Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine

AUSTRALIAN MILITARY Biography

Nancy Wake led a charmed and sophisticated life with her husband, a wealthy French industrialist, in pre-War Europe. When Germany invaded France, Nancy joined the embryonic Resistance movement and soon played a key part in the war. This is her story.

For Nancy, what began as a courier job became a highly successful escape network for Allied soldiers, perfectly camouflaged by her high-society life in Marseilles. Such was Nancy’s knack of slipping through the Gestapo’s traps, she was dubbed ‘the white mouse’. Much later in the war, Nancy discovered that her husband had been tortured and executed for not revealing her whereabouts.

Nancy was forced to flee to England, where she was trained by the British Special Operations Executive and parachuted back behind enemy lines. Again, she rallied to the cause and helped lead a powerful resistance force. Her work included supplying weapons, organising countless ambushes, and she once cycled four hundred kilometres through German checkpoints and across a mountain range to find a new transmitting radio.

Nancy Wake is today one of the most decorated wartime heroines, having received numerous international honours, including the George Medal, the Croix de Guerre, the Medaille de la Resistance, the Chevalier de Legion d’Honneur and the US Medal of Freedom. viii, 310 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., ports. ; 24 cm.  #0218/0318/0819/0320/0820/0221/100122/070524

Wake, Nancy, 1912-2011.  |  World War, 1939-1945 — Secret service — Great Britain — Biography.  |  World War, 1939-1945 — Underground movements — France — Biography.