Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  ‘It will be my turn soon,’ Henri announced cheerfully one night, as they said goodbye to yet another newly drafted warrior.

  ‘Worry about that when it comes,’ Nancy declared. ‘And when it does, I want to go too.’

  ‘My dear Nanny, what as?’

  ‘An ambulance driver.’

  ‘But you can’t drive.’

  ‘You must have me taught.’

  ‘But you have no ambulance. And France has no ambulances either.’

  ‘I know. You must give me one of the firm’s trucks. Convert it for me. Then I’ll drive it to the Front.’

  ‘But, Nanny, why?’

  ‘Because I want to help.’

  ‘You can help here.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Henri. Here we help no one.’

  ‘But why do you want to help? War isn’t for women.’ He paused a moment and then finished lightly. ‘How often have I told you how I won the last war for France?’ He had served in the First World War for a few months as a boy in 1918. ‘Now I will win it again. Have you no confidence in me?’

  ‘Certainly,’ she assured him. ‘That’s why I want to go to the war myself. I’m sick of hearing how you won the last one! This one I shall win!’ Then they both rocked with laughter at her ludicrous notion and Henri felt in such good humour that he promised her a truck and lessons to drive it. When, a little later, he was called up as a second-class soldier and sent to Belfort to fight the Germans, he thought it rather unreasonable of his wife to hold him to his crazy promise, but hold him she did.

  A nerve-racked mechanic gave Nancy all her driving lessons in one day. Thereafter, boldly and noisily, she set off for the Rhine. It was January 1940.

  It was fashionable at this time for wealthy women to adopt a filleul de guerre – a poor soldier to whom food parcels and cigarettes might be sent. Nancy wrote to Henri and asked him to nominate her a filleul de guerre . He sent her the names of three fellow privates and from them she chose an ex-tram conductor called Ficetole. She chose Ficetole because he came from Marseille. After that, she regularly sent both Ficetole and his wife and children food parcels.

  To drive one’s own ambulance was also fashionable in those days of a France that had cheerfully omitted to prepare for the inevitable war by providing enough government ambulances. Nancy’s driving, however, was not at all fashionable.

  Driving on the right-hand side of the road never came naturally to her. Time after time, as traffic approached, she swerved smartly and instinctively to the left and so pinned the oncoming vehicle to any hedge, fence or wall that happened to be nearby. Passengers in her ambulance (mere civilians, but in the phony war ambulances acted as buses, because all the buses seemed to have been requisitioned and sent elsewhere as ambulances) would protest loudly; the driver of the other vehicle would shriek with rage; pedestrians would hurl in their own fierce denunciations. Placidly Madame Nancy Fiocca would wait for silence. Then she would announce, ‘ Je suis Australienne. En Australie on fait comme ça! ’ Which statement the French invariably found so perplexing that the discussion ended then and there. With a crash of gears, she would lurch off, leaving a heap of wreckage behind her.

  In February the French government decided that the department in which she worked must be evacuated. It was winter and there was chaos on the roads – a chaos of refugees towards Paris one way, and of military traffic the other. Nancy made her own handsome contribution to the chaos by helping with the evacuation. Later she worked, for weeks on end, driving loads of clothing up to the refugee centres and sorting it out when she had arrived.

  Then the Blitz began and with it all semblance of organisation vanished. Nancy just picked up refugees, wounded soldiers, machine-gunned civilians, anyone at all, and drove them out of immediate danger. Then she drove back – always ignoring the police who forbade her to approach the Front any closer – and loaded up her ambulance again. Her work was made no easier for her by the facts that blood made her feel sick and death shocked her profoundly.

  Everywhere were dead bodies, bombed-out vehicles, Stukas flying low and machine-gunning – machine-gunning anyone. There was a bedlam of French refugees, Belgian refugees, Allied soldiers and fifth columnists disguised as senior French officers and giving wrong directions . . . Total disorganisation.

