Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  ‘Certainly,’ she agreed. ‘Someone’s thrown a bottle of ink or something.’

  He told her that he would speak a word and she must respond with another word which her mind associated with the one he uttered. The duel was short.

  ‘Roses’ . . . ‘Red.’

  ‘Sugar’ . . . ‘Sweet.’

  ‘Soda’ . . . ‘Whisky.’

  Quietly he put away his list of words, wrote in his dossier and then suggested that Nancy might play with some blocks. He was a large young man and now Nancy looked at him curiously.

  ‘You’re not English, are you?’ she asked.

  ‘No – New Zealander.’

  ‘Don’t you think you’d be more use fighting the Japanese in the Pacific than mucking about with all these ridiculous blots and blocks over here?’ she demanded severely. ‘Because if you don’t, I do.’

  Knowing the value of the job he did, he just smiled amiably and replied, ‘Perhaps! Well, that’ll be all for now, thank you,’ and so dismissed her. Cussed interviewees told him just as much, by the quality of their cussedness, as did the compliant or over-anxious by their desire to please. He was perfectly satisfied that Ensign Nancy Wake would make good training material – and he said so in his report.

  From the ‘Mad House’ Nancy and three other young women were to proceed to a second training centre in Scotland. They waited in Welbeck House to be taken to the station by their conducting officers – a man for the male candidates, a woman for the females. Nancy entered the lounge just as Denis and one of the women were in the midst of a violent personal argument. She sat down and pretended not to hear. Almost immediately Rake stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  His antagonist then began a tirade of abuse about Denis. She didn’t like him; she didn’t think he knew his job; she didn’t think he would be any good in France and anyway he was impossible.

  Nancy, who knew that Rake had already done a wonderful job in France, and who had the highest regard for him both as a person and for the work he had done, said quietly, ‘You’re talking nonsense; anyway, leave me out of it, he’s a friend of mine.’

  ‘He was insufferable to me. You heard him. I’ve never been so insulted. I’m going to report him and you’ll be a witness to what he said. I’ll fix him, you see.’

  ‘For God’s sake, woman,’ Nancy hissed, her eyes blazing unpleasantly, ‘shut up! What you need, you know, is a couple of good stiff drinks and to forget the whole thing.’

  ‘You’ve had a few yourself, haven’t you?’ she suggested disagreeably. Nancy, who had had one double whisky an hour before at lunch, decided to be contrary.

  ‘A few,’ she replied.

  The woman promptly reported the affair to an officer in the organisation who was a friend of hers. She claimed that Rake had been rude to her and that Nancy had witnessed the incident but was drunk and would not admit having heard the disputed words. A message was sent to Nancy asking her to wait in another room. Unsuspectingly she did so. Then she was called into the officer’s room.

  He looked at her sharply and began to question her with considerable hostility about the Rake affair. Nancy returned the hostility with interest.

  ‘You been drinking?’ he demanded.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Well, we don’t like our girls to drink,’ he said. Nancy looked at him very coolly and then used an army word which seemed the only suitable means of expressing her feelings at that moment.

  ‘Ensign Wake,’ he stormed, white-faced with anger, ‘I am not accustomed to that kind of rudeness.’

  ‘Neither am I accustomed to your kind,’ she retorted. She was ordered to leave the building at once and to return to her flat. Very soon a telegram arrived from SOE saying: Send back your FANY uniform to HQ at once. She rang up SOE, told them that the uniform was in a box, neatly packed, and that she would gladly surrender it if it were called for. But to one person only: to the officer who had been rude to her! Her career as a saboteur, it seemed, was finished.

  She waited in her flat all of the next day for the pleasure of handing the uniform over to the man she now disliked more than anyone else in England. To her disappointment, he never arrived. She had dinner that night with a colonel who had once sheltered in her Marseille home before escaping from France and who now got her side of the story. Inquiries started. Garrow was questioned about her character and explained her extraordinary volatility, her passionate loyalty to anyone who had actually served in the field and her fierce courage when people questioned her convictions. She was asked to attend SOE’s office for an interview with Major Philipstone-Stowe the next day.

