Which is a bad place to be, honestly.įinally, in 1943, the Germans started to figure out who the hell The White Mouse really was, and they then, in their typical German Gestapo way, decided the best thing to do would be to capture her, line her up against a brick wall, and shoot her in the back of the skull until she died from it. Her operation became such a major pain in Germany's ass that they put a five million Franc reward out on her head, and known only by her nickname "The White Mouse", Wake at one point was on the top of the Gestapo's Most Wanted List. Working out of a safe house she'd purchased outside Marseilles, Nancy Wake spent the first three years of the war recovering downed pilots, getting them fake papers, fabricated identification cards, new clothes, and false identities, and then ferrying them across the Pyrenees Mountains to Spain by sneaking them in trucks, bribing guards with huge stacks of cash, and doing whatever the hell she needed to do to get these pilots back to Britain safely. Wake got to work almost immediately, using her and her husband's considerable wealth to shelter Royal Air Force pilots who had been shot down by Nazi anti-aircraft defenses in France. She stayed behind in France, watched in horror as Hitler seized Paris and teabagged the Arc d'Triomphe with stormtroopers, and then she immediately started making plans to do whatever she could to get these Kraut bastards out of her new home and send them back to Bavaria in body bags. Nancy Wake, however, refused to evacuate with the rest of the English and Commonwealth forces. She drove an ambulance during the invasion of Belgium, watched the Nazis steamroll everything before them in a cloud of Teutonic dust, and then used her truck to help ferry British, Aussie, and New Zealand soldiers to the evacuation points at Dunkirk after it became painfully obvious that France was toast. By this point Wake had been married to a millionaire French industrialist for a few years, and when her husband was called up to service and ordered to desperately hurl himself in front of the Nazi War Machine in hopes that his crumpled-up mashed-to-paste corpse would perhaps clog up the gears of one of their Panzers and possibly slow it down by a couple miles per hour, Wake headed straight to the recruiting office and signed up to work as a nurse. In 1940 the German Reich invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France as part of their whole "hey let's conquer the entire world" strategy of planetary domination. It wouldn't take long until she had her chance. Wake, horrified by what she was seeing, vowed to oppose this Hitler fellow at any opportunity. Wake interviewed Hitler, got the official party line, and then watched as gangs of Nazi thugs roamed the streets of Vienna beating the crap out of Jewish men and women for no good reason. In 1933, Wake's newspaper beat took her to Vienna to do a story on the new German Chancellor, some guy named Adolf Hitler or something like that, so she headed out to see what the big deal was. A tough-as-hell chick who could rarely be found without a double gin and tonic in her hand and designer cosmetics in her purse, Wake had a reputation for drinking hard, telling dirty jokes, and then getting a tall, dark, and handsome Frenchman pick up the tab for her. By 22 this globetrotting Aussie/Kiwi was living in Paris, working as a freelance newspaper journalist during the day and then rocking out at the hottest Parisian nightclubs after dark. Growing up in poverty, Wake left home at 16 to go work as a nurse in Sydney, then at 20 she moved to London with about $300 in her pocket to try and make a new life. Then her dad promptly abandoned Nancy, her mom, and her five brothers and sisters. Nancy Wake was a hard-drinking, hard-fighting World War II special agent, saboteur, and resistance commander who survived four days of Gestapo interrogation, saved over two hundred downed Allied pilots from falling into the clutches of the Nazi penal system, blew up a couple German supply depots, had a bounty of five million Francs placed on her head, and then killed an SS stormtrooper with her bare hands by apparently dishing out a hardcore Austin Powers judo chop to the throat.īorn to a dirt-poor family in New Zealand in 1912, Nancy Wake's family moved her to Australia at the age of two.
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