  Belgium fell, and Nancy realised that she must now get out or be taken prisoner by the advancing Germans. Taking on a last load of passengers, she drove off, her face grim and her eyes cold – except when the bodies of slaughtered children brought tears to them. But she drove on. This was no fashionable business now. This was a slow, murderous lurching down roads reeking with the stink of death and despair, roads hideous with screams and roaring dive-bombers and machine-guns. This, suddenly, terrifyingly, was defeat.

  Nancy was asleep in a small hotel when, on 13 June 1940, Paris fell. Now there was humiliation too. Grief-stricken for France, because at that moment she felt wholly French, she wept all day. Where, she asked herself frantically, was Henri – if he was alive? Heading for Marseille, of course, she realised suddenly. Stupid not to have thought of it before. Into her ambulance again, she headed desperately south.

  Twenty kilometres from Nîmes her truck broke down and nothing in her sadly deficient mechanical repertoire would restore it to life. So, without any feeling at all, she abandoned it and started walking. Soon she got a lift, then she walked some more, then another lift. Finally, white-faced and exhausted, she reached Marseille. There she went straight to her father-in-law’s home and asked the family for news of Henri. They had no news.

  Then France fell and it seemed as if the world must surely end. Again Nancy wept, refusing to leave her room for two days. The shock, the shame, the awful waste of it all – all those helpless bodies dead on the road and at the Front – were too much for her. And still no news of Henri.

  But he returned some weeks later and, when he did, he and she retired to their flat. Half of France was now occupied by the Nazis. The other half, the southern half in which they lived, had promised its goodwill and allegiance to the Führer and could be swamped by him at any moment if that promised goodwill should appear to falter. The fleets which the French kept back in their own ports of Toulon and Oran, rather than dispatch to hard-pressed Britain, thus became their last symbol of power and their last weapon for bargaining with Hitler. But not even the continued existence of these superb ships of war could disguise France’s humiliation – Germany, the arch enemy, had defeated her. Life seemed completely hopeless and for days on end the Fioccas endured it numbly because the War, for them, was lost and over.

  2 THE FIRST STEP

  Unoccupied Southern France was now governed from the city of Vichy. The new administration collaborated briskly with the Germans, was hostile towards Britain and was soon to impose its collaborationist policy upon the public by an officious use of its police force, who were to be known, unaffectionately, as the Milice. The Milice were always, thereafter, to be almost as dangerous to any Allied sympathisers as were the Gestapo who supervised them – which supervision was conducted discreetly and unofficially by Nazi commissions who travelled incessantly throughout the southern zone. Rationing, shortages and black marketeering were the other new aspects of life in conquered but Unoccupied France.

  Nancy and Henri now set about making the best of a thoroughly bad situation. For Henri life became a case of ‘business as usual’, and for his wife it became the chore of stocking the house with as many provisions and as much food – tinned or otherwise – as possible. Henri’s wealth made this a more feasible operation for her than it was for many other housewives, and by September of 1940 the Fioccas had acquired a hoard of the most varied provisions.

  This was not selfishness. The Fioccas spread the net of their generosity wide. Nancy had a flair for talking with anybody and making friends with many of those to whom she talked. All these friends were regularly provided with meals or parcels of food. They ranged from society women to the wife and family of Ficetole,
her ex-tram conductor and filleul de guerre ; from bartenders to Henri’s employees.

  Every day for months past Nancy had gone black marketeering – buying. In the course of the haggling that always ensued the language thrown at her was often the ripest of Marseille’s abuse. Nancy, followed by Picon and Grenadine, with her maid Claire to help carry her purchases, would make her cautious way home and then wait for Henri to return from work. When he did she would repeat a phrase spoken to her while out shopping and ask him the meaning.

  Henri would blush a little and then tell her what it meant and also what to reply. She would repeat after him the correct and lurid response in the language of a fishwife, watching him carefully with that child’s stare of hers to see that every nasty nuance was exactly right, her brow smooth and serene in spite of the frightful oaths that were ripping from her mouth.

