Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  ‘Den, darling, will you look after the wounded?’

  ‘Me?’ he exclaimed in horror. ‘Why me?’

  ‘’Cos I’ll only faint and there’s no one else.’

  He muttered mutinously but he agreed.

  ‘Den,’ she called back again, ‘look after the bus and Roger first, will you?’

  Rake straight away took command of the evacuation. He was pushing a bicycle up on to the bus roof when Schley appeared in his raggedly chopped-off shorts.

  ‘Very fetching indeed,’ Denis murmured . . . and the next second was shrieking with terror. The local electricity wires hung low over the bus and, in passing up the bicycle, he had placed the metal frame in contact with the cables. A stream of current was charging through him.

  Yelling and jerking, Rake gave every indication of being electrocuted. In the middle of the battle the whole headquarters group gathered round to help – and then, realising that the wireless operator would not die, began to laugh. Whilst Schley and Nancy held a conference to try to work out the interesting electrical problems of disentangling Denis from his high-voltage bicycle, the rest of the Maquis rolled round the ground in helpless mirth.

  Eventually Rake freed himself and joined in the general hilarity. He succeeded in stowing the bicycle on top of the bus without further hitches and then Roger, enigmatic as ever, although furious that he was not allowed to join in the fighting, drove out of the area along a woodcutter’s track which, although the enemy did not know it, led to safety.

  A runner arrived to tell Nancy that the Germans were entrenched at the junction of the main road and the road that led down to the camp and that they had armoured cars there as well. At once a Maquis captain, whose knowledge of things military was as small as his courage was high, suggested that a party of twenty men should go up to the crossroads with les deux américains and there, simultaneously, be instructed in how to use the bazookas that had arrived the previous night, and, with bazookas, attack the German armoured cars and machine guns, thus relieving the group of its most immediate danger.

  Nancy translated to Schley and Alsop, who first registered immediate dismay and then quickly agreed. For a second she wondered what was wrong. Neither Schley nor Alsop were the type to be afraid, so why the dismay? But, of course! Pitched battle is hardly the time to give weapon instruction to men whose language one can’t speak. On the other hand, the Frenchmen were now clamouring to go, and the Americans would not consider backing down.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ she told them, seeing the quick gratitude that spread over their faces as soon as she spoke. She looked very matter-of-fact about it all and they decided that probably the battle was not as serious as it sounded.

  Actually the battle was just as serious as it sounded. Reports that had reached Nancy indicated that they were being attacked by between six and seven thousand Germans, and with her there were only two hundred Maquis. Still, this was no time to show any panic and there was a job to be done.

  Leaving Denis to command the headquarters and look after the wounded (however reluctantly) she chose twenty men and they then set off up the curving road towards the crossroads. Each man carried a Bren gun or a Sten; Nancy and the Americans carried carbines, revolvers and grenades; also they had four bazookas and an ample supply of rockets.

  Several hundred yards up the road Schley suggested tentatively that their progress might perhaps be more militarily correct if they were to deploy into the cover of the forest. Nancy gave this order and thirteen of the men at once obeyed her but seven of them deplored this cowardly technique and continued to walk brashly along the road.

  No sooner had Nancy and the rest reached cover than there was the sound of fierce machine-gun fire. All seven men on the road toppled to the ground and stayed there.

  The thirteen other Frenchmen were only seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds and their nerves failed them when they saw the gruesome fate suffered by their friends. So they dropped their arms and ran.

  Nancy sprang to her feet at once, infuriated by this display of cowardice, and bellowed after them. Rage had an extraordinary effect upon her. The customary vague amiability of expression, the slightly crooked grin, the slouch with which she had for months camouflaged her own femininity all vanished from her. Except for her cheekbones, her complexion paled whilst her eyes flared with green fury, her features tautened into porcelain smoothness and her body straightened until she achieved a posture of statuesque fury. Anger and danger seemed to stimulate her. There was no fear in her face nor in her mind. Rather her brain worked with the speed and smoothness of skates on ice and her casual acceptance of authority crystallised into a full-blooded instinct to command and to lead. Wholly feminine, transformed by the catalyst of her own anger into an astonishingly erect and fine-drawn beauty, she stood there, feet apart, hands on hips, head flung back and surveyed her fleeing men. Then, like a whip, lashing them through the forest trees and ringing out savagely even above the sound of machine-gun fire, her voice pursued them.