  The interview went smoothly, and Philipstone-Stowe concluded it by saying, ‘Are you still prepared to go to France?’

  ‘Provided I never see him again, yes,’ she replied. It was then agreed that she should go to another course in Scotland.

  SOE sent Nancy to Scotland unaccompanied by other trainees. Moreover, she was afforded a male conducting officer on the journey rather than the usual woman. There were to be no other women on the course. At the end of her journey she was consequently awaited by her instructors-to-be with the deepest distrust. Any woman whom SOE would send escorted by a man to a unit in which there were only men, her receiving officers decided, must be a veritable old dragon. They felt confident that she would be about sixty years old and certainly toothless. They were pleasantly surprised when she arrived.

  There followed a wonderful six weeks in Inverie Bay. PT at dawn was the only snag and Nancy soon found a way out of that. On the third morning, when she was called, she surveyed the chilly darkness and shouted through the door, ‘Not this morning. I don’t feel well.’

  The men were understanding. They knew that such indispositions were inevitable with women! Whilst they leapt and pranced and grunted and froze, Nancy lay snugly in bed, nothing at all the matter with her.

  When her indisposition had continued for many days beyond the expected time, a young doctor was sent to see her. He was very shy and very tactful. ‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked. ‘Anything you’d like to ask me about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she assured him truthfully.

  ‘Would you . . . Would you, er, like me to examine you at all?’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ she vowed. He left her and she continued not to do PT until eventually the hour was changed to 9 a.m. when it was light and reasonably warm. Then she miraculously recovered and joined her comrades in their violent exercising.

  She learnt about explosions and detonators and about dismantling and reassembling Bren guns and their three main causes of stoppages. She practised firing with a Sten gun and achieved the reputation of being a crack shot because her bullets never went high. She omitted to explain that she had weak wrists which meant that her barrel always tended to drop so that she couldn’t fire high, anyway.

  She trained in silent killing, raids on other students, night exercises, radio transmission by Morse and how to move across country. She was wonderfully happy throughout because the companionship was completely loyal and undemanding.

  She regarded silent killing and unarmed combat with some horror as dirty and violent. But when the thought occurred to her that it could easily be a choice between the silent killing of a Nazi or herself in a concentration camp, she studied hard at the dirt.

  There was an obstacle course. The best man in the school took only two minutes; Nancy took four and missed out three obstacles in the process.

  There was a cross-country race. Nancy completed only three legs of it and then found herself far behind the rest of the field. She remembered that in the mess there were to be crumpets for afternoon tea and she was very partial to crumpets. By the time she completed the course all the crumpets would have been devoured by her greedy colleagues – she knew it!

  Abandoning the cross-country course, she took a shortcut back home and entered the mess by the front door. By great good fortune this turned out to be the finishing post and the officers in charge thou
ght she had finished first. She accepted their compliments gracefully, went into the empty lounge and ate all the crumpets!

  In the grenade classes she did not shine. She loathed the rigid overarm throw and did everything she could to avoid practising. The drill was simple. The class sat in a trench and took it in turns to climb out, remove the pin from a grenade, hurl it forward and then leap quickly back into the trench whilst it exploded. Nancy’s turn eventually arrived.

  ‘What do I do?’ she stalled. The sergeant instructor glared at her and then answered with terrible sarcasm.

  ‘Pull the pin, throw the grenade into the trench and run,’ he advised. With a dead-pan face Nancy pretended to believe him. The class in the trench – including the sergeant instructor – were last seen fleeing for cover whilst Nancy laughed helplessly above them.

  A fisherman, who had spent forty years as a trawlerman in the worst northern seas, taught them how to handle a rowing boat and, from it, to pick up parachutes and containers that might have landed in lakes and reservoirs rather than on the ground. In his forty years of stormy trawling, the old fisherman had never had an accident. On his first trip with Nancy she capsized him and the boat and they had to swim to shore.