  ‘ Formidable ,’ he would comment. Thus she soon held her own in these wordy battles and even grew to be greatly respected by those with whom she traded. Few ladies, so sympathique and bien gentille , they told one another, could converse with a quarter of her fluency and colour. In short, now that she had added the idiom and bad language of all classes to her already perfect French, she was ready to deal with any situation. It was probably just as well that she did not realise then just how much, later on, she was going to need her knowledge of bad language.

  In those summer months of defeat in France and the Blitz in Britain, Nancy amused herself by swimming. Marseille is full of blue-green, rocky swimming holes and to these – now that hairdressers and clothing salons were no longer either fashionable or feasible – she would adjourn for the afternoon, accompanied by Picon and Grenadine.

  Picon was Grenadine’s faithful husband and Nancy’s most loyal friend, but he loathed water in any shape or form. On the other hand, not only did Nancy and Grenadine love swimming but, it must be admitted, Grenadine was not the unswervingly dutiful wife she should have been. So, whilst they lay sunbathing on the rocks, Grenadine would cast shamelessly come-hither looks at other gentlemen dogs in the vicinity, which enraged Picon. And when Nancy swam, Grenadine swam with her. Thereupon, frantic with anxiety, Picon screamed his head off until both his wife and his mistress returned.

  In August Grenadine went for a little walk on her own. This was silly of her because meat was short in Marseille and sausage makers were utterly unscrupulous. She vanished and never returned. For a fortnight after she vanished Nancy felt sad for the warm-hearted terrier bitch and Picon fretted inconsolably. For the same period, being a realist, Nancy bought and ate no sausages.

  Her birthday came on 30 August and Henri gave her a heavy gold bracelet.

  ‘Henri,’ she thanked him, ‘it’s lovely. And it must weigh at least a quarter of a pound!’

  ‘At least,’ he agreed gravely.

  She snapped it on to her wrist and went out proudly to shop. Sometime during her morning tour of sources that supplied illicit soap, English cigarettes, toothpaste, salt, fats, sugar and tinned food, a faulty catch on the bracelet broke and her new present was lost. First Grenadine and now her gold bracelet. Fate seemed unkind at that moment.

  Glumly she returned to her flat and melted down all the cakes of soap, pouring the fluid into rough moulds, splashing in some of her own perfume to disguise the manufacturer’s original scent and then waited for the blocks to set.

  ‘Now let the black-market police try to prove this is illegal soap,’ she muttered grimly to herself. That was the kind of deception that became a routine housewifely chore to the women of France. She wandered into her drawing room, poured herself a drink at the bar and called her maid.

  ‘Claire,’ she ordered, ‘from now on Picon is never to be allowed out alone. Understand?’ Claire nodded. ‘Now, where,’ she continued, ‘do you think we can get hold of some meat?’ Claire told her of a splendid black-market butcher’s shop, so she went to that and eventually became its star customer.

  This was to have a dramatic outcome four years later. For the moment, though, the butcher was to be just a good friend and an unfailing source of illegal meat.

  And so September 1940 came and passed and October was upon them. By that time their new life had become almost a habit. The Germans, it seemed, really did not mean ever to occupy Southern France, and Britain continued to resist stubbornly in a war the French were certain she must eventually lose. They watched her with mixed emotions – jealousy because she was still free; dislike because they thought she should have done more when France was attacked; vague hopefulness that she might survive and perhaps, a million years hence, even beat the Germans. Mainly, however, they thought only about themselves and how to cope with their altered way of life. The passionate goodwill towards Britain that was felt by both Nancy and Henri was shared by very few others in Marseille. But even Nancy and Henri had slipped into a routine which seemed likely to go on forever and had little bearing on Britain and the battle she fought at that time. They hardly noticed, for example, that Japan had just joined the Axis or that the rich oil wells of Romania had fallen to the Germans.

