Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  All went well with the escape and the ten men duly arrived at Françoise’s flat. For three days, whilst Toulouse seethed with search parties, the men lay low in the flat. Nancy spent the time washing their clothes, which were prison soiled and had been badly muddied in the break-out as well, so that their next move could at least be attempted in respectable dress. Also she had to persuade Gaston to surrender the huge jail key which he insisted on keeping as a souvenir.

  Reluctantly he handed it over and Nancy then flung it into the river. Gaston, wanted for the fact that he had been caught assisting at an Allied dropping of parachutes, was too ‘hot’ to be allowed to wander around their flat with a jail key on his person.

  Thus, washing clothes all day, playing cards all night, Nancy, Françoise and the ten escapers passed their time.

  The guard slipped away first, then Gaston departed and hid up locally. The remainder accepted orders to split into two parties and head for Spain independently. The second group left with Nancy and O’Leary as their leaders.

  Apart from O’Leary, Nancy’s party consisted of a French Resistance radio operator called Phillip, a New Zealand airman and an ex-policeman known as Guy. A little anxiously they took the train to Perpignan on the frontier.

  Nancy was dressed as smartly as ever, determined to attract no unwelcome attention by looking hunted. She wore silk stockings, Cuban-heeled shoes, a smart navy-blue dress, a camel-hair coat and no hat. Her nails were well-tended and polished. Over her shoulder she carried her large handbag: in it some walking shoes and also a small leather purse containing all her jewellery.

  These jewels were themselves worth a small fortune. Her engagement ring boasted a large diamond, pure and almost blue. There were brooches, Henri’s Christmas gift gold bracelet, a platinum watch, eternity rings, a wedding ring and four other rings. These and the money in her bra were all she had with her of her once opulent life in Marseille.

  The train sped along smoothly. All seemed to be going well and gradually they relaxed. Perhaps the recent plague of arrests had now ended and there was no need to worry. Nancy slipped her bag off her shoulder and took out a cigarette. O’Leary lit it for her. At that moment the door of their compartment slid open and a railway official rushed inside.

  ‘The Germans are going to check the train,’ he warned urgently and then slipped out again. Throughout the War the employees of the French railways were constantly helpful with warnings such as this and Nancy and O’Leary knew better than to disregard one now.

  Already the train had begun to slow down. And yet it was not scheduled to stop anywhere at all near here.

  ‘Quick,’ said O’Leary, ‘jump for it.’

  Nancy did not hesitate for a second. She crawled through the window, flung herself away from the carriage and crashed on to the metalled track. Picking herself up, she rushed stumbling towards the vineyard that flanked the railway track. Machine-gun fire slashed through the vines around and above her. Nevertheless, she straightened up and ran faster, all the time collecting her wits and working out just where she should head to reach the mountain that had been fixed as their emergency rendezvous in the event of just such a disaster as this.

  Although the German fire continued to be heavy, Nancy never faltered. She had her directions now and she ran on steadily, panting but determined, through a mile of vineyard until she began the muscle-tearing ascent of the mountain itself. It did not cause her the least surprise to find that she had reached the emergency rendezvous first. Collapsing on to the ground she recovered her breath and waited for her companions.

  Guy was the first to arrive.

  ‘Where are the others?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘How did you get here so quickly?’

  ‘I ran,’ she told him, ‘like a deer!’

  ‘I’ll go and look for the others,’ he said. He left and never returned. He was captured, sent to a concentration camp and died of typhus. Shortly after he had left her, the others arrived. It was only then that Nancy realised that as she had jumped out of the train she had somehow lost her handbag and her jewels.

  O’Leary then shepherded his small party into a deserted barn, where a sentry was posted, whilst the others, on a freezing February night, with only their coats to cover them, endeavoured to sleep. They huddled close together for warmth and when one turned over the whole lot turned. They stayed there for two days, very uncomfortably, until the neighbouring countryside quietened down; and then they set off to walk to Canet-Plage.

