Nancy Wake Was One Hell of a Woman!!
I have recently learned that I apparently have a mouse living in my refrigerator.My goddaughter Hannah, who lives in Germany, has named him “Julius Cheese-r.”She has also given me strict instructions to provide him with food and water and, most importantly, not feed him to the neighbor’s cat—or throw THIS one into a dumpster if it dies.
My instructions are to hold a memorial service. I didn’t want to ask if bagpipes had to be included. I have no idea whether Julius Cheeser possesses the survival instincts necessary to make it through the next few days.
But that got me thinking about another mouse.
Her name was Nancy Wake.I recently discovered another person I somehow managed not to learn about in school. I’m beginning to think history class left out a lot of the interesting stuff.
THE WHITE MOUSE
The Gestapo called her the White Mouse because she was so damn good at slipping away from them. I think they meant it as an insult. I’m pretty sure she took it as a compliment.
Nancy Wake was born in New Zealand and grew up in Australia before eventually making her way to Europe. She worked as a journalist in Paris in the 1930s and saw the rise of Nazi Germany firsthand.
After marrying French industrialist Henri Fiocca, she was living in Marseille when Germany invaded France. She could have left. Instead, she got involved. Wake and her husband helped the French Resistance and assisted Allied servicemen and Jewish refugees trying to escape occupied France.
Eventually, she became part of an escape network helping people reach neutral Spain. When the Gestapo began closing in on her, Nancy Wake had to become one of the people escaping.
She crossed the Pyrenees and eventually reached Britain. And that’s where apparently, a normal person might have thought: Well, that’s enough excitement for one lifetime.
Nancy Wake apparently did not have that setting. In Britain, she trained with the Special Operations Executive—the organization created to conduct sabotage and support resistance movements behind enemy lines.
The training included weapons, explosives, radio work, hand-to-hand combat, and parachuting. Then they sent her back into France. By parachute. In April 1944. Because apparently escaping the Gestapo once…wasn’t enough.
Wake returned to the Auvergne region and became a key figure in organizing the French Resistance there. She helped arrange parachute drops of weapons and supplies, organized fighters, and helped turn scattered resistance groups into a more effective fighting force.
After D-Day, she took part in combat against German forces trying to destroy the Maquis. And then there is the bicycle.
Oh, Nancy. At one point, a German attack forced the destruction of the radio codes her group needed to communicate with London. No radio codes. No communication. No good. So, Nancy borrowed a bicycle. The nearest radio station was in Châteauroux, more than 150 miles away.
She rode there. She got the message through. And then she rode back. More than 300 miles in roughly 72 hours. Through occupied France. On a bicycle. She later said that when people asked what she was most proud of accomplishing during the war, the bicycle ride was the thing she mentioned.
I love that. Not the medals. Not the parachuting. Not the fighting. The bicycle. Maybe because sometimes the most ridiculous-looking thing you ever do is also the hardest. And maybe because there is something wonderfully human about it.
Imagine somebody sitting around a table in the middle of World War II saying:
“We’ve lost the radio.”
And Nancy Wake apparently saying:
“Okay. Give me the fucking bicycle.”😂
The White Mouse survived the war. Her husband, Henri Fiocca, did not. The Gestapo captured and killed him in 1943 while Nancy was already trying to stay one step ahead of them. When she learned what had happened after the war, she had lost the man she loved while she was doing the work that had made her one of the Gestapo’s most wanted enemies.
Nancy Wake was decorated by Britain, France, and the United States for what she did during the war, including the George Medal, the French Legion of Honour and Croix de Guerre, and the U.S. Medal of Freedom.
She died in 2011. She was 98.
And somehow, I had never heard of her. That’s the part that bothers me. I don’t mean that everybody needs to memorize every historical figure who ever lived. We couldn’t. There are too many of them.
But there are people whose stories seem almost custom-designed to be remembered. Nancy Wake is one of them. She wasn’t born a superhero. She didn’t have superpowers. She wasn’t invincible. She was a woman who looked at what was happening around her and decided that she couldn’t simply stand there and watch. Then she kept going.
When the Germans came, she ran. When running wasn’t enough, she fought. When the Resistance needed weapons, she got them. When the radio codes were gone, she got on a bicycle. And when somebody apparently asked her what she was most proud of? The bicycle ride.
That’s my kind of hero. Not because she was fearless. I don’t know if Nancy Wake was fearless. Maybe she was scared as hell. I suspect she probably was.
Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s deciding that something else matters more. And that is why I have a new member of my personal Hall of Legends.
The White Mouse
Nancy Wake.
Sorry, Julius Cheese-r. You’re going to have to move over.
There’s a new mouse in town.