Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  The tour was successful. She found all the groups well-armed, their arms well cared for, their feet well shod, their stomachs well filled. They were dying to fight.

  She discussed with each leader the exact location of German underground telephone cables (all to be severed on D-Day) and possible small ambushes until then that would subject the groups to little risk but relieve them of boredom.

  The seven thousand men were now assuming personal characteristics. Tardivat, away in the forests of the Allier, was the adventurous one – an experienced army officer who led his men dozens of times in forays against German convoys. They would allow the whole convoy to pass them and then shoot up the last truck.

  Laurent, too, Nancy admired for his daring. She found him a wonderful driver who combined fearlessness with acute intelligence, and whenever she had a dangerous car journey to make, Laurent was the man with whom she liked to make it.

  Fournier continued to be her most loyal supporter so that she found it easier every day to forgive him his short temper. Besides – his wife nagged him and Nancy always felt sorry for a man with a nagging wife.

  Only Gaspard, although now quite friendly, remained passively uncooperative. Nancy had come to respect him as a man, but as a soldier in command of other soldiers he enraged her. Nevertheless, he was training his men hard, and in his group, as in them all, morale was superbly high. A formidable fighting force had thus been set up, high on the plateau above Chaudes-Aigues, at St Martial in the heart of Germany’s Western Forces.

  Then, on 5 June, she received a special message from London that ‘Anselm’ was being dropped that night and would have to be collected from Montluçon. Anselm, his code name, was being sent to her as a weapons instructor.

  Montluçon was Maurice Southgate’s area but Southgate had long since been arrested. From Nancy’s point of view the arrest was doubly unfortunate. First because of poor Maurice himself, secondly because he had been supposed to give her the address of and password for his contact in Montluçon, and that contact was the person from whom Anselm was now to be collected. This he never had time to do. Nancy knew only the contact’s name – Mme Renard – but had not the faintest idea of where she lived or what the password might be to which she would respond.

  Therefore, she must now go into Montluçon, which was stiff with Germans, and find a Mme Renard, who might live anywhere and, having found her, then persuade her to deliver up Anselm. It sounded a highly improbable project, but orders were orders and Anselm could not be left in Montluçon for long or the Germans would find him and then her own men would never be adequately trained in the use of their newly acquired weapons.

  Fournier gave her his best car and his best driver for the journey. Because of the risk of snap controls (both German and Maquis) the trip took all of that day rather than the two hours it merited, and at every farm and village Nancy had to get out and inquire about Germans.

  ‘Just down there,’ the villagers would point and warn. Or, ‘They have gone. But the Maquis will stop you. I will come with you and tell them that you are of the Maquis d’Auvergne.’ So it went on – until the outskirts of Montluçon.

  They hid the car in the bush and the driver hid himself where he could see the car and anyone who might examine it. If, at any time, it were to become an object of German suspicion he would slip away and warn Nancy.

  Nancy unstrapped a bicycle from the car’s roof and cycled into town. First she called on the pregnant wife of one of her men. She delivered messages and gave the woman some money.

  ‘Do you know any Madame Renard?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ the woman replied.

  ‘Then I’m on a wild goose chase,’ Nancy told her. ‘All I know is that she probably lives on the outskirts of the town and that she was once a cook in the house of an ambassador.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the woman said dully.

  ‘Heavens,’ thought Nancy, ‘you poor dear. I’ve never seen anyone as pregnant as you before.’

  ‘But, if you are willing to risk it,’ the woman suggested, ‘you could go and see a friend of mine who might know your Madame Renard.’

  ‘What’s the address?’ The woman gave it to her and Nancy pedalled off. The town was lousy with Germans, she noted. The new contact remembered Mme Renard only when Nancy explained that she had once been an ambassador’s cook. Then, yes, she knew the address.

  Again Nancy pedalled away and eventually found Mme Renard’s house. She knocked at the door and it was opened by a pleasant-looking woman with white hair. Nancy asked was she Mme Renard and the white-haired woman nodded in assent.

