NANCY WAKE: The Gestapo hunted her for 2 years — SHE CYCLED 500KM PAST THEM

The road was empty.

It was a clear afternoon in the summer of 1944, and a woman was cycling alone through the French countryside.

She passed a German checkpoint.

The soldier on duty glanced at her.

She smiled and gave a small wave.

He waved back.

She kept pedalling.

The Gestapo had been hunting her for 2 years.

They had a name for her, the white mouse.

They had 5 million franks on her head.

And on that afternoon, the most wanted woman in Nazi occupied France cycled past their checkpoint, smiled at their soldier, and kept going.

She had been riding for over 60 hours.

She had hundreds of kilome still ahead of her, and if she stopped, if she was caught, thousands of people would die.

She was 32 years old, and she was hiding in plain sight on a borrowed bicycle.

This is her story.

Nancy Wake was born on August 30th, 1912 in Rose, New Zealand.

Her father left the family when she was 2 years old.

She grew up poor in Sydney, Australia, raised by a mother who struggled and a family that didn’t have much of anything except each other.

She was from the beginning the kind of person who didn’t wait for permission.

At 16, she inherited £200 from an aunt, packed a bag, and left home.

She worked as a nurse, then as a journalist.

By 1933, she had made her way to Europe as a freelance correspondent, 20 years old, covering a continent that was beginning to change in ways that made serious people nervous.

In 1933, she was in Vienna.

She was walking through the city one afternoon when she came across a scene she would never forget.

Men from the SA, Hitler’s Stormtroopers, were beating Jewish men in the street.

Not quietly, not in some hidden place.

In the open, in daylight, crowds of people stood and watched.

Some looked uncomfortable.

No one moved.

Nancy stood there and watched a man be humiliated and beaten in front of his neighbors, and she felt something harden inside her that never softened again.

She wrote in her notebook that evening, “I decided then and there that if I ever could, I would do anything in my power to make war on this thing.

She meant it.

She just didn’t yet know what it would cost her.” Over the following years, Nancy built a life in France.

She became a respected journalist, covered the rise of fascism across Europe, interviewed politicians, drank with diplomats.

In 1939, she married Henri Fioa, a wealthy French industrialist, charming, successful, completely devoted to her.

They lived in Marseilles.

There were dinner parties and champagne and long summers, the kind of life that felt for a moment like it might last.

On September 3rd, 1939, France declared war on Germany.

Nancy volunteered as an ambulance driver.

In June 1940, the German army entered Paris.

France signed the armistice.

The life she and Henri had built ended in a weekend.

Nancy didn’t wait to be recruited.

She recruited herself.

She started hiding allied soldiers who had been shot down or left behind, sheltering them in safe houses, forging documents, organizing routes through the Pyrenees into Spain.

She did it on foot in winter through mountain passes.

She used her glamour as cover, elegant dresses, easy French, a glass of wine at the checkpoint, and a joke for the guard on duty.

Over two and a half years, she helped nearly 2,000 people escaped Nazi occupied France.

Not one of them was captured while in her care.

The Gestapo began to notice.

By 1942, they had identified her network.

They gave her a code name, the White Mouse, because she always slipped away.

Every trap, every sweep, every operation to catch her ended with nothing.

They raised the reward, 5 million Franks, more than they were offering for most Allied generals.

Nancy kept moving.

By early 1943, the network was too compromised to continue.

She had to run.

She crossed the Pyrenees on foot, alone in winter, and made it to Spain.

Hri stayed behind.

He told her it would draw less attention if he didn’t leave with her.

they would find each other after the war.

She believed him.

She had no reason not to.

What Nancy didn’t know and what she would not know for a long time was what happened after she left.

The Gestapo came for Henri.

They had questions.

Specifically, where was she? Henri Fioa knew exactly where his wife was going, who was helping her, and how to find her.

He said nothing, not a word, not under questioning, not under anything the Gestapo did to him in the weeks and months that followed.

He protected her completely until the end.

Nancy was already in England by then, sending messages to Marseilles that went unanswered, asking contacts if they had news, getting nothing back.

The SOE, British Special Operations, said they didn’t know anything or they didn’t say.

She kept going.

Now, here is what the opening of this story didn’t tell you.

Because when you picture Nancy Wake cycling alone down a French road, you might picture a courier, someone carrying a message, running a small errand.

