was never driven by religious conviction, having rejected her mother’s strong religious conviction as a headstrong teenager. She does, however, demonstrate that there is something in the human spirit that rises up against injustice and achieves extraordinary things against incredible odds. 

We remember the Nancy Wakes on ANZAC Day. Ordinary people who found extraordinary resources within themselves to fight against injustice.

Nancy’s medals are on display at the Australian War Memorial.

For further information see https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/P332 and http://diggerhistory.info/pages-heroes/white_mouse.htm. If you can access the documentary Nancy Wake – Code Name: The White Mouse you can learn more about this courageous woman.