  ‘Madame Renard,’ Nancy declared at once, ‘my name is Andrée Joubert. You don’t know me but I do know you. I believe you have a “packet” for me.’

  Mme Renard simply stood very still and said nothing.

  ‘You don’t have to believe me,’ Nancy continued. ‘Frankly I wouldn’t if I were you. Perhaps if I were to tell you how I found you?’ She told the long story. Mme Renard still made no response. The two women, instinctively liking one another, nevertheless stood silent and divorced by suspicion. A faint sweet aroma of cooking floated to the door.

  ‘Ooh,’ Nancy murmured, sniffing blissfully. ‘Lovely! I know all about your cakes.’

  It was better than any password. Promptly Mme Renard stood to one side and said, ‘Please come in.’ She led the way into the kitchen and motioned to Nancy to stand still.

  ‘It’s all right, Anselm,’ she called. Swiftly she flung open a cupboard door.

  Anselm, white-faced and brandishing a .45 revolver, stood staring out at them. Then his face relaxed into a grin.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Nancy,’ he said in broad American tones.

  ‘René!’ she burst out. ‘René Dusacq. What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Like you said when I kissed you goodbye at Wimpole Street,’ he told her. ‘I was jealous! So I’ve come all this way to join you.’

  Mme Renard prepared strong coffee from René’s supplies and fed them with a delicious baba à rhum cooked by herself. René grinned hugely at the extravagant comforts of life in the Resistance.

  ‘Where to from here?’ he asked.

  ‘Chaudes-Aigues’ she told him. ‘Fournier’s headquarters.’

  ‘Far?’

  ‘Yes – but we’ve got a car!’

  ‘You’ve what?’

  ‘Got a car,’ she repeated tranquilly. ‘Don’t worry, René – it’s much the safest way. They do it all the time in this district.’

  They said goodbye to Mme Renard and Nancy led the shaken American back to where she had left her car. The driver appeared from his hiding place in the bushes as they drew level.

  ‘Anyone been snooping?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘No one,’ he assured her.

  ‘Good. Let’s go.’ With René sitting petrified in the back seat and Nancy, a Sten gun lying easily across her lap, in the front, they drove uneventfully back to Chaudes-Aigues. When they arrived there they were told that the Allies had just landed in Normandy and that the long-awaited D-Day had become a fact.

  * * *

  4 Approximately £2.5 million in 2020.

  14 PITCHED BATTLE

  Before they had left London Nancy and Hubert had been given a list of those demolitions to be effected by the Maquis d’Auvergne on D-Day – vital points to be attacked and destroyed the second the invasion started.

  These were the plans that, along with money, Nancy had carried in her handbag in the early days of her meeting with Gaspard – the plans and the money the Maquis had hoped to steal from her.

  The targets listed for destruction had been the underground cables which the Germans laid throughout the area and used – imagining them to be safe – instead of telephone lines; factories at Clermont-Ferrand and Montluçon; a synthetic petrol plant at St Hilaire and a railway junction at Moulins.

  As soon as he had become amenable to reason, Nancy had passed on this list of D-Day targets to Gaspard a
nd he, in turn, had delegated the various tasks to groups situated conveniently to those targets. In the ensuing weeks the Maquis had planned their various operations very carefully and they had even located all the underground cables which the Germans had imagined so secret and safe.

  And so, whilst Nancy sought and found Dusacq, the Allies landed. By the time she had returned to her headquarters the underground cables had been cut, the steelworks at Clermont-Ferrand had been rendered useless, the factory at Montluçon had been destroyed and the Moulins railway junction was a madhouse of torn and tangled lines and shattered rolling stock. Only the petrol plant remained intact – and that, the Maquis had asked, since they themselves were stealing all its petrol, to be permitted to spare.

  ‘Hell,’ protested Nancy, ‘we’ve missed all the fun.’

  René Dusacq was very welcome because he had arrived as a weapons instructor and strange new weapons were now flooding down to the Maquis every night. Although he was an expert on every sort of gun, Dusacq’s great passion in life was the bazooka. So fervently did he sing the praises of this deceptively harmless-looking stovepipe that the Maquis promptly dubbed him Bazooka. Thereafter he was never called anything else – although fate saw to it that no bazookas were ever dropped into the Auvergne in his time.

