Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  Fortunately, Denis did not repeat the mistake of his first transmission. Every day of every month had a special time at which he would be expected to ‘come through’ in London. Two minutes to six one day, thirteen minutes past seven the next . . . and so on. But always different times so that the Germans with their detector vans could not easily pin down a transmitter. From now on Denis, a superbly trained agent, was scrupulously careful always to check his dates and the scheduled times for transmission on each date.

  Soon supplies were pouring down upon Fournier’s men. On six successive nights Nancy supervised parachutages which delivered everything the group required. Word of this military bounty spread throughout the district and hundreds of recruits flowed in to join them. Nancy’s work was on its way.

  Waiting for messages was one of her worst duties. Whenever a parachutage was due, the BBC would issue the special code phrase that she had previously sent to London as one suitable for the occasion. Without any preamble it would come over the air, after each of the news sessions. She would hear simply . . . ‘The cow jumped over the moon.’

  ‘The cow jumped over the moon’ would be the phrase she had asked London to transmit when they planned to dispatch to her whatever she had asked them for in that particular message to them. Also in her message to them she would have given the name of the field (a fruit).

  Perhaps she would transmit the message thus: ‘Hélène to London. Want boots, Sten guns, money for 500 men at Strawberry. The cow jumped over the moon.’

  When she heard the bare BBC message ‘the cow jumped over the moon’, she would know that that night, on Strawberry field, the RAF would drop boots, Sten guns and money for 500 men.

  But there were five news sessions a day, and if on any one of the five the message suddenly stopped coming through, then the parachutage would be off, so all the news broadcasts had to be listened to. And if London wanted her urgently, then they simply broadcast: ‘Personal to Hélène . . .’ and then whatever it was they had to say.

  It was a good system – but it chained Nancy and Denis to their receiving set for months on end – particularly at this moment when so many hundreds of recruits to the Resistance movement were flooding in to her at Chaudes-Aigues.

  This influx of recruits was increased by two tragic incidents.

  Nancy had set up her headquarters at Chaudes-Aigues and she was sitting in the sun one morning, close to the roadway, when a car drove quickly past. Indifferently she saw that there were two strange men sitting in the front seat. She would not have remained indifferent had she known that the man who sat in the seat nearest her was Gestapo agent Number 47, alias Roger, the spy who had brought about the arrest of O’Leary a year earlier in Toulouse.

  Roger was being driven by another Gestapo agent and their mission was to locate and then either capture or assassinate Gaspard.

  They drove twenty miles past Nancy to a point where they were halted by Patrice, the French agent, who was guarding the road with another Resistance worker. Roger gave Patrice the correct password and then asked to be taken to Gaspard.

  Patrice and his colleague got into the back of the car and guided Roger along the road that led to Gaspard’s headquarters. They had almost arrived when suddenly Patrice noticed the ring that hung from the ignition key. It was engraved with German lettering! This could mean only one of two things – either that the two men in the front seat were Resistance workers who had captured a German car, or that they were, in fact, Germans.

  Patrice bent his head towards his companion and began to whisper. Roger, watching them intently in the rear-view mirror, observed their growing suspicion. Just as Patrice reached for his revolver, Roger turned round, shot the second Resistance man through the head and then fired at Patrice. At exactly the same moment Patrice shot first the driver and then, three times, Roger.

  The car skidded to a crashing halt and was immediately surrounded by Gaspard’s men who had heard the firing. Both Patrice and his friend were dead. The German driver was slightly hurt. Roger, in spite of a bulletproof vest, had three hideous wounds in his stomach.

  The Germans were taken to Gaspard’s headquarters and tortured by Judex for information. Word was sent to Nancy, telling her that two Gestapo agents were being interrogated at Mont Mouchet; perhaps she would care to come and ask some questions.

  Nancy hastened to Mont Mouchet by car. As she walked into the château she smelt burning flesh and stopped dead.

  ‘What are they doing to them?’ she demanded.

  ‘Getting information.’

  ‘I don’t want to see it,’ she said. ‘Why don’t they just execute them?’

  ‘We had to find out who they were. They had our password.’

  ‘Do you mean you have already found out who they are?’

  ‘Certainly. The leader is a man called Roger. His Gestapo number is 47.’ The filthy smell of charred flesh filled the corridor again. ‘For God’s sake, shoot the poor devil,’ Nancy urged. There was no answer. ‘I’m going,’ she said. ‘Tell Gaspard I’ve no questions.’

  Jerkily she walked away into the woods and was sick. The wheel had turned full cycle. Roger had trapped O’Leary, who by now had probably been tortured to death. Roger had been the link in the chain that had caused Nancy’s flight to England. Now she was back in France and Roger was himself trapped and being tortured.

  A shot rang out from the far side of the château. ‘Thank God,’ she whispered. Roger, a brave man on the wrong side, was dead. Telling no one that she knew who Roger was (in fact she never admitted to anyone that she had been in France previously) she slumped into her car and was driven back to Chaudes-Aigues.

