Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  * * *

  1 Approximately £80,000 in 2020.

  2 Approximately £6,500 in 2020.

  6 THE WHITE MOUSE

  Garrow escaped from Meauzac on 8 December 1942, and for a few days after that Nancy, since Marseille was littered with Gestapo agents, made frequent appearances as the harmless socialite wife of Henri Fiocca.

  She was cleaning up in her flat when a gendarme knocked on the door. He told her that Captain Garrow had escaped from his concentration camp and he watched Nancy’s reaction to this news very closely.

  ‘Has he?’ she demanded, half amazed, half enthusiastic, which was not at all what the gendarme had expected.

  ‘You look very pleased, Mme Fiocca,’ he accused.

  ‘Pleased!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m delighted! Wouldn’t you be if your cousin had just escaped?’

  This entirely disconcerted the gendarme. ‘I suppose I would,’ he had to agree.

  ‘Good,’ she announced. ‘Let me give you a drink.’

  After the gendarme, suitably refreshed and considerably puzzled, had left, Nancy rang Henri at his office.

  ‘Do you know what?’ she shouted excitedly at him. ‘A very charming gendarme has just called in to tell me that my cousin Garrow has escaped from Meauzac.’

  ‘No!’ exploded Henri, registering supreme astonishment.

  ‘Yes,’ his wife assured him. ‘Au revoir for now, dearest.’

  ‘Au revoir.’ Whereupon they hung up.

  ‘So if any of you Gestapo apes are tapping my wires,’ Nancy muttered to herself, ‘just put that conversation in your pipes and smoke it!’ The instinct to cover every dangerous track with innocent and obvious footprints had long since become second nature to her. The moment she had seen the gendarme at her door she had known why he was there. Instantly she had realised that the only innocent thing to do was to look delighted and then to ring up her husband to tell him the wonderful news. This was the kind of subtle mental reflex – an unfailing ability to convince herself of her own innocence in any situation – that was to save her life many times in the next two years.

  Perhaps it was the Garrow affair that developed this talent of hers to perfection. Certainly she was to use it again very shortly.

  Christmas was approaching and Nancy decided that pork would be an excellent idea for a Christmas dinner with all their friends. She accordingly bought herself a new ski suit and headed off boldly by train and bus to Névache – to her chalet and, she hoped, a fully grown piglet.

  The ‘piglet’ exceeded all her finest expectations. It had become a huge porker, weighing more than 300 pounds. Ruthlessly Nancy ordered its immediate execution and division into two. Before this task could be carried out, however, four Resistance men crept into the chalet with her, having been sent on to her by the French organisation at Toulon.

  She was about to take the bus from Névache to Briançon, complete with a huge suitcase full of pig weighing well over 100 pounds, with her four ‘friends’ as company, when news arrived in the village that the Germans were planning to block all the roads to Briançon that day and to check all traffic.

  The villagers, who knew all about Mme Fiocca’s pig, assumed that the Germans were hunting her only on charges of black marketeering. Since they approved whole-heartedly of black marketeering, they helped her to persuade the bus driver to depart from Briançon hours before the scheduled time, so that he would pass the crossroads at which the Germans planned to check all traffic before the Germans even got there.

  Nancy herself had had word, though, that the Germans were setting a trap not for black marketeers, nor even for the four men in her care, but for herself alone. They were looking for a woman, a strange woman, whom they styled ‘The White Mouse’.

  She therefore made a quick decision. The half pig and her four charges would go by bus to Briançon. Even if the Germans arrived at the crossroads in time to check the bus – which was very improbable since it was leaving early – they would be looking only for a woman. Men and pigs would be all right. She herself would ski from Névache to the Briançon side of the crossroads and would pick up the bus there, beyond the checkpoint.

  She set off herself at once by ski and, on a long cross-country run, managed safely to bypass the crossroads. Soon the bus came lumbering along and she climbed inside. The Germans arrived at the crossroads a mile behind them some time later. They caught no one. The mystery of The White Mouse remained unsolved.