  ‘My God,’ exclaimed Alsop, ‘who’d have thought it? You could hear her across the Rhine. Wonder what she’s saying?’

  ‘Whatever it is, doesn’t sound like it’ll ever be quoted in a drawing room,’ observed Schley laconically.

  Schley was right. Nancy was using every foul oath she had ever heard in the days of her black marketing in Marseille, the days when Henri had taught her the correct responses to the vile abuse of the market traders.

  Some of the fleeing men were only speeded on their way by this fearful blast of language, but some, after a particularly ripe reference to a lavatory brush and what each of them might do to himself with it, halted and returned, shamefaced, to the fray. Fiercely then she ordered them to provide cover for her own attack.

  Alone, she and the Americans advanced, leaving the others to guard their rear, to within firing distance of the crossroads and delivered a sharp volley of bazooka rockets at both armoured cars and the machine-gun posts. With devastating violence, the rockets burst – first in front of the crossroads trench from which the Germans fired straight down into the heart of the Maquis camp and then, with awful finality, in the trench itself. Abruptly life in that enemy trench died. Next the armoured cars were destroyed. Nancy peered for a long minute towards what had been, seconds before, a group of living men firing machine guns. Then, certain that the threat to her camp had been obliterated, she allowed her eyes to drop and shrugged a little at the ugliness of what had happened. The two Americans saluted her ironically and instantly she grinned mischievously, allowed her body to sag into its customary slouch and started walking back to the camp. As Shakespeare might have said, Nancy was herself again. She rounded up the few Frenchmen who had returned to support her and ordered them to collect all the weapons abandoned by the fleeing men. Then, in good order, they withdrew a quarter of a mile back to their headquarters.

  There they found Denis attending to the wounded. His head averted, he was deliberately swabbing their wounds with a pad soaked in pure alcohol. In between swabs he took a regular sip of the alcohol for himself. He was very drunk and armed to the teeth. From his belt hung a terrifying array of grenades, suspended only by their rings, over his shoulder was a carbine, in his holster was a .32 Colt with a bullet up the spout and the safety catch off! He was certainly the most hostile-looking medical orderly the Americans had ever seen.

  ‘Can’t stand all this mess,’ he explained as he dabbed gently but blindly at a stomach wound. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Not too well,’ Nancy replied. ‘I must get word through to Tardivat. If he could counter-attack from the rear for a while, we could get out. Otherwise we’ve had it.’

  ‘Anything I can do?’

  ‘No, you stay here with the wounded.’ Rake groaned but stayed on the job. Now that he was drunk he would much rather fight.

  Nancy called over Schley and Alsop and told them, a little untruthfully, that everything was under control. Then she ordered a scout to accompany her and set
off towards the Spaniard’s camp. It was two miles away on her flank. Tardivat, on the other hand, was well away from the area under attack and at its rear.

  For much of the way she was under fire and for the final stretch she had to crawl the entire distance through long grass on her stomach. But eventually she found an outpost of the Spanish camp.

  ‘Tell your colonel I’m in trouble,’ she ordered him urgently. ‘Ask him to contact Tardivat for me and see if he can counter-attack from the rear.’ The Spaniard repeated the message and then Nancy and her scout returned to their besieged headquarters.

  ‘We hold out till Tardivat relieves us,’ she explained to the Americans. So a tight perimeter was formed round their position and Schley (deciding that there seemed to be very little chance of his ever using them in the future, and determined that they should not fall into the hands of the Germans) distributed his boxful of cigars. Cheerfully smoking a fine Havana, Nancy now blazed away in the direction of their attackers.

  There was a slight interruption when some of the Spanish Maquisards entered the camp and delivered the bodies of the seven men killed on the road. Each man had, whether dead or still living, been shot again by the Germans, very deliberately, in the middle of the forehead and all the faces had been cold-bloodedly mutilated.