  Nancy had arranged to meet Henri for drinks in the Hotel du Louvre. The main entrance to the Louvre was from Marseille’s Canabière, an elaborate marbled porchway which led into a large foyer. Here it was the habit of the Gestapo – thinly disguised as the German commission – to sit and order drinks. They were an arrogant lot and Nancy, preferring never to go near them, always entered the hotel by a back door off the Cours Belsunce. There she would wait for Henri in a small bar behind the foyer, a bar too obscure ever to be used by the haughty Gestapo gentlemen.

  On this particular occasion she slipped into the bar as usual, ordered a drink from the waiter, Antoine, and settled down to wait. Only then did she notice that she was not alone. Sitting at the other end of the bar was a good-looking young man, fresh-complexioned and fair. Quickly Nancy glanced at Antoine. He caught her eye, polished a few glasses, replaced a few bottles and then moved casually down to her.

  ‘German?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he murmured. His doubts made Nancy wonder. Antoine was a Corsican, stocky, dark-haired, broken-nosed. He hated all Germans and seemed infallibly able to sense their presence even before he saw them. Actually, of all the non-French races, Antoine liked only the English. This latter was not entirely altruistic. The English had always been good tourists and his livelihood had depended upon tourism. He had added to his list of hates against the Germans the fact that they had so rudely terminated the English habit of Continental travel.

  ‘He’s had a Boc ,’ Antoine told her. ‘And he’s reading an English book!’

  ‘Then he must be a German,’ Nancy announced. ‘No Englishman would be silly enough to sit here in Marseille, with the lobby full of Germans, and read an English book.’

  Antoine nodded, but he did not look convinced. Soon he returned and whispered, ‘He hasn’t paid for his drink.’

  ‘Do you think he’s just waiting to eavesdrop when the place fills up?’

  ‘He would buy another drink while he waited, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Or at least pay for his first,’ she agreed. She had a sudden idea. ‘Antoine, offer him a drink. I’ll pay you for it later.’ Antoine spoke to the man, who at once accepted a brandy, raised his glass coolly to the Corsican, drank and then returned his eyes to his novel. At that moment Henri entered.

  Drawing him quickly aside Nancy explained the situation. ‘He could be a German or he could be a British soldier who’s got through from the north,’ she concluded. ‘Henri, what should we do?’

  ‘I know what you want to do,’ he told her, smiling.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Find out,’ he replied. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘If he’s a German we should know it, and if he’s English then perhaps we can help.’

  ‘All right, my dear,’ Henri murmured, ‘I shall find out.’

  He crossed to the tall, fair stranger and spoke to hi
m. The stranger put down his book and replied calmly. They talked for about five minutes and then Henri returned to Nancy.

  ‘He’s a British officer, from Newcastle upon Tyne; he’s been interned here in the fortress, along with all the other British stragglers in these parts; he’s on parole; he was fed up and he came in here for a drink. Why don’t you go and talk to him yourself?’

  Delighted to meet a fellow Brit after so many months, Nancy rushed across to him.

  ‘Come on,’ she urged, ‘let’s have a night out.’

  They took him to dinner, they laughed, they drank and they had a splendid evening. During the time they spent together Nancy discovered that there were two hundred British officers in the fortress, interned there by the French military authorities. Conditions were poor, food scarce and money non-existent.

  ‘I’ll get you a radio,’ she promised, ‘then you can listen to the BBC. Meet me tomorrow at Basso’s,’ she proposed, ‘and I’ll bring you a thousand English cigarettes.’ She thought a second and then made the suggestion that was to transform her life.

  ‘We’ll go to a shop I know where we can buy food. Can you come out on parole at lunchtime tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then meet me.’

  ‘At Basso’s?’

  ‘At Basso’s.’

  ‘Till then.’ He grinned in farewell and, thanking them profusely, left them. Only when she got home to the flat and talked it all over with Henri did it occur to her that the man could still easily be a German and, if that were the case, that she would then certainly be in trouble. All night long, worried by these doubts, she lay unable to sleep or to decide what to do the next day. But in the morning she made up her mind that, on the chance of the stranger’s being English and needing her help, she must take the risk. Armed with a brown-paper package containing a thousand cigarettes, she marched down to Basso’s.