  Just before they arrived at the terminus, Nancy, with her four evaders and the pig, got off the bus and caught a taxi to the station at Veynes, rather than go to the obvious one at Briançon. Briançon station was being heavily controlled at the time and, had they gone there, they would all certainly have been trapped.

  At Veynes, the four evaders being now well on their way, they split up, agreeing to rendezvous outside the station at Marseille, where Henri would have sent a truck. Nancy, still in her ski suit, boarded the Grenoble-Marseille express, and the taxi driver lifted her enormously heavy suitcase up on to the luggage rack for her.

  For some time she travelled alone and without too much anxiety. Then the train stopped at Aix-en-Provence and she was no longer alone: she was, in fact, sharing her compartment with a very obvious German in plain clothes. As there was a German headquarters at Aix-en-Provence, she had very few doubts that he belonged to one of the Nazi services. And at Marseille she heard there was a curfew.

  Overhead was almost 200 pounds of illegal pork; behind her, in the train somewhere, were four men she had helped escape; in the valley near Briançon a special raiding party were looking for her. This, she decided, was as pretty a kettle of fish as ever she’d been in. But what would an innocent woman do? First, look completely disinterested in the young gentleman opposite; second, never even think of whether he might be Gestapo or not since, to a legitimate traveller, it could not matter one way or the other; third, forget the danger of Marseille’s curfew.

  Convinced now that she was just an ordinary traveller, she gazed placidly out of the carriage window. The German found her calm good looks soothing and attractive. Like most of his compatriots in France, he was lonely for decent company.

  ‘It’s very cold, isn’t it?’ he commented. His French was perfect. Perhaps he was not a German, she thought. She decided to test him by her answer.

  ‘Well, we French people don’t have the fuel any longer to heat our trains like you do yours in Germany,’ she stated mildly. ‘That’s why,’ she lied, ‘I always travel in these skiing clothes.’ He did not deny her observation about German trains. So he was a German. Instead he chose to talk about her skiing clothes.

  ‘They suit you.’ He smiled. She smiled back. She decided then that he would help her with her bag at Marseille. The young German flirted and Nancy did not discourage him. He asked if he could see her again in Marseille and she said ‘of course’ and made a date.

  They rattled into Marseille station. Nancy looked out along the platform and, as the train clanked to a halt, saw that it was stiff with German police, French police, black-market police and customs officials. She began to pull at the handle of her huge suitcase.

  ‘Allow me,’ the German said, as she had intended he should.

  ‘Thank you,’ she agreed. He reached up, tugged at the case and looked faintly astonished at the way it moved only a few inches forward on the luggage rack.

  ‘If it’s too heavy for you,’ Nancy told him, ‘leave it for me!’ After that, of course, nothing would stop the young German from carrying her suitcase. Lurching heavily, he followed her on to and along the platform. He listed noticeably to starboard.

  ‘The way you are carrying my bag the police will think it’s full of black-market stuff,’ Nancy complained. ‘You’ll get me into trouble. Faites comme ça. Swing it like this,’ she ordered . . . and mimed someone carrying the lightest of handbags.

  With a heroic effort he straightened his back and shoulders and walked erect.

  ‘ Bon , bon ,’ Nancy c
ommended. ‘ C’est bien comme ça .’

  At the barrier only the customs stopped them. They wanted to look inside the suitcase. Nancy knew, though, that no German officer could possibly allow himself to be caught carrying contraband – or even risk being caught. And she was certain that the German officer now knew as well as she did that contraband was exactly what he was carrying. Arrogantly he produced a Gestapo card for the customs officer and walked through the barrier, the bag unopened.

  When she had promised him faithfully that she would meet him later that week, he eventually agreed to leave her.

  ‘Thank you for carrying my bag,’ she said.

  ‘Delighted,’ he told her and smiled broadly. Then he walked away and Nancy sighed at the thought of his disappointment when she would fail to turn up at her date with him in three days’ time.