  Nancy regarded herself as most inefficient in matters of this kind but endured her failures cheerfully. When her colleagues roared with laughter at the mishaps that befell her she was undeterred.

  ‘Maybe I can’t do it,’ she would laugh herself, ‘but at least I’m good for morale. You people have never been so amused in all your lives.’

  ‘But, Führer,’ one asked, for that was what they had christened her, ‘what will you do in France? You can’t climb this wall. What will you do if you have to climb a wall like this in France?’

  ‘I have never seen a wall like this in France,’ she told them easily. ‘And if ever I do – even if the whole German army’s after me – I shan’t even try to climb it. I’ll let the Germans climb it if they want to. But I’ll just stay on my side of it and talk myself out of trouble. Come on – time to change for dinner.’

  They dined in full uniform. Nancy always arrived at the table first because experience had taught her that being just a fraction of a minute late allowed her companions to prepare practical jokes on her. In rapid succession her colleagues followed her to the table.

  ‘ Sieg heil! ’ they declaimed, saluting her with Hitler’s outstretched arm. Gravely she saluted them back. It was their ritual. Then they sat down to eat. The world, she felt, was a nice place. She had got used to the idea of Henri staying in France whilst she trained in England. She was accustomed now to the lack of news from him. Soon she would be near him, back in France. All in all, she had never been happier in her life.

  After a grand finale of a thirty-six-hour trek – in the course of which one Pole broke his leg – they all moved down to Manchester to learn how to jump in parachutes. They arrived on a Sunday just in time to watch a Frenchwoman from another school doing her preliminary jumps from a tower.

  ‘Führer,’ the men said, ‘don’t let us down. You must jump better than her or we’ll beat you!’

  Nancy jumped from the tower very reluctantly. As far as she could see it was just a splendidly alarming way of breaking her ankles, which would stop her jumping from a plane later in the week, which would stop her jumping into France eventually. But she jumped as she was told and her friends didn’t beat her.

  On the Tuesday they did their first jumps from a plane. They were very subdued as they flew high above the ground, sitting in two rows, facing inwards towards that ominous hatch. ‘Remember,’ the instructor said, ‘elbows close to your sides; legs together.’

  Wafting down through space, Nancy decided that parachute drops were not so bad after all. Then she heard shrieks from the ground below.

  ‘Remember what your mother told you,’ an officer roared, his head bent back, his hands cupped round his mouth. She leant downwards. ‘Bah,’ she bellowed in reply. ‘ Merde! ’ But she snapped her legs together as instructed and landed perfectly. So did everyone else. They were all very excited and laughed when Nancy begged that they be allowed to go up again at once and do another jump.

  On Wednesday morning they did do another jump, but from a balloon instead of a plane.

  Up in the balloon all was silent and insecure and Nancy grew steadily more unnerved. The instructor noticed her malaise and decided to take her mind off what had to be done.

  ‘Do all Australian girls have such lovely pearly teeth?’ he asked pleasantly.

  ‘Shut up,’ Nancy snapped back ungraciously. ‘Oh, this is awful. I’ll be killed, you know. I’ll never do it again.’ But she did. The weather continued to be too bad for flying and, if the boys on her course were to finish their jumps in time for weekend leave, the balance of descents would have to be made from the balloon. They implored her to jump from the balloon.

  ‘Think of it, Nancy,’ they begged. ‘Weekend leave in London.’

  ‘What’s it worth?’ she demanded. They consulted together and agreed that it would be worth a double whisky from each of them if she jumped.

  ‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘But I wouldn’t do it for any other men in the world.’

  She jumped for the last time at night in the worst of a long day’s bad weather. She caught no sight of the earth until suddenly it smacked her in the face and promptly she was knocked unconscious.

