Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Australian Nancy Wake,who as a spy became one the Allies most decorated servicewomen for her role in the French resistance during World War II,died in London,Monday. She was 98.
Code named The White Mouse by the Gestapo during the war,Wake died Sunday in a London nursing home,Prime Minister Julia Gillard said. Nancy Wake was a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end, Gillard said.
Trained by British intelligence in espionage and sabotage,Wake helped to arm and lead 7,000 resistance fighters in weakening German defences before the D-Day invasion in the last months of the war.
While distributing weapons,money and code books in Nazi-occupied France,she evaded capture many times and reached the top of the Gestapos wanted list,according to her biographer,Peter FitzSimons. They called her the la Souris Blanche, the White Mouse, because every time they had her cornered … she was gone again, FitzSimons told Australian Broadcast Corp. radio.
Part of it was she was a gorgeous looking woman, he said. The Germans were looking for someone who looked like them: aggressive,a man with guns,and she was not like that. France decorated her with its highest military honour,the Legion dHonneur.
Born August 30,1912,in the New Zealand capital of Wellington,Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was the youngest of six. After studying journalism in London,she became a correspondent for The Chicago Tribune in Paris. A 1933 trip to interview Adolf Hitler in Vienna led her to become committed to bringing down the Nazis.
When World War II broke out in 1939,she was living in Marseille with her first husband,industrialist Henri Fiocca. She helped British servicemen and Jews escape German occupying force. Her husband was eventually seized,tortured and killed by the Gestapo. But Wake managed to escape in 1943 through Spain to London,where she received the espionage training. Wake eventually moved back to Australia and married British fighter pilot John Forward.