  Her four evaders joined her the moment he had gone.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Gestapo,’ she answered curtly.

  ‘But he carried your bag.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t think I was going to, when there was a willing man around, did you?’ she retorted. ‘The cursed thing weighs a ton! And this curfew has stopped Henri coming along to help me. Now you lot hang around.’

  Soon she learnt why the station was so cluttered with police and soldiers. Someone had blown up something and the Germans were after blood. They had imposed an early curfew and were ‘controlling’ everything. So it was no use expecting Henri or anyone else to meet her and help with the pig, or with the four men. What to do?

  After much brain-racking she remembered Carlin at the nearby Hotel Terminus. Carlin was Ficetole’s brother-in-law. Carlin was contacted and came to the station. He helped carry the suitcase and he led all five of them by dark back streets to the rear entrance of a hotel requisitioned entirely for German officers. These officers would arrive on the 6 a.m. express next morning. He guided them through the basement kitchens and up the servants’ staircases. He showed them into an empty room and invited them, all five of them, to lie crossways under, not on, the bed.

  At 5.30 a.m. – half an hour before the Germans were due to arrive – a friend of Carlin’s collected them and led them out through the same staircases and kitchens and into the back streets again. The four escapers thanked Nancy and left her to travel on to Toulon, where she had given them another contact. Then Henri’s truck arrived and drove her home with the pig.

  Nancy, a Cordon Bleu cook, now made piles of pork savouries and pâté. She prepared all the pork and threw a series of parties, which were invariably given on a Friday.

  The bath was the reason for this. The ham and the gammon portion of the pig’s carcass was in the bath being cured. This process took forty days of constant turning in strong brine. After forty days it had to be hung in cheesecloth until it was dry. So, for forty days, the bath was almost always full of brine and pig.

  But this was not the hardship it might seem. Because of German restrictions there was no central heating in the flat and the hot-water system worked only once a week, on Fridays. So, on Fridays, the salted carcass would be taken out of the bath and laid tenderly on newspapers in the hall. Then as many of the Fiocca circle as possible would be invited to the flat. They would each have a glorious hot bath and, after that, a delicious meal of the pâté and savouries that Nancy had baked. As the meal began, Henri would carry the pig back into the bathroom and again lay it gently in its cradle of brine.

  Other friends, who had also acquired illegal foodstuffs, reciprocated; and so began what Nancy always regarded as the warmest, friendliest time of her life in Marseille. Black-market restaurants, haunted by the Gestapo, had become too dangerous to patronise so, instead, people shared their hoards of food in the comparative safety of their own homes. Parcels of cured ham were dispatched all over Marseille when Nancy’s pig had eventually spent its full term in her bath and dried out in cheesecloth. She particularly looked after the Ficetole family.

  Walking home with Henri and two of her friends one night, after just such a meal with another friend, all four of them were depressed by the fact that they had to make their way by foot. Petrol rationing had immobilised their cars and taxis were the province mainly of the Germans. They came to the long, steep hill that led up to their home.

  ‘This is almost enough to take the edge off all that lovely food I’ve had,’ Nancy complained.

  ‘This is the worst atrocity the Germans ever committed,’ confirmed her husband, who hated walking as much as ever.

  Every step of the way they complained. Then, not quite halfway up the hill, about fifty yards ahead of them, they noticed a black Mercedes Benz and, standing round it, a group of officers in Gestapo uniform. Nancy was ahead of the other two, who were lagging lazily. Panting, she reached the Mercedes just as the last officer was climbing inside.

  ‘No, this is too much,’ she said facetiously as he looked round at her.

  ‘What is?’ the German demanded.

  ‘All you lucky men in that lovely car, and I’m walking.’

  The German looked at her in amusement and then suggested gallantly, ‘Perhaps Mademoiselle would like us to drive her home?’