  When Roger failed either to return, or to send back a message to his own Gestapo headquarters, the Germans launched a massive attack against the whole of Gaspard’s over-concentrated and under-armed three thousand men at Mont Mouchet. The attack was skilful and the defence, of necessity, was inadequate. Gaspard’s men had not even been instructed as to an emergency escape route or reassembly point in the event of their being overwhelmingly assailed.

  And the assault was overwhelming. At last Gaspard had to pay the price of the pride that had made him so ostentatiously mass all his men in the one place, for his arrogant treatment of the agents from London, which had left him unarmed, for his political ambitions which had unbalanced even his simple knowledge of military strategy. For all his faults, however, Gaspard was an exceptionally brave man. He led and fought in the battle that befell him like a tiger.

  His group inflicted severe casualties on the attacking Germans and then – having lost about a hundred and fifty men – were given the order to scatter. That was when Gaspard’s lack of attention to military details cost him so much.

  With no definite route in mind, with no recognised point of reassembly, the three thousand Maquisards straggled aimlessly through the fields, losing most of their treasured equipment on the way and scattering over a huge area. The more intelligent and forceful of Gaspard’s men decided on their own escape route and rendezvous. They simply chose the shortest way to Chaudes-Aigues, their rendezvous being Fournier’s group which had been fully armed, as everyone knew, by Mme Andrée.

  Every day more and more of these men filtered through. His overtures rejected by Victor, Gaspard eventually headed towards Nancy.

  Finally they all arrived, those who had survived, and thus Nancy found herself the only source of communication between no less than seven thousand Resistance fighters (all congregated in the one area just north of Freydefont) and London. At her first conference with the leaders of these men she announced that the Maquis’ security had been terrible, that the lack of emergency planning at Mont Mouchet had been unpardonable and that henceforth she would be, for all of them, chef du parachutage and that, as such, she would arm them only if they conformed to her concepts of military preparedness. Mutely her announcement was accepted.

  This, plus Gaspard’s humbling, plus the control she exercised over supplies of money and
arms, plus the fact that she and the incapacitated Hubert alone knew all the plans for all the groups on D-Day, now established Nancy securely, if not legally, in the Maquis d’Auvergne as a leader. In little more than a month she had grown from a seemingly useless female agent, with a handbag full of coveted money, into probably the most powerful individual among seven thousand fighting men.

  But she was not convinced that Gaspard would keep his word. Therefore, in despair at his stubbornness in flunking more politically than strategically, Nancy decided next to visit a certain Colonel Thomas in Clermont-Ferrand.

  Thomas was a soldier of the French Colonial Army who had organised a group of regulars to be ready for combat when D-Day should arrive. He had refused to lead his men out into the fields until then – and, since his men were already trained and organised, there was indeed little point in his doing so. He was also a strong critic of Gaspard’s policy of forming large groups in the one area simply for the effect they had on the morale of the civilians in that area, but regardless of the military risks involved. Nancy hoped that she would be able to persuade him to come to Chaudes-Aigues to argue with Gaspard.

  The road to Clermont-Ferrand was too dangerous by car, so she had to go by train. Wearing her usual navy-blue outfit and camel-hair coat, she boarded a train at Montluçon.

  She was expecting a BBC message at the time. She had her small receiving set in one coat pocket, her battery in the other. The various leads ran under her coat. The leads to the tiny earphones, which plugged right into the ear like a hearing aid, ran up her back and under her hair. Her hair covered the earphones.

  So, sitting in a carriage full of German officers, she listened to the BBC.

  Her expected message did not come through and, when she met him, Thomas would not agree to parley with Gaspard. Tired and a little bad-tempered she returned to Montluçon and was then driven home to Chaudes-Aigues. It was all in the day’s work.

  Fortunately, even if Thomas would not talk to Gaspard, she now had the power to control him a little by virtue of her contact with London. And, having acquired the power, she at once set about exercising it. Fournier, still delighted with the treatment she had afforded him, supported her completely.

  Whilst her headquarters remained in the valley at Chaudes-Aigues, the mass of the Maquis were distributed nearby in groups, each under its own leader, on top of a large plateau which overlooked the valley and the one road that led into it. The plateau commanded all the other mountains and valleys that surrounded it and the Maquis controlled every path, track and road that led up to it. They were ensconced in the strongest position in the district and they knew it.

  Nancy took possession of the best petrol-driven car she could find and had herself driven to every leader and sub-leader of each of the groups on the plateau. As soon as she arrived at each small headquarters (usually in one of the tiny plateau villages) she got down to business. Her three years’ previous experience of Resistance work gave her a secret and unconfessed knowledge of the difficulties encountered and the finances required by a Maquis group. When they tried to bluff her about their expenses, she simply blinded them with a science they had been sure she could not possess.

  Accurately she assessed their qualities and then their needs. Mercilessly she budgeted for them. Here, twenty francs a man a day; there, forty; somewhere else, thirty-five. Shrewdly she judged their fighting calibre from the condition of their camp. Having judged, she would then say that she hoped to get them so many of this type of weapon and so much of that kind of explosive and francs to the sum of such and such.

