Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  PRAISE FOR NANCY WAKE

  ‘Russell Braddon has written the story of this indomitable woman with skill and understanding, played up the friendship, love, laughter and adventure; and played down the tragedy, the horror, the vulgarity of war.’

  – The Observer

  Text copyright © 1956, 2005, 2009, 2019 by The Estate of Russell Braddon

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published in 1956 by Cassell.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com , Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542021661

  ISBN-10: 1542021669

  Cover design by: @blacksheep-uk.com

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART ONE: NANCY’S WAR BEGINS

  1 THE ENEMY ARRIVE

  2 THE FIRST STEP

  3 DOUBLE LIFE

  4 DISASTER

  5 THE RESCUE

  6 THE WHITE MOUSE

  PART TWO: INTERLUDE

  7 ARRESTED

  8 ESCAPE TO SPAIN

  9 WELCOME HOME

  10 THE MAD HOUSE

  11 WITCH ON A PARACHUTE

  PART THREE: WITH THE MAQUIS D’AUVERGNE

  12 A MURDER IS PLANNED

  13 OLD ENEMIES AND NEW FRIENDS

  14 PITCHED BATTLE

  15 EMERGENCY MESSAGE

  16 AMBUSH

  17 SABOTAGE AND COGNAC

  18 OPERATION GESTAPO

  19 SILENT KILLING

  20 RETURN TO MARSEILLE

  21 THE ENEMY DEPART

  22 THE LOOSE ENDS

  APPENDIX I

  APPENDIX 2

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The story that follows is Nancy Wake’s and because of that I have asked her to write the next and only important sentence on this page.

  ‘I dedicate this book to everyone in France who helped us, even if it was only by refraining from helping the enemy, for that in itself required courage, but especially I dedicate it to my comrades in the Maquis d’Auvergne.’

  PART ONE: NANCY’S WAR BEGINS

  1 THE ENEMY ARRIVE

  A rebel, always laughing and very, very feminine – that’s the best way to describe Nancy Wake. Although one could add that she had the disconcertingly direct stare of an infant child – candid, unhurried and perceptive – and a child’s serene brow. Her eyes were hazel ordinarily, but they went green when she cried and blue when she walked outside on a fine day.

  As a twelve-year-old she was a brilliant pupil in an Australian high school. Even then she cooked the household meals and often had to clean the house and she didn’t like these tasks at all. She ran away from home twice.

  At eighteen she was a nurse, cheerful and popular with the inmates, in a country mental hospital.

  In her early twenties she began a world tour, supporting herself by freelance journalism, her sales stemming from good looks and personality as much as from an adequate literary talent. She earned enough to live and to keep moving.

  When she was twenty-two she took a flat in Paris and, with her first wage packet, bought two wire-haired terriers – one a dog, one a bitch – and these she promptly named Picon and Grenadine, as a compliment to France’s drinking habits. She always loved Picon most and it was he who was to live right through the next fantastic seven years of her own life, so that when he died after the War, she wept for days. Friends asked her why. After all, he was only a dog. And she replied, ‘If you love dogs you’ll know part of the reason. The other part is that when Picon died, the last of my youth died too.’ By then, of course, she had spent almost the entire War fighting the Nazis in France; she had become a distinguished Resistance leader; she had earned more decorations than any other British servicewoman; and she had lost her husband to the Gestapo torturers in Marseille. Picon had lived through it all and now he was dead and she felt that the last link with her life as a girl had vanished. So she wept.

  But we run ahead of time. When she was twenty-three she was a considerable beauty and had the dubious compliment paid her one evening of being strenuously pursued round and round the Cannes Palm Beach Casino by a wealthy sheik or pasha, she wasn’t sure which. Eventually she cooled his ardour by introducing him to her fiancé, Henri Fiocca, a Marseille steel industrialist who was equally as wealthy as the sheik or pasha, whichever he was.

  She had first met Henri Fiocca at a party. He was fourteen years older than she, and his partner, on that occasion, was an incredibly beautiful young woman. The next evening, he contrived to be at the same restaurant as Nancy and her friends and his companion was another beautiful woman. Nancy’s group moved on to a nightclub and later Fiocca turned up again – this time with a third beautiful woman.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ Nancy exploded, ‘how does he do it?’

  ‘He has great charm,’ one of her companions pointed out.

  ‘I’m not saying he hasn’t,’ she replied. ‘But all those gorgeous-looking girls. How does he do it?’

  Her partner shrugged. ‘Henri has many more girls than you have seen,’ he assured her.

  For weeks it went on. Finally, Nancy, who could not bear not to understand, tackled Fiocca bluntly on the subject.

  ‘How do you get on to so many beautiful girls?’

  ‘They ring me up.’

  ‘They ring you up?’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘Every girl, except the one I want, rings me up.’ He looked at her quizzically as he spoke and she, understanding at once what he meant, stared at him very straightly in reply.

  ‘If you want to speak to me on the phone, Fiocca,’ she announced finally, ‘ you will ring me up!’

  He did.

  He courted her and wooed her and a little while later – despite his enraged family’s objections – he announced his engagement to her. Nancy had never known that any man could be so charming and so amusing, or that anyone could mean so much to her. It was early 1939 and they planned to marry in 1940.