  ‘Put them in there,’ Nancy said, indicating the shed in which Schley and Alsop had slept. ‘I’ll come back for them tomorrow.’

  At that moment sounds of a terrific onslaught against the Germans’ rear were heard.

  ‘Tardivat,’ said Nancy. ‘Quick – let’s get out.’

  The Germans, unsure of the extent of the attack on their flanks and rear, turned to fight off this new enemy. After a short time the attack subsided and then ceased. Turning round to resume their battle against the first group, the Germans found that Nancy and her men, in cars and trucks, had vanished. At the same time Tardivat’s force melted away from behind them.

  At their agreed rendezvous all her men met again. Roger was there as arranged. Soon Tardivat, grinning hugely, a vital, athletic figure, also joined them.

  ‘I got your message,’ he said, ‘when we were having lunch. I just shouted to my men, “Come quickly, Madame Andrée is in trouble”, and so they all stopped eating and we fought the Germans.’

  ‘Frenchmen stopped eating?’ she queried.

  ‘For you, yes,’ Tardivat laughed. ‘A special exception.’

  17 SABOTAGE AND COGNAC

  When Schley and Alsop had accustomed themselves to this sudden atmosphere of war, they went to find Nancy and inquire if there was anything they could do to help set up the new camp. They were told that she had left the camp to go back and look for Hubert.

  ‘You know,’ Alsop remarked to Schley, ‘that girl would cheerfully risk her own life to save any one of the men here. She’s gone straight back to where we’ve just come from to look for a guy who should be looking after her.’

  ‘Don’t forget,’ Schley reminded him quietly, ‘that only this morning she was looking after us! Remarkable girl.’

  ‘Remarkable temper too. Hope she never gives me a tongue-lashing like that.’

  A car drove into the camp; in it were Nancy and Hubert.

  ‘He was looking for your lost bag,’ Nancy shouted to Schley. ‘Got cut off from us by the attack. Too bad. He missed all the fun – and the cigars.’

  ‘Any Germans down there now?’ Schley asked curiously.

  ‘No. All gone home.’ She walked quickly away to give Roger a message for London. Placidly he coded it, then balanced his wireless on the wheel of a truck and tapped the signal out. Nothing ever bothered Roger. He could send messages from any place in any circumstances. Nancy felt positively maternal towards him.

  ‘Well that,’ summed up Schley, talking of their recent foray at the crossroads, ‘must have been one of the most unsuccessful missions in the history of war. But why do you imagine the Germans broke off the action so early?’

  ‘Union hours,’ Alsop informed him. ‘It was four o’clock. I guess we’re free for the evening!’

  Next morning Nancy took a truck back to the outhouse in which the Americans had slept on their arrival, to collect the bodies of the seven dead Frenchmen. There she met Gaspard and Laurent. They had driven up to see her the afternoon before, had heard the fighting and lain low. Now they helped her load up the corpses.

  Back in camp she washed the bodies carefully, particularly the hideously torn faces, and then shrouded them in parachute silk – this, the same woman who only two years earlier had nearly fainted when her hand was placed against the cheek of a dead woman. Gaspard watched her respectfully. ‘ Formidable ,’ he murmured.

  Nancy then held a conference at which she suggested that the least they could do was to give the bodies a decent burial and, when everyone agreed, the whole group got into their transport and drove to a nearby cemetery. The cemetery was surrounded by a high wall and had only one exit and into it poured the executive of the entire Maquis, plus all their foreign assistants, to conduct a forty-five-minute burial service. Outside, just so that no passing Germans could possibly fail to see them (or so the alarmed Americans felt) was posted a Maquisard with a machine gun.

  Eventually it was over. ‘Did that feel like forty-five minutes to you?’ queried Alsop. ‘More like five days,’ responded Schley. And since Nancy and her followers had seemed perfectly at home throughout the ceremony, the Americans wondered, as they drove back to their camp, whether they would ever get used to the strangeness of it all.