  For the next ten days Bazooka instructed Maquisards frenziedly in the use of all the weapons that were dropped to them out of the heavens, the Maquis attacked everything they could, and Nancy and Denis were kept busy organising replacements of weapons and ammunition expended in these engagements.

  The Germans did not accept these onslaughts lightly. On the contrary, they indulged in fearful reprisals against anyone who lived anywhere near the scene of any such attack.

  Time after time Nancy drove past farmhouses that the Germans had doused with petrol and then fired. Outside sprawled the bodies of the farmer and his wife and children. Charred, mutilated bodies which the Nazis forbade to be buried. Corpses swung hideously from the branches of trees. Hostages were taken out and mercilessly shot. The whole country was blazed by the track of anti-terrorist reprisals in which the frightened Germans now indulged.

  And no sector, on the whole, gave the Reich more cause for fury than Nancy’s – the Auvergne, the Fortress of France. Methodically, the SS laid its plans and prepared to obliterate the group whose stronghold was the plateau above Chaudes-Aigues. Troops were massed in towns all around the plateau; artillery, mortars, aircraft and mobile guns were made available; then, steadily, secretly, an enormously powerful army began to close in – through the valleys and over the mountains – from all sides.

  But of this Nancy and her mission were blissfully unaware. On 20 June 1944 they were advised that there would be a heavy parachutage that night and a massive daylight parachutage the following afternoon, both of them on the plateau. No less than a hundred and fifty Liberators were to take part in the daylight drop.

  Cursing the fact that they must attend two drops within twenty-four hours, Nancy and her men went out to receive the night parachutage, little knowing that a force, whose object it was utterly to destroy them, was already close at hand and ready to pounce. It was very late when they returned to Chaudes-Aigues and they were all tired, dirty and cold. Invasion or no invasion, Nancy had to have a bath and a few hours’ rest. For too many weeks on end now she had made do with two hours’ sleep a day – usually after lunch – and now there was need of absolute strength and alertness.

  Chaudes-Aigues boasts hot springs, so Nancy at once adjourned to the public bath centre and took a long, hot plunge. Then she retired to bed, clad elegantly as usual in her nightie. She had brought two handmade French nightdresses with her and from now on, until the end of the War, regardless of what the next day might seem to offer, she always went to bed in one of them. However masculine her garb might be whilst she walked or fought, she would sleep like a proper lady! Just before dawn she was rudely awakened by the sound of gunfire.

  Flinging herself out of bed she dressed in slacks and shirt, grabbed her money, carbine, revolvers and Sten gun and joined the rest of a now thoroughly roused headquarters. The sound of heavy rifle fire reached them from up the valley.

  Packing everything they could into their car, they rushed off to Fournier’s house. Then, at a hot pace, they drove up to the plateau and joined the main body of the Maquis.

  The seven thousand Maquis were being attacked, in a determined attempt to wipe them out, by a huge encircling force of twenty-two thousand SS troops. The Germans were being supported by artillery, mortars, spotter aircraft and dive bombers. Steadily they closed in from all sides and then began their crawling drive up towards the plateau itself. Confidently the Frenchmen awaited them.

  Nancy, Hubert, Gaspard, Laurent and Fournier held a hurried conference at the village of Freydefont on the edge of the plateau. Nancy listened to the steady stream of battle orders that were dispatched to all points around the perimeter – listened to them and memorised them. Only Gaspard’s orders displeased her. He and his men, he declared, would fight to the death.

  Nancy knew that it was not the task of any of them to fight to the death. To fight, yes, but only fight to fight another day. There was a long war ahead of them yet and if all Gaspard’s men died the group couldn’t possibly execute all the future tasks that would be assigned to them by London to hamper the Germans after D-Day in the battles that had been planned to secure the liberation of both France and Europe.

  ‘We’ll get out tonight under cover of darkness,’ each leader agreed, except Gaspard. Nothing Nancy could say would alter his decision. Furiously she went and found Denis.

