Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  ‘The Allier, that’s the solution,’ Nancy told them. ‘Hubert, you and I will drive up there and see Tardivat. We’ll find a new base and move our headquarters there. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Bazooka, you’ll have to take over while we’re away. And, Den, probably your codes and radio will come then, too. If they do, you’ll have to receive the parachutage yourself.’ Their minds made up, they returned to their house in the village.

  Publicly snubbing the colonel, Hubert then announced formally that he and Nancy were going to find a new headquarters in the Allier and that, in the meantime, Bazooka would be in command. Immediately after that, the two leaders left Saint Santin by car.

  Tardivat welcomed them with open arms and was delighted that Nancy should have decided to move into his area. She was as delighted to be moving her group so near to him, and when he showed her a possible forest site for a camp, she at once accepted it. Tardivat also told her that a group of anti-Fascist refugees from Franco’s administration formed a Spanish Maquis nearby in the forest. She was introduced to them and found them a most impressive body of men.

  ‘We’ll bring our people up here,’ she announced decisively.

  ‘Good,’ said Tardivat. ‘Then we can fight together.’

  Hubert remained in the forest to make arrangements whilst she returned in the car to Saint Santin to collect her men.

  There she found that the message warning her of the parachutage had already come through on the BBC and that Denis and Bazooka had gone out in her absence to receive the ‘packets’. It turned out that as well as the arms and the radio and the codes she had requested, London had also sent her a radio operator – a young American Marine called Roger. He was about nineteen years old, fair, tall and good-looking, and he spoke very little French. Henceforth he was to be Nancy’s personal operator. Denis, who had recovered his buried set, became personal operator to Hubert, using the same codes as Roger, and Bazooka was ordered to go to another Maquis near Clermont-Ferrand to instruct in weapons there.

  They parted with Bazooka sadly and then, about two hundred strong, they set off for the Allier. Arriving there, the men camped in the forest whilst Roger, Hubert, Denis and a handful of others set up their headquarters in a farmhouse near Ygrande. Nancy commandeered a bus, had it converted into an office and living quarters for herself and parked it alongside the house. In a few days they became an efficient fighting unit once again.

  July 1944 arrived and Tardivat, now regarding Nancy as an equal comrade-in-arms, took to inviting her to accompany him on ambushes laid against German convoys heading for the Normandy front.

  They would prepare their plans and choose their position with scrupulous care. Also they would manufacture large numbers of home-made bombs – plastic explosive wrapped in socks or stockings. Then their party would drive to the chosen spot which was usually not closer than twenty miles from their camp. The drivers of their trucks and cars would wait in their vehicles on the far side of the vineyards, away from the road, whilst the Maquis lay in the drains immediately alongside the road.

  Soon the convoy would rumble towards them. They always allowed the whole column of vehicles to enter the trap. Then they would destroy the first two or three armoured cars and the last two vehicles in the column.

  Toss their bombs, fire from the hip as they withdrew across the vineyards, into their vehicles and away – leaving behind them twenty or thirty German dead and a mounting Nazi dread of the forest terrorists.

  Half a dozen times Nancy and Tardivat fought together thus, so that she grew to admire him as she had seldom admired anyone and he, describing his regard for her to the Spanish Maquis colonel, said, ‘She is the most feminine woman I know – until the fighting starts! Then’ – and he kissed his fingers – ‘she is like five men.’

  On the other hand, Nancy, explaining her somewhat unladylike actions to Denis, declared, ‘If I’m to keep the respect of these camps, Den, I’ve got to keep up with them. I mustn’t panic and I must seem as game as they are. And when you’re with a man like Tardivat, that isn’t easy. After all, he is a man and I am a woman.’

  It was their lookout up on the hill who warned them of the coming German attack. Swiftly but calmly they collected all their gear and left in cars and trucks and on foot along the inevitably prepared line of withdrawal. Three thousand Germans attacked, and their fire was heavy, but the Maquis group had had plenty of warning and when the attackers finally closed in they captured only an empty farmhouse.