  Nancy had no walking shoes and no papers – both had been in her large handbag – and they spent five days, travelling only at night, getting to Canet-Plage. During that time they slipped past numerous control posts and slept the day in sheep pens. They all developed scabies. When they reached Canet-Plage they were filthy and consequently felt horribly conspicuous, so they cleaned up in a known safe hotel before they boarded the train for Toulouse. Thus they reached Françoise Dissard’s flat once more and there held a conference.

  ‘There have been too many arrests,’ Nancy declared. ‘The Germans know too much. You know what I think? I think we’ve got a German counter-agent working in our circuit.’

  This was the most dreaded of situations for any Resistance organisation, and yet it seemed the only possible explanation of all their recent disasters – of Nancy’s six thwarted attempts to reach the frontier, for instance.

  O’Leary nodded in agreement. ‘We’ll have to lie low and get you out as quickly as possible,’ he ordered.

  ‘Then I’d better get my clothes clean again straight away,’ she remarked practically.

  So Françoise took Nancy’s clothes to an express dry cleaner and her shoes to a cobbler. Until they came back she would have to wander round the flat clad only in her underclothes and her camel-hair coat.

  On 2 March O’Leary went down to the café he used as a meeting place for his contacts. There he was to meet one of his most recently acquired agents, a man known as Roger. Roger had repeatedly asked the privilege of meeting the ‘Boss’ and at last his request was to be granted.

  O’Leary had not been in the café thirty seconds before the Gestapo arrived and arrested him. His trusted agent Roger was, in fact, Gestapo agent Number 47 and had worked with the organisation as a spy. At last the secret of their constant betrayals was out.

  When word reached them that O’Leary had been arrested and that Roger had vanished, Nancy and Françoise were quick to realise who had been responsible for the disaster. They thanked God that Roger had never met them or come to know their identity. But they must move quickly. They decided that the only course of action open to them was to disperse, to break up the organisation and take cover.

  Since Nancy still had no clothes, she took refuge in the nearby house of a man who, before the War, had been a pilot with Air France. When she had been taken to the house she had felt apprehensive. After all, she didn’t know the ex-pilot or his mother and they had never heard of her.

  But when it was explained to them that Nancy was both British and in trouble with the Germans, the mother had at once said, ‘Come in,’ and offered shelter for the night. Françoise and the rest of the organisation then set off by train from Toulouse. Half an hour later one of Françoise’s men, Bernard, remembered that the Gestapo, through O’Leary’s arrest, might search his own home and find a diary list of his old Air Force comrades. Nancy’s temporary refuge was on that list. Bernard immediately turned back and made his way to the endangered house.

  Nancy borrowed a dress and left at once, and she and Bernard boldly boarded a train heading towards Marseille where Nancy proposed to warn the other members of the O’Leary organisation about the defection of Roger.

  In Marseille she found that all her contacts and agents had already got wind of the disaster and were reported to be at her second flat. Quickly, head thrust forward, she walked towards it, passing her own home on the way.

  With her heart in her mouth and tears in her eyes, she compel
led herself to continue straight past the block where she knew Henri would be at that moment. She longed to go inside and see him but she could not be sure that the block was not under observation or that she herself was not being skilfully trailed. To visit him would only endanger his life unjustifiably.

  Feeling very depressed she carried on to the headquarters flat. She found it full of escaping airmen, warned them of the break-up of the circuit and then – still without papers – took another train to Nice. She took two of the airmen with her.

  As the train drew out of Marseille she thanked God for Henri’s wad of notes that she had stuffed inside her bra weeks ago when she had first left Marseille. Without her papers this money was now doubly valuable. The train gathered speed. She became suddenly and deeply convinced that this time she really was saying goodbye to the city that had been her life and her love for almost five years and, smitten with unaccustomed loneliness, she began to weep.