  ‘Got through to London yet, Den?’

  ‘Yep, Gertie. They’ve given me a time to come back on the air. They’ll be ready for me an hour from now.’

  ‘Well, when you get through, tell them about this attack. Tell them we’re going to try and get away tonight. Cancel today’s parachutage and ask our people to order Gaspard to evacuate tonight. The idiot wants to stay here and fight it out.’

  Carefully Denis began coding the long message. So far it had been a hellish morning. First of all, the dawn flight from Chaudes-Aigues; then tapping furiously at his set for over an hour trying to attract London’s attention at a time when London, not expecting him, wouldn’t listen to his unscheduled transmission; now, less than fifty minutes in which to prepare all his messages and start transmitting again. Shells began to crash down into the village. Nancy looked across at him and smiled.

  ‘Gertie,’ he muttered absently, ‘I’m terrified.’ But he kept on coding. Nancy kissed him affectionately from behind his chair. ‘I’ll go and collect last night’s containers and see how the boys are doing,’ she said.

  First she drove alone to the scene of the previous night’s parachutage. They had not had time to unpack any of the containers then. Now, with a battle on, all these supplies would be needed.

  Single-handed she opened every container and loaded its contents on to a truck. For hours she worked, ignoring the occasional mortar bombs that exploded on the field, completely occupied with the physical effort of opening containers, lifting out their grease-packed arms, carrying them to her truck and loading them. But at last it was done.

  She then drove to all the fortified vantage points on the plateau and at each one she found the Maquis blazing away happily and effectively. Wherever they were needed, she distributed more weapons or ammunition. For all their vast superiority in numbers and arms, she noted, the Germans were being pinned down and suffering heavy casualties among the mountainside’s volcanic rocks. Bazooka, when she met him, was furious that she travelled alone, but she told him to stay where he was.

  ‘Keep an eye on their fire,’ she told him. ‘Make sure they aim low.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ he growled. ‘But tonight, when we pull out, I’m gonna make sure there’s someone to look after you.’

  ‘Bazooka,’ she mocked, though secretly touched by his chivalry, ‘I didn’t know you cared!’

/>   ‘Bah,’ he shouted after her. ‘Scram!’

  She continued her drive and noticed, a little absent-mindedly, that the shelling had become heavier. An observation plane circled maliciously round her car and directed artillery fire which pursued her into the village. The house trembled under a barrage of explosions as she entered it.

  ‘Did you get through?’ she asked Denis.

  He nodded.

  ‘Parachutage cancelled?’

  ‘It’s all done, Gertie. Don’t like this shelling much.’

  ‘Why don’t you get outside?’

  ‘Waiting for the message about Gaspard.’

  ‘Oh, yes. The idiot still says he won’t budge. Well, there’s nothing we can do till London comes through. I think I’ll have forty winks.’

  ‘In this lot, Ducks?’

  ‘I could sleep anywhere,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing else I can do. I might as well rest.’ Retiring to her bed, with shells pounding the whole village, she took off her revolvers and her boots, loosened the belt on her trousers and went to sleep.

  A frantic Fournier woke her up a little later.

  ‘Andrée,’ he shouted, ‘you must not lie here. Already the house has been hit.’

  ‘The Germans are still being held, aren’t they?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I can sleep.’

  Again he shook her. ‘You must not sleep here,’ he persisted. Complaining bitterly, she got up, put on her boots, did up her belt, collected her carbine, Sten gun and revolvers and walked outside. A shell exploded in the street and splinters of stone smacked against the wall behind her.

  ‘Much worse out here,’ she grumbled and dashed across the road. She found a convenient patch of cool shade under a tree and lay down. It was a fine hot day on the plateau.

  ‘I will be here if anyone wants me,’ she told her companion. Then she went to sleep again.

  She was woken next time with the news that London had sent through a personal message for Gaspard. It ordered peremptorily that he evacuate under cover of darkness with the rest of the Maquis and it was alleged to have been inspired by General König himself – König being the head of Free French Headquarters.