  When all her estimates were made, she would allow herself to be entertained. Successively in tents, kitchens, inns, the open air, she consumed huge meals and a stream of brandy – which was where the French had hoped finally to unseat her! But, unfortunately for them, Nancy had been born with a brain as susceptible to alcohol as a block of concrete. She was not a habitual drinker, she had not ‘trained’ to achieve her endurance and she didn’t ever care whether she had a drink or not. But if she did, no amount of alcohol could knock her out. To the Maquis, drinking was what duelling used to be to German students – a point of honour! Outwitted on all other scores, in their conferences with her they relied on this last weapon to preserve their male superiority. Placidly she sat down with them to join battle and implacably she drank them all under the table. And it was as vital to her authority that she did this to the Maquis as it was that she improved their security.

  As she drove off from each camp in the morning Nancy would smile freshly at her jaded group leaders and say, ‘Well, we have agreed on what you need. Now I must see what my chief in London says.’ This gave her time to reconsider her estimates, to change them if necessary and – if she did so – to blame her ‘chief’ across the Channel for the reduced assessment.

  Another duty was to select suitable fields for parachutages and to completely reorganise the methods of reception. Vivid memories of her own comically publicised descent into France spurred her on. The comedy could too easily have been tragedy, and supplies from England were too precious to squander on the Germans through gossip about where and when they were due and fiery blazes of light while they fell.

  Accordingly, she vetted every single field in the district and gave each field the name of a fruit. She then cabled to London the Michelin map reference and the fruit-title of each field. In France she kept the names secret to herself and Denis alone. The Frenchmen might then ask for a parachutage. She might agree and she would even accept from a message that the BBC could transmit to warn them that that night the planes would arrive. But, having accepted it, she invariably (without telling them) changed it to something else. The Maquis would never hear their message because it was never sent. But she would hear her substituted message – and then she would organise a reception party. Thus only Nancy and her wireless operator knew what night would be the night of the parachutage. Nancy herself always organised the reception committees and usually she attended them personally. With fifteen containers falling from each plane, and sometimes fifteen planes a visit, she was kept busy night after night, in one part of the country after another, but she thrived on it.

  Money began to arrive from London. Whenever it did, she had to be there to receive it. She would take the entire sum with her in a car and pay it out each fortnight to individuals whom she had herself appointed as paymasters. She insisted on a receipt (which she usually destroyed) but the Frenchmen were impressed by the practice and were not to know that she only did it to make the ceremony seem more official. She paid out as much as 15,000,000 francs a month (the equivalent then of about £85,000 4 ) and her group were always, to a man, certain of their ration allowances and even, where required, of family pensions which Nancy infallibly delivered in person to the households concerned.

  When all the men were at last armed and on a subsistence allowance, she turned her attention to two other aspects of their life. The first, provisions; the second, emergency action. Food, clothing, cars and fuel had often, in the past, been stolen quite unscrupulously from anyone merely unfortunate enough to be at hand. In consequence, the Maquis were getting a bad name among decent French farmers. Emphatically Nancy laid down a new rule. A fair price was to be offered for everything they required. If that price was accepted, it must be paid. If it was not accepted, the object of the transaction could at once be taken for nothing! Collaborationists could be robbed whenever it seemed desirable; the Germans must be robbed whenever possible. The ruling about emergency actions was that every group whenever they took up any position, must, before they did anything else, plan an escape line from that position and a fresh rendezvous for all those who should escape. Remembering Gaspard’s sad fate, the Maquis accepted her ruling willingly and set about devising escape routes from the plateau where they were then encamped.

  So much did Nancy teach the Maquis, but the Maquis also taught her.

  She had been trained by SOE to travel everywhere in France either on foot or by
bicycle or train. The Maquis, however, never considered using anything but cars and – in that district – they were right. For one thing, the work of organising the four groups could never have been completed in so huge a zone without a car; for another, London’s orders usually arrived so late that only drastic measures and speed could put them into effect in the required time.

  The Maquis also taught her that though German garrisons were scattered, Frenchmen were not; though Germans were hostile, Frenchmen were usually not; though the Germans were strangers to the countryside, Frenchmen were not.

  These points were by no means as obvious as they seem. What they meant, in fact, was that, in this district at least, provided one kept off the main roads and out of big towns, the Maquis were in control. To have appreciated this point, as Nancy quickly did, was to gain a degree of confidence in her increasing travels that enormously enhanced the speed and efficiency of her work.

  April 1944 was coming to a close when Nancy embarked on a second grand tour of her group leaders. She drove by secondary roads in a car that bristled with Sten and Bren guns but still, occasionally, she bumped into German opposition and had to shoot her way out of it. And this worried her – not because of the shooting but because such German activity was ominous.

  ‘Gaspard’s mob are still too much of a lump,’ she explained to Denis. ‘He’s attracting too much attention. He’ll have to disperse a bit.’

  ‘If it’s him that’s causing this sort of thing,’ Denis agreed, ‘he certainly will. All those guns going off, Ducks, I was terrified.’ Denis, of course, had blazed away as willingly and as effectively as anyone and what Nancy most loved about him was that, whilst being frankly alarmed by many situations, he invariably stood his ground and fought it out in all of them. She was very glad she had Denis with her.

  ‘Well, we’ll have a go at him when we get back,’ she promised.