  Now her life was transformed. From being one of the least affluent journalists in the world, Nancy had become the fiancée of one of the wealthiest men in Marseille. Money had never been of any importance to her, but now she realised that lots of it is more pleasantly unimportant than none.

  ‘Get us an apartment and furnish it,’ Fiocca ordered. By June she had obtained the lease of a huge flat in a luxury block on the hill that overlooks all of Marseille and its harbour. The apartment had a bathroom window that looked out over the Old Port. She had even ordered lavish drapes and Persian rugs and a bar for the drawing room. Together, she and Henri chose a huge table and the best monogrammed Sèvres china and crystal glasses for the dining room. Nancy employed servants to look after them when, in the New Year, she would be married. Purring with contentment, she decided that now, at last, the harsh memories of her childhood housekeeping were to be expunged forever. Never again, she thought, need she go without anything.

  Meantime, Henri made her life a constant joy. He taught her the best places to eat and thought nothing of driving 150 miles to find the meal he desired for her. That was customary in the wealthy society of those days, but in those matters Fiocca was an expert and a fanatic.

  He often took her to Cannes at weekends, where she stayed with a Madame Digard and her daughter Micheline. They swam during the day (this
was something she did better than Henri, which pleased her) and went to the casino in the evening.

  Although it is only five minutes’ walk from the Martinez, where Henri had his suite, to the casino, they always drove the short distance. Henri loathed walking and had a passion for cars, which he drove at appalling speed.

  At the casino Nancy found she had no desire to gamble. ‘Just not interested,’ she told Henri, when he offered her chips and pointed to the green-topped tables with their fringe of fanatical players who plotted every fall of the numbers and then worked out their infallible theories. ‘I’d much rather talk to Miracca.’

  And so, for hours, she would sip brandy in the bar and talk with Miracca. He was an immaculately dressed h ȏ telier , a director-manager of the Palm Beach Hotel in which the casino was housed. The friend of royalty, of the aristocracy, of the rich and the famous, he had an endless fund of anecdotes which fascinated the journalist in Nancy.

  He told her how his wife had once run a fashionable millinery shop in London’s Bond Street and sold a dozen hats to a Scottish girl who was then about to be married to the Duke of York – and who later became, as she was at that very moment, Queen Elizabeth of England.

  He told her how once he had been assistant manager at the Café Royal in London, after working there for twenty years, starting as a child under Madame Nicol and going each evening to night school. Then he had become manager of Prince’s in Piccadilly. He remembered the girl who was later to become George VI’s queen coming to Prince’s every week. He remembered his bandmaster, Fortoni, composing a special song for her. He remembered the three royal princes coming in regularly for a seven-and-six dinner before the theatre. And he always wondered why the Prince of Wales once called him over and said, ‘Miracca. Be a good fellow and put a couple of lemons in my coat pocket, will you? I’m going to the theatre.’

  ‘He still comes here ,’ Nancy had protested. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘No,’ said Miracca emphatically, ‘I cannot do that.’

  Doubtless he was right, Nancy decided, but she knew that if ever she met the Duke of Windsor she would have to ask. Then she wondered why it would be wrong to question a royal duke about the lemons he had once requested to be put in his coat pocket before he went to the theatre. She was a fanatical royalist but she liked to know these things.

  ‘Please,’ she urged, ‘ask him some time.’ The powerfully built Italian, stocky, good-humoured and perfectly groomed, glared at her with stern brown eyes.

  ‘Never,’ he replied. Fiocca walked across to them at the bar. ‘Your fiancée,’ Miracca told him, ‘is probably the most beautiful girl here, but she asks me the most difficult questions. How can I do what she asks? It is quite impossible.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Fiocca agreed amiably. ‘What do you want him to do?’ he asked Nancy. Briefly she told him; briefly her Henri answered her.

  ‘Miracca is a Grand Ufficiale of the Italian Crown and a friend of all the kings and queens, and ex-kings and ex-queens, of Europe. He knows best. So now, my dear, shall we drive home?’

  As they left, Miracca’s eyes followed them good-humouredly. ‘A beautiful girl,’ he murmured. ‘The most beautiful. And he is a wonderful man for her. A most serious businessman. Very rich.’ To Miracca there were no higher compliments!

  Her future home was now quite ready for occupation, and Nancy found that she had time to spare and nothing much to do in it except listen to the endless café talk of whether or not there would be a war. At night she and Henri could dance or go to the cinema or an occasional concert – though Marseille was not much of a town for concerts – but for the rest of the day it was just society women and talk of the coming war.

  Suddenly she conceived a fierce desire to see England again before she married. It was then considered highly fashionable to go to England, to Tring, there to take a three-week slimming course. All the chic Frenchwomen were doing it. So Nancy asked Fiocca would he mind if she went slimming for three weeks. He looked her up and down, found nothing wrong with her figure and then assured her that he didn’t mind at all. She left for London in August of 1939.

  When she arrived there she found that her booking for the Tring ‘cure’ had been somehow bungled and that she could not immediately take it. A quick look at the newspapers made her decision simple.