  They stayed for several days in the forest near the Spaniards and then moved on to the forest of Troncet, to a much more elaborate camp. Here the routine hard work really began.

  For the men, in between attacks on convoys, bridges and railway lines, there were the regular chores of camp life – cleaning, doing sentry duty, cooking and fetching water – and, in this respect, only a recent batch of gendarme recruits failed to fall into the spirit of the place. Full of the dignity of their social position as policemen, they refused to do their stint of water carrying. The matter was reported to Nancy.

  ‘You don’t want to collect water, I hear?’ she asked, marching up to them. They were all sitting on a tree trunk and they indicated that this was so.

  ‘Well, then, of course you mustn’t,’ she said sweetly. ‘You are gendarmes. Water carrying is not for you. Now you just stay there comfortably in the sun and I’ll get the water for you.’

  ‘This,’ remarked Denis, ‘I must watch.’

  She put the buckets in her car, drove to the nearby lake, filled them up and drove back to the headquarters. Then, grim-faced, she opened the door of her car, took out one bucket of water, marched across to the first gendarme and deposited it violently upside down over his head.

  ‘Don’t move!’ she bellowed at his startled companions. Petrified, they sat where they were. And so, one after another, she helmeted every one of them with a pailful of water.

  ‘That’s our Gertie,’ commented Denis placidly.

  ‘In future,’ rapped out a very cold Mme Andrée, ‘whether you’re gendarmes or not, you’ll do your share of all the work. Now – go and get me ten buckets of water.’

  Sadly, the ten gendarmes disappeared with their buckets down towards the lake.

  For the Americans work was endless. They started with squads of trainees at dawn and they switched from squad to squad, right through until dark. They instructed on Brens, Stens, mortars, piats, bazookas, grenades and carbines. Stripping, loading, aiming, cleaning – everything had to be taught. Especially the cleaning. Nancy, whose own weapons were always immaculate, was fanatical in her insistence on that. But she had only the profoundest admiration for the way the two Americans persisted in their task of instructing anyone who needed instructing in a group that numbered nearly seven and a half thousand.

  Hubert and Rake were kept occupied with reporting to London on the purely military aspects of the situation and now that it had become less fluid and more orthodox, H
ubert had found his feet and was working very efficiently.

  Nancy herself, as chef du parachutage , had almost insurmountable difficulties to overcome. Every single day there were engagements of some kind or another with the Germans. Most of the time she was too busy to join in them, but always she had to replenish the ammunition used by them, replace any weapons lost in them, pay out the subsistence allowances for her 7,490 men, make allowance to their dependants, wait in the dew-drenched fields for parachutages that occurred four times or more a week and inspect the various groups to see that they both needed the weapons for which they asked and correctly maintained those she had already procured for them.

  All of these inspection journeys were done now with the protection of a personal bodyguard. Several times recently Nancy had had to shoot her way out of attempts by the Germans to halt her car. Once, even, a drink-crazed Communist had attempted her assassination. He had aimed for her car with a bomb. It had exploded too early and he had been pulped against a wall whilst Nancy herself escaped unhurt. Hubert thereupon asked for volunteers to travel with her as an escort on any subsequent expeditions.

  The colonel in charge of the Spanish Maquisards at once begged her to allow his men the exclusive privilege of protecting her, and Tardivat, who knew the Spaniards well, urged her to accept their offer. Gratefully she did so.

  For a while the Spaniards always drove in the car ahead of hers and in the vehicle which followed Roger’s car. They had removed half the windscreen of each car and filled the empty space with Bren guns. Whenever they met trouble, the plan was, the front and rear cars would fight; Nancy and Roger, in the two middle cars, must run. But after only two trips she declared her intention thereafter of travelling in the leading car.

  ‘Very brave of you, Gert, but why?’ inquired Roger.

  ‘Not brave at all, Roger,’ she assured him. ‘It’s just that I can’t stand any more dust!’

  Their skirmishes were numerous but always ended up safely – except once. Then, having shot their way out of a road check and careered away, they continued along the road at hair-raising speed and swerving wildly.