  London’s recent orders had been that Nancy should concentrate her attentions primarily on those Maquis groups in the Allier, although she would still be at liberty to provide such help as was required by a few other groups in the Puy-de-Dȏ me, groups like Gaspard’s and Laurent’s. Therefore, she moved camp now only into another nearby forest.

  Moreover, she had to stay in the area, Germans or no Germans, because the next night it had been agreed that two more weapons instructors were to be dropped to them – unfortunately in a field close to the scene of that day’s attack at Ygrande. London advised that these instructors were Americans.

  Late the following night she, Hubert and a few others prepared their field. Fires were stacked, torches were held ready, sentries watched anxiously for enemy patrols and about eighty men circled the clearing to fight off any attack.

  In silence they waited and softly the dew wet the grass. For the hundredth time in her career the thought struck Nancy that nothing was more symbolic of the Resistance than this evening dew. When darkness fell, it would suddenly appear, wrapping the whole of France’s mountains and fields and forests in its heavy, pallid hand. It was silent. It was everywhere. And then, as daylight dawned, it evaporated magically into thin air – until nightfall, when it would appear again. So it was with the Resistance. A force of the forests and of the night; silent, ubiquitous, mysterious. And yet, when the sun rose, gone; leaving only the ashes of a fire or the wreckage of a bridge to mark its furtive descent.

  So it had been through the months and years of occupation and right up to the present time. Now, of course, its nature could change. With the Allies back in Europe, the Resistance movement could become less a heavy dew and more an avalanche, fearfully poised, unsuspected and yet ready at any moment of the day or night to crash on to the enemy who lay below.

  It had been a long road that the spirit of France had trod. Nancy remembered the first milestone along that road. She had been standing in a crowded tram just as the Germans marched into Marseille. Two German officers crossed the road in front of the halted tram at the Boulevard de Gambetta. Their boots gleamed, their uniforms were brutally smart, their whole bearing was unshakably confident. Nancy had happened to glance at the tram driver behind whom she was standing. She saw two tears trickle down his cheeks. Just two. Then the Frenchman’s eyes had grown hard and he had carried on with his work, his face grim but no longer grieving.

  And the second signpost on the way to victory? What had that been? Undoubtedly Madame Sainson, her intelligent brown eyes gleaming with the joy of battle and laughing at the irony of being photographed in the joint company of three American evaders and three soldiers of the Axis.

  The next milestones, it seemed to her, had been Judex’s raid on the sports store, then the battle on the plateau, and now these final preparations – not just for small ambushes or for fighting their way frantically out of enemy encirclements – but for full-out Maquis attack. She glanced back at one of her devoted Spanish bodyguards, past him then towards a sentry, away from him to a crouching Maquisard – none of these were any longer mere hunted outlaws: they were all confident fighting men who were certain that they would win.

  ‘ Advise whether the Maquis D’Auvergne is suitable to be financed, equipped and instructed for use on and after D-Day . . . ’ That had been the initial reason for her visit to France.

  Well, she had advised and they had been equipped, financed and instructed, and D-Day at last had come. She felt passionately pro
ud of the France she saw today and of her own Britain that had never lost its confidence in the spirit of Frenchmen.

  Hubert broke the trend of her thoughts: he could hear planes. They lit their fires, alerted all their men and flashed their torches. The cars and lorries on the field’s perimeter, facing inwards, turned on their headlights. Then the planes roared overhead and the parachutes came tumbling down, out of the moon-drenched sky into the flaring field.

  The first instructor landed on the wrong side of the hedge and was appalled to see the area now seething with running men, vehicles of all types, three bonfires and flashing torches. Then he heard hoarse shouts of ‘ où sont les americains? ’ so he shouted back across the hedge.

  He saw (vaguely, because he had jumped without his thick glasses) a young woman running confidently towards him. She had black hair and a cheeky, white-toothed grin. With one hand she dragged along a laughing man, in the other she held a bottle of champagne. Reaching him, Nancy and Hubert introduced themselves, using their pseudonyms, as Hubert and Madame Andrée. The American’s name was Reeve Schley.