  Remembering Bernard, and the other two escapers who were also on the train with her, and now largely dependent on her leadership, she finally pulled herself together. Life and the War might have grown sad, but she and her men were heading for Nice, and, if they arrived, there they would carry on living and continue waging war. In future, though, for her it would always be the habit of war that would be dominant because, having fled from her husband and her home, she no longer had a real life of her own.

  * * *

  3 Approximately £2 million in 2020.

  8 ESCAPE TO SPAIN

  It was to the home of Mme Sainson that Nancy and her friends, once they had reached Nice, now walked. ‘Sainson’ being French for ‘Samson’, Madame’s Resistance nom-de-guerre was inevitably ‘Delilah’.

  There can have been no more reckless enemy of Hitler’s Reich in the whole of France than Mme Sainson. Both she and her husband were active members of the Resistance, her flat was always full of escaping airmen and the whole population of Nice knew that if ever they saw anyone who looked foreign or lost, the place to send them was to her apartment in Rue Baralis.

  She had a daughter aged twelve and a son aged fourteen, both of whom had frequently carried messages and helped her outwit the Germans. Once, when the flat was surrounded and being searched, and in it was a radio transmitter that would have meant death to them all had it been discovered, it was her young daughter who carried it out of the house. Deceptively childlike and innocent, she walked straight past the sentries at the front door with the transmitter concealed in a pail of rubbish.

  On another occasion Mme Sainson had sheltered thirty evaders at once in her flat. It was an uncomfortable and dangerous time; but all thirty were eventually sent safely on their way towards freedom.

  In 1942 alone, sixty-three men passed through her hands. From the end of 1942 onwards it was Nancy who always took delivery of her ‘guests’ and each woman had conceived an undying admiration for the other.

  Mme Sainson’s brother, Raoul, had escaped to London in 1942 and her husband was to be arrested in 1943 and later executed. Yet right through until the end of the War she carried on – with a maximum of gossip and ostentation – her escape-route work.

  She was a humorous, volatile woman with heavy black eyebrows, calculating brown eyes and strong white teeth. Running her husband’s garage in her spare time, her greatest pleasure in life was to give the fuel the Germans left with her (for the exclusive use of their own vehicles parked there) to the fishermen of Nice. She would replace the missing quantity with water! She worked in close association with the district priest and her lack of any sense of security was the despair of her chief, Arnoul.

  Her worst weakness was a passion for being photographed with groups of Allied escapers. She would take them down to the beach for a breath of fresh air and then she would ask the nearest Italian soldier to photograph them. Once she even suggested that three of the enemy soldiers should join her group. The result is a handsome portrait of a mischievously smiling Mme Sainson with three slightly disconcerted-looking Americans, who spoke neither French nor Italian, for whom three flattered Axis soldiers are making a willing background.

  When Arnoul heard of this episode he was extremely displeased, but the expression of his displeasure made no impression at all on his exuberant subordinate. Unrepentantly she showed him the photograph and remarked that she thought it a very good likeness, except for the Italians, who were imbeciles and of no importance.

  This, then, was the atmosphere towards which Nancy and her four friends walked from the station at Nice. They entered the apartment doorway, climbed up the stairs and Nancy looked at the doormat. It lay squarely against the door. This was one of Mme Sainson’s only three gestures towards security. If there was any danger, she kicked the mat crooked, then she chained the door firmly (which was her second precaution) and laid a hand grenade ready inside the door (which was the third). Anyone mad enough to knock when the mat was crooked merely invited Mme Sainson to open her door the few inches allowed by the chain and to deposit an exploding bomb at their feet.

  ‘We’re safe.’ Nancy sighed with relief and knocked. Mme Sainson opened her front door and peered out suspiciously. ‘Nancy!’ she exclaimed with delight. ‘How are you? Come in.’ Without asking for any explanations she ushered in the troupe of strangers behind her friend as well.

  ‘A brandy?’ she offered. They all accepted. ‘I’m sorry, Nancy, that we have no pastis!’ The two women laughed uproariously at this and the men looked puzzled. Mme Sainson hastened to explain.