  ‘Of course,’ she accepted promptly. And so, to their horror, Henri and his two friends saw Mme Fiocca roar off in the dreaded black limousine of the Gestapo. Frantically they ran all the way back to Henri’s apartment block and ascended to the flat. Henri fumbled with the key as he tried to open his front door, his hands trembling with nervousness. But eventually the door yielded and they burst inside. There, placidly helping herself to a drink, they saw Nancy.

  She turned round and grinned mischievously. ‘Much quicker than walking,’ she told them. ‘Easier too!’ Then she began to laugh helplessly.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she choked, ‘if only you could have seen your faces when I drove off in that car.’

  This escapade with the German officers and the Mercedes Benz was not just a gallant piece of bravado peculiar to Nancy. It was characteristic of the majority of loyal Frenchwomen at that time. They were at once objects of envy and despair to the Germans.

  The conquerors poured into garrison towns all over Southern France from November 1942 until January 1943. By that time they had occupied the entire zone very securely. Then the officers brought down their wives or acquired low-class mistresses; and for these women the German officers had only one ambition – that they should attain French chic .

  So, noticing that all the Frenchwomen went hatless, the officers’ women also stopped wearing hats. Immediately the Frenchwomen started wearing hats again. But they made it impossible for the officers’ women to copy their example because the hats they wore all sported a green feather. The green feather symbolised a green bean and ‘the green beans’ – les haricots verts – were what the French had nicknamed the Germans! For any woman in Marseille to wear any hat at all after that was to fling subtle insult at the Reich. The officers’ women had to remain hatless.

  But the Frenchwomen did not stop there. When the officers’ women obtained the best French stockings, the local women went stockingless. When their rivals also went stockingless, the Frenchwomen took to wearing revolting knitted stockings in which they still contrived to look chic . At this the opposition gave up the unequal struggle and victory went to the conquered.

  It was a woman’s war they started fighting now, these daughters of France. They were quick to sense that peculiar quality of loneliness which afflicts all soldiers away from home. They managed to make the Germans feel lonelier than any other army has ever felt before. Also they had the capacity to taunt like navvies, to be even more arrogant than the Nazis themselves and – if the need arose – to kill quite ruthlessly.

  Theirs was an attitude of magnificent defiance and convinced superiority. They were frivolous, cunning, hostile, courageous and utterly lacking in any discretion. They were acutely conscious of recent German defeats in Africa and at Stalingrad and took no pains at all to disguise their pleasure in those de
feats, and, in four years of living with them, many of their characteristics seemed to have rubbed off on to Nancy Fiocca.

  Hitherto all the Gestapo attempts to capture The White Mouse had been directed from Paris alone. Now both the Paris Gestapo and the Marseille Gestapo were operating in Marseille and looking for her. Fortunately, however, as so often happened in Nazi organisations, there was inter-departmental jealousy. The Paris and Marseille Gestapos did not cooperate. Each wished to bring off her capture alone. So far, then, neither had succeeded, but recently, sensing that all was not entirely well, Nancy had been lying low.

  For three days, for example, she had heard strange clickings whenever she spoke on her telephone and often the phone had rung, only to go dead when she answered it.

  It was all very mysterious – and ominous. So finally she forced herself to sit down and take stock of her position. The Vichy commissaire who lived opposite her flat; the camp commander she had crossed at the time of the bribing of Garrow’s guard; the authorities at Fort St Nicolas who had read her letters to Garrow and checked all her visits; the Gestapo roadblock planned to catch ‘a woman’ outside Briançon; the Gestapo officer with whom she had travelled by train – who had carried her suitcase full of pig, and whom she had failed to meet as she had promised.

  Yes, it all added up. Particularly now, with this business of the telephone. She was under suspicion. Briskly she stood up. She’d call Henri. But no, she couldn’t call Henri; the phone was tapped. Visit him at his office, then? No, it would be better if she did nothing unusual, just kept to her normal daily routine. That being the case, it was time for her to call in at the bistro opposite her flat.