  ‘The war’s definitely coming,’ she told herself in her cheap back room at the Strand Palace Hotel (she had refused Henri’s money for the trip), ‘and when war comes we’ll all starve anyway, so why start off with three weeks of it at Tring?’

  Promptly she wrote and cancelled her course. Equally promptly war broke out and Nancy prepared to return to France. First, though, realising that Fiocca would inevitably be called up into the French army, and anxious to do something to help the Allied war effort herself, she offered her services to the British. In return they could only suggest that she might work in a NAAFI: Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes, an organisation that ran canteens for British service personnel.

  ‘Not at all my cup of tea, thank you,’ she replied, abandoning her notions of military service.

  Then came a letter from Cannes asking her please, when she returned, would she bring Mme Digard’s daughter Micheline back with her? Micheline was a pupil at the convent of St Maur in Weybridge.

  Nancy rushed off to Weybridge and found that the Mother Superior was, quite properly, utterly unwilling to allow Micheline to leave for France with anyone until she had direct authority so to do from the girl’s parents. For all the Mother Superior knew, Nancy could have been a Nazi spy or a kidnapper.

  Time passed whilst word went down to Cannes and then returned to Weybridge and with it passed the last of Nancy’s money and her exit permit, which had expired.

  Then the Mother Superior received the authority she required from Mme Digard and Nancy received fifty pounds from Fiocca. Now all that was needed were the necessary permits from the British and French passport offices.

  At this time thousands of people had the same idea as Nancy – to get out of England and back to France. The queue at the permit office stretched for hundreds of yards, an undisciplined queue of impatient Frenchmen. Each day they received queue numbers so that they could take up their correct positions next morning, and each morning they tried desperately but unavailingly to cheat. Nancy queued for seven days outside the British office and then for three days outside the French office. This done, she collected Micheline, packed her bags and stumbled gratefully out of her hotel into London’s blackout.

  The streets were chaotic, with lurching pedestrians and groping cars, and Nancy’s trip to the boat-train strained even her sense of humour. Then there was no proper boat for the boat-train – only a car ferry – and before she could get on board even this unpromising craft she had to run the gauntlet of a dozen gloomy officials questioning her sanity, attempting to prevent her departure.

  ‘You really sure you want to go, Miss? You, an Australian girl, to France?’

  ‘You’ll be sorry, you know.’

  ‘If you go, you’ll never come back. You understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘Can’t even guarantee you won’t be sunk halfway across the Channel.’

  ‘Quite sure you want to go?’

  ‘You’ll never get back.’

  To that chorus she clambered aboard with Micheline. The Channel crossing was hell. They were completely blacked-out, no one was allowed to smoke, there were numerous submarine alarms – all false – and the whole atmosphere on the car ferry was fraught with the direst fears and restrictions of total war.

  And then their blacked-out, zigzagging craft entered the harbour of Boulogne. There, before them, lay war-ridden Europe – every light ablaze, no security whatsoever, the traffic racing briskly! Nancy and Micheline gazed at it a moment, aghast, and then shrieked with laughter.

  ‘Ah,’ announced Micheline gravely, when they had controlled their mirth, ‘now I know I’m home in France!’

  Nancy and
Henri married on 30 November 1939 – the Fiocca family still far from reconciled to the advent of an Australian, Protestant daughter-in-law. Then the newly-weds set out to enjoy themselves as much as possible before Henri should be called up to fight.

  Fiocca would leave their flat early each morning for work after the maid had brought them tea. Nancy would then remain luxuriously in bed till ten, reading the papers, gossiping with her maid and discussing what they would have for lunch when Henri got home at noon.

  ‘Shall I bring in Picon and Grenadine?’ the maid would ask.

  ‘Have they been for their walk?’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  ‘And have they . . . ?’

  ‘Yes, Madame, they have!’

  ‘Then bring them in.’

  The two dogs would curl up on her bed with her and watch her eat her pétit dejeuner. Halfway through this light breakfast she would retire to her bath, boiling hot and quite full. There she would lie, with her big toe against the hot tap, ever ready to increase the temperature, a glass of champagne in one hand, a book in the other and a small slice of toast and caviar by her side. This, not so much because she was addicted to champagne and caviar, as that she was endlessly delighted at being suddenly able to afford them.

  Thus, nibbling her toast, sipping from her glass, reading her novel, pausing occasionally to glance out of the bathroom window and gaze upon Marseille – sometimes idly wondering whether any of the Old Port could see her as clearly as she could see it – a pleasant hour passed.

  Then she would dress quickly and lunch with Henri. After that, drive into town, where the afternoons were always full. Full with visits to the dress salons, the beauty salons, the hair salons, to restaurants and to cinemas. Buy something, order something, have an egg-pack facial here or a hair wave there; eat cream cakes at the Marquise de Sévigné or drink aperitifs at Basso’s or the Hôtel du Louvre.

  These were her afternoons each week, every week. Hers was a frivolous, extravagant life. And, as each week passed, it became even more frivolous because every night there were parties – parties to farewell yet another husband off to the Front. Without any compunction Nancy thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. A more useless woman there cannot have been in the whole of France, she thought.