  ‘Call me Gerty,’ Nancy said. ‘Everyone does. Here . . . have a drink and welcome to France.’ Whilst Schley gulped good, dry champagne out of her proffered bottle, Hubert asked the vital question.

  ‘Do you speak French?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ replied Hubert. ‘Does your friend?’

  ‘Only a little.’

  ‘God Almighty,’ quoth Hubert. He now had a mission in the centre of France in which his American wireless operator and his two American instructors spoke either very little or no French at all. It was a trifle perplexing. Nancy, on the other hand, seemed to find the tall American cavalry officer a perfect recruit to their organisation. Quite apart from the fact that she approved of the guts of anyone who would risk parachuting into France when he could speak no French, she was delighted to observe that Schley was in uniform. Very shrewdly she realised just what a magnificent boost to morale it would be for all her men at last to see an Allied officer boldly wearing his proper uniform instead of skulking round in civilian clothing. Such boldness could only mean, to anyone who observed it, that the day of Liberation was close at hand.

  On the other side of the field the second American officer, also in uniform, had been located and identified by two of Nancy’s men. His name was John Alsop and he had spent the last twenty minutes searching for Schley’s bag which contained his glasses, because without his glasses, Schley was quite blind. Alsop was led to the middle of the field where, already, much of the gear that had been dropped, including bazookas, was being loaded on to trucks. There he met Nancy and Hubert, was offered a drink, and exchanged glances of consternation with Schley. Never had they seen so much chaos. But the woman, Gertie, seemed self-possessed and confident, so they left themselves in her hands.

  They were bundled into cars and driven away, and to the mechanically minded Americans their convoy of assorted French automobiles and trucks was the most ludicrous collection of vehicles they had ever seen.

  Surprisingly soon they arrived at the Maquis’ new forest-shrouded headquarters and there promptly adjourned with Nancy and Hubert to her converted bus to eat and talk and drink several bottles of excellent wine. Vastly relieved, Schley found his spare glasses in the one suitcase that had been brought back with their convoy from the field. He put them on at once and examined his hosts with new-found interest. He found that his hosts were examining himself and Alsop just as shrewdly.

  The two British pumped them first for news of England. Wittily and amusingly, for both were cultured men, the Americans filled in the gaps left by the BBC’s excellent news service.

  The Americans inquired searchingly about their duties for the future and the attitude of the Germans at the moment.

  ‘No need to worry about them,’ Nancy stated.

  ‘Don’t they ever try to round you up?’

  ‘Oh, yes! They attacked yesterday. But we always have a way out.’ The Americans gulped at this casual assessment of what, to them, sounded highly dangerous – and then carried on with their questioning.

  ‘How many Maquis are attached to your mission?’ Schley asked, surveying Nancy curiously as he spoke. He observed a young woman who slouched a little to identify herself with her men and to disguise her own quite unmasculine charms, who coped with the roughness of endless male conversation by assuming a mask of amiable vagueness, whose eyes gazed at him with unfailing politeness but also with an occasional blankness which perhaps indicated that mentally she had withdrawn to a gentler mental environment and whose lips were constantly parted in a cheerful and slightly crooked grin. Here, unmistakably, was one who lived fully and equally the life of her fighting men but who remained always a woman.

  ‘Difficult to say exactly,’ Nancy replied, ‘but it would be more than seven thousand.’ (Actually it was 7,490). This information impressed the Americans profoundly. Gradually Nancy then dug out the story of how they themselves had come to land in Europe as agents of the Allies.

  Reeve Schley, a lawyer on the outbreak of America’s war, had volunteered for the Navy. They rejected him because of his eyesight. Always an enthusiastic equestrian, he had then enlisted with the Horse Cavalry as a private. Eventually he got his commission – whereupon the powers-that-were took away the Cavalry’s horses and scattered the cavalrymen all over.