  ‘Nancy is very fond of pastis,’ she said, ‘but of course it is forbidden. Once she had a small flask of it and the police caught her with it. They ask her, this is pastis, no? And Nancy says, “Certainly not, it is only perfume and anyway I never drink,” and puts it in her handbag and they believe her and let her go! Ah,’ she concluded, ‘ elle est formidable, cette Australienne! La plus formidable de la Résistance! ’

  Between the two women there was a strong bond of affection and confidence. This was not surprising. They were very alike. Arnoul regarded them as his two best agents and respected their talent for imagination and initiative in the work they did.

  Fortunately for him his respect was amply returned – although that was not surprising either. At the age of sixteen Arnoul had won a British Military Medal in the last year of the First World War. In 1940, to quote him, he ‘had been obliged to go very quickly from Paris where the Germans did not like him’. Friends in Nice gave him a job running a macaroni factory and, under cover of that, he continued his Resistance work.

  In 1941 Claud Bourdet, then leader of the Resistance in that area, became a national Resistance officer and appointed Arnoul (whose real name was Major Comboult) as his successor.

  Thereafter this slim man, who looked ten years younger than his real age, ran the organisation in Nice. Occasionally Mme Sainson would have him wringing his hands in despair at her recklessness but more often he blessed the fates that had given him so courageous a lieutenant. Whenever, in her profligate fashion, she took in excessive numbers of ‘boarders’, so that she was unable to buy sufficient food for them all on the black market, he himself would make up the deficiency with huge donations of macaroni. To over a hundred evaders, as a result, he was to become known disrespectfully as ‘The Macaroni Man’ or Monsieur Macaroni. Americans and Britons particularly found the diet he provided hideously monotonous. But they were grateful to him that they ate at all – and to Mme Sainson that they had a roof over their heads and a hostess who apparently loved entertaining them.

  Let it not be thought, with all this gossip and lack of security, that the Gestapo never heard mention of Mme Sainson. They did, frequently. In fact all the time. And quite often they took her away for questioning. But Mme Sainson had a great facility for tears, and as soon as they picked her up, and right throughout her interrogation, she would sob moistly and noisily. Invariably they decided that she was a cowardly blabbermouth, worthy only of contempt, who boasted of non-existent Resistance work to b
oost her own prestige – and so they would release her. Immediately she would stop her weeping and return grimly to work.

  Nancy stayed with Mme Sainson for three weeks. During that time she bought new clothes, acquired a set of false identification papers and endeavoured to find out exactly what the position was about the circuit.

  Soon she discovered that guides were again escorting escapers across the Pyrenees. Bernard, therefore, made some exploratory trips and eventually declared that the time was ripe for Nancy’s seventh attempt at getting out of France.

  He declared that he wanted to go to England with her and she suggested that the New Zealander and two American airmen should accompany them. She herself escorted the non-French-speaking Allied airmen to a big store to be photographed so that false papers could be made for the three of them.

  In her spare time she cooked or gossiped with Mme Sainson, or went to the cinema with the Sainson children, whom she adored, so the days passed quickly and happily and eventually she was almost sad to have to leave. She and her party took the train from Nice to Perpignan.

  At Perpignan they picked up two French girls who also had a pressing need to leave the country. The next difficulty that confronted them was to locate guides. Because of the breakdown of the circuit, they had no passwords and no contacts. Nancy, however, knew the address of one of the guides so she volunteered to try to persuade him to take her party into Spain – a dangerous business because, without a password, it was quite possible that the gentleman concerned would regard her as a spy for the Gestapo and shoot her out of hand.

  Eventually she contacted the guide and, without any preamble, said, ‘Look – I haven’t got a password. You don’t know me, but I know you. You’ve worked for O’Leary and I’ve worked for O’Leary too. Now don’t give me any nonsense – I want to go to Spain.’