Nancy Wake

On November 30, 1939, she married Henri Edmond Fiocca, an affluent French industrialist. They were issueless. Fiocca was captured and killed by Germans during the Second World War.

In December 1957, she married RAF officer John Forward.

She died on August 7, 2011. On March 11, 2013 her ashes were scattered near the Verneix village, near Montluçon according to her wish.

She was born on August 30, 1912, in Roseneath, Wellington, New Zealand, in to Charles Augustus Wake and Ella Wake as the youngest daughter of their six children. Her father was a journalist and editor.

In 1914 her family moved from New Zealand and settled at North Sydney, Australia. After a while her father went back to New Zealand leaving her mother with the responsibility of raising the children.

She joined the ‘North Sydney Household Arts (Home Science) School’ in Sydney. Around 1928 she left her home and landed up in rural New South Wales, where she took the job of a nurse. After a couple of years she came back to Sydney and worked in a shipping company.

Thereafter she travelled to New York and London with the £200 inheritance from her aunt and studied journalism in London. Thereafter she moved to Paris and worked as a freelance correspondent with the Hearst newspaper group. Her assignments include a 1933 interview of Adolf Hitler. She witnessed the atrocities of the Nazis that included thrashing Jews men and women in the streets of Vienna.

She was in Britain at the outbreak of the ‘Second World War’ but soon she returned to France and when Germany invaded the country she was living with her husband in Marseilles, France.

In no time she came forward to aid war victims by using her newly purchased vehicle as ambulance and also suppled goods to refugee camps.

By June 1940 France had to surrender to Germany that saw incapacitation of the French armed forces and abatement of its government. Wake joined the ‘French Resistance’ and worked as its messenger. She also became a member of Captain Ian Garrow’s escape network.

She was in constant lookout by the Gestapo who tapped her phone and blocked her mails. They named her ‘The White Mouse’ for her finesse in dodging them.

As the British-American invasion, ‘Operation Torch’ began, unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, ‘Wehrmacht’ conquered southern part of France in November 1942. With this the Nazis got free access to the documents of Vichy regime that put Wake’s life in greater danger.

In 1970 she was inducted as a ‘Chevalier’ of the ‘Legion of Honour’ and in 1988 after receiving a promotion she became ‘Officer of the Legion of Honour’.