  Schley then pulled strings and was shipped to America’s saboteur group in London – the OSS. There, after the past two years of what he himself described as ‘intensive training, creeping and crawling, etcetera’, he found himself doing a ‘twelve-dollar-a-week job as a clerk in the city of London’.

  ‘Found all sorts of folk, who’d only been my juniors in the legal profession, were now majors and colonels in OSS – and I was a mere lieutenant.’

  Meantime Alsop had had similar experiences. Both the Army and the Navy rejected him for service as a volunteer and eventually he was drafted into the Military Police. ‘Not exactly the thing I wanted to do,’ he explained wryly to Nancy.

  He was later transferred to England as a second lieutenant in the Police Corps. On leave in London one day, he met his brother Stewart, who had for a long time been a member of the British Army. ‘Stewart suggested we should go and jump into France,’ he related. ‘This seemed a novel sort of idea so I went round to OSS and suggested that they might like to put it into effect.’

  Apparently OSS approved of the suggestion that they might employ Alsop and accordingly they secured his transfer to the office of their Western Europe Section. There he met Schley.

  ‘And then,’ Schley explained, ‘instead of one twelve-dollar-a-week clerk doing a desk job, there were two!’

  They had nothing to do in their respective jobs, except sit with their feet on the desk and smoke cigars. Eventually they made themselves so persistently troublesome to authority that they were shipped off to Scotland, trained and parachuted, in late July 1944, into the Allier.

  ‘Talking of cigars,’ Schley said. ‘I’ve got a boxful with me in this suitcase. My father sent them to me in London. But I don’t seem to be able to find my other bag and that’s got my best pair of glasses and most of my personal kit in it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Hubert urged. ‘It’s probably still down on the landing field. I’ll have a look for it for you in the morning. As it’s nearly four o’clock now – how about some sleep?’

  They were shown to a farm outhouse which Nancy had had scrubbed clean for them. There were two mattresses on the floor and these Nancy had herself made into neat beds. Between them, also on the floor, was a jar of forest flowers. Not much of a welcome, Nancy had reflected when she had finished preparing it for her guests, but better than nothing.

  As they crawled into their beds and felt the soft smoothness of parachute-nylon sheets, and remembered the night’s good conversation and superb wine, Alsop turned toward Schley.

  ‘Hey, Reeve,’ he whispered. ‘After all those buzz-bombs
and what else in London, these silk sheets will do me. G’night.’

  At about eight that morning the peace of the sleeping camp was rudely shattered by long bursts of machine-gun fire.

  Schley woke under the violent shaking of Alsop’s hand. ‘Listen, listen,’ Alsop said.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ Schley urged, ‘it’ll only be the Maquis practising.’

  Out in her bus Nancy heard Denis’s voice come startled to her from his tent.

  ‘Gert, what’s that?’

  ‘The Germans, you twerp,’ his Gert snapped back, shedding her pink nightie with the embroidered neckline and donning slacks and revolvers instead as she spoke.

  The camp burst into furious life, men deploying in all directions to meet the attack. In the farm shed, Schley and Alsop dressed frantically. Schley jammed on his beautiful cavalry boots first and then couldn’t get his equally beautiful trousers over the top of them, so he hacked off the narrow bottoms and emerged from the shed curiously clad in ragged shorts.

  Nancy called Denis to her. ‘Where’s Hubert?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t know, Gert.’

  ‘Well, no use worrying. Look, find young Roger and put him in a truck with all our records and the codes. Send him out to wait for us in the forest.’ It was essential that wireless operators be protected and the codes saved. Without them, cut off from London, a Maquis was crippled. ‘You go with him,’ Nancy ordered.

  ‘No,’ Denis refused. ‘One operator is all you’ll need. I’ll stay here with you.’

  Some wounded were brought back to the headquarters, many of them seeming to be only children, mostly with abdominal wounds. Schley and Alsop rushed over, horrified at the fate of these eighteen-year-old forest fighters.

  ‘Here,’ they said, ‘use this for the kids,’ and offered their brandy flasks. Nancy found some pure alcohol and then again spoke to Rake.