  As she came to she saw anxious eyes peering down at her and felt affectionate arms supporting her. She swore violently. ‘Ah,’ the men sighed in relief, ‘she’s all right.’ In great good spirits they all set off together for London.

  There they ate at the Celeste Restaurant, which was out of bounds to them because it was a leave rendezvous for the Free French, whose security was known to be terrible. They had a huge meal and then celebrated all over London. They ended up at the Astor doing parachute rolls across the dance floor and singing, ‘ Gory, Gory, Alleluyah – What a helluva way to die ’, much to the astonishment of the nightclub’s other clients and with a lack of security that would have done credit to the Free French themselves.

  Down Park Lane they whooped, up Piccadilly and at last to Nancy’s flat. Micheline was there with her child, so she and Nancy cooked a meal for the men and then shared the bedroom again whilst the others slept all over the sitting-room floor.

  Much of the group’s behaviour in London had been childish, much perhaps not very funny. But they had led a hard life, they took risks – they were going to take even greater risks – and their esprit de corps was as high as their joie de vivre. Their antics were a childish relaxation against the days when they must be purely adult. Their frivolity was a safety valve against the knowledge they all shared that Ravensbrück and Belsen could lie ahead of them just as surely as did France.

  Certainly Nancy saw nothing foolish or excessive in the behaviour of those with whom she had spent the past two months. On the contrary, she was touched by their unfailing gallantry and chivalry and she loved them for their magnificent gusto and vitality. Enthusiastically she played her part in their nonsense.

  Their next school was in the New Forest and dealt with security. Nancy hated it. She learnt to identify all types of German planes, German regiments and German badges of rank – and she found all of it boring in the extreme.

  She cheered up a little, however, at the exercise designed to simulate a Gestapo interrogation. She and her group were told to prepare a story and then all would be questioned on it, in Gestapo fashion, to try and bring out inconsistencies in their various versions.

  The group agreed that they had all gone to the local doctor’s home to play tennis. They had all gone there in uniform. They had had afternoon tea in the drawing room. And since they had done all this, they could not possibly also have blown up a bridge at 3 p.m.

  At the last minute they decided that they were not wearing uniform, they had gone in civilian clothes. Then, individually and quite harshly, they were questioned.

  Nanc
y’s turn came. She answered a series of questions with the confidence born of experience. And then, disaster.

  ‘What were you wearing?’

  ‘Uniform,’ she replied promptly – and, too late, remembered that the group had changed their minds and finally agreed on civilian clothing. Ferociously her blunder was noted down and then, even more aggressively, the questioning continued.

  ‘What did you do after the tennis?’

  ‘Had tea.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the drawing room.’

  ‘On what sort of table?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Was it a round table?’ Nancy cursed herself that she hadn’t thought to bring this point to the notice of her group.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Square then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well if it wasn’t square and it wasn’t round, what shape was this table?’

  ‘Between the two,’ she averred – and refused thereafter to be shaken from her story. She regarded her performance on this occasion as a shameful fiasco but she had learnt her lesson and was never to be tripped up again. Rather contritely she went on weekend leave.

  11 WITCH ON A PARACHUTE

  Her next course was the manufacture of explosives from the sort of ingredients that could be purchased quite innocently anywhere in France at either hardware shops or chemists.

  ‘The secret of these explosives,’ the instructor told them, ‘lies in being absolutely accurate with your weighing-out. The slightest fraction too much or too little of any one ingredient and there’ll be no bang!’ In a savage kind of way it was amusing to see the entire group sitting round on the floor, pudding bowls between their knees, weighing scales at their sides, carefully mixing their mortal brew.

  When they had finished their scrupulous preparations they would go out and test the result. It was a tedious business but the lessons were obviously valuable. Should supplies fail to arrive by parachute from London, these saboteurs would never be compelled to abandon altogether their attacks on railways, rolling stock, machinery or communications. A little ‘home cooking’ would keep them operational.