That is not what this was.

By the time she got on that bicycle, Nancy Wake had already spent 3 years running one of the most effective escape networks in southern France.

She had helped nearly 2,000 people survive.

She had been recruited, trained, and deployed by British intelligence as a fully operational special operations agent.

She had learned combat, explosives, parachuting, weapons, and codes.

She had parachuted back into occupied France in the middle of the night, and she was the coordinating officer for a guerilla army of 7,000 men operating in the mountains of the Oang.

7,000 men.

She was their commanding officer.

When Nancy arrived in England in 1943, the SOE moved quickly.

They already knew who she was.

They had been watching her network for some time.

Training was immediate and intensive.

Her instructors wrote about her in terms that don’t appear in many personnel files.

One noted that she could drink most men under the table, shot better than the majority of her cohort, and showed an absolute absence of fear that was, in their assessment, either remarkable or concerning, depending on how you looked at it.

On April 29th, 1944, Nancy parachuted back into France in the dark.

The drop zone was a field in the middle of the night.

She landed in a tree and hung there in her harness, tangled in the branches, unable to get down.

A French Mackisard named Henri Tadiva ran over and started working to free her.

While he untangled the straps, he looked up and said, “I hope all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit tonight.” Nancy looked down at him.

Don’t give me that French blanie.

Undo these straps.

She was back.

She was assigned to coordinate Maki resistance groups in the Oang, the mountain region of central France.

7,000 guerilla fighters scattered across remote terrain waiting for direction.

The men, veterans, farmers, former soldiers were not accustomed to taking orders from a woman.

That lasted about a week.

She went on every operation herself.

She drank with them at night and outran them in the field.

Within days, the question of her gender had stopped being a subject of conversation.

In a planning meeting, a veteran Makisar looked at the route she had marked on the map and said, “Madam, with respect, this route passes through three German checkpoints.” Nancy didn’t look up from the map.

I know.

I came through all three of them this morning.

A pause.

We leave at midnight.

The operations continued through spring and into summer.

sabotage of railway lines, ammunition depots, communication infrastructure, Nancy in the field for every one of them.

Then during a night assault on a Gustapo garrison at Mont Luson, the situation shifted.

The attack was going well.

The garrison was being overrun.

In a side corridor, Nancy came across a German sentry who had been separated from the others.

Using a weapon would have made noise and alerted the remaining guards.

Nancy had been trained in silent combat at SOE.

She used what she had learned.

The sentry was dead in seconds.

She moved on.

When someone asked her about it afterward, how she had done it, whether she had hesitated, she considered the question for a moment.

They taught us in training, but I was surprised to find it worked.

A pause.

My answer is, “If I had to, I had to.” She said it the same way she might have described a flat tire.

In June 1944, the Germans launched a major offensive against the Maki strongholds in the Overia.

On June 10th, the main attack hit Mont Mushe.

By June 20th, the guerrillas were surrounded and forced to retreat 150 km through the mountains in 3 days under constant pressure with casualties.

In the chaos of the retreat, Dennis Rake, the SOE radio operator assigned to NY’s unit, lost the radio.

Worse, he burned the code books to keep them out of German hands.

The right decision tactically, but it meant the unit was now completely cut off from London.

No communication, no confirmation.

The next supply drop, weapons, food, ammunition for 7,000 people could not be coordinated.

The nearest S so S SOE operator with a functioning set of codes was in Chaturu approximately 500 km away.

There were no vehicles available.

German patrols were stopping cars on every major road.

A woman alone on a bicycle was less visible than almost anything else moving through occupied France.

Nancy looked at the map.

She looked at the team.

I’ll go.

Someone asked why her and not one of the men.

A woman cycling alone.

Because a woman cycling alone is less suspicious.

And because I’m faster, she borrowed a bicycle.

It wasn’t even hers.

And left alone with false documents and civilian clothes.

The first 40 km, she later said, her legs felt like hot lead.

But she couldn’t show effort, couldn’t show urgency.

At every German checkpoint, she slowed to a normal pace, smiled, answered questions in fluent French, a housewife going to the village just passing through.

She rode through the day and into the night, resting for short stretches in fields off the road, eating almost nothing.

At the tensest checkpoint, a German soldier took her documents and studied them for 90 seconds.

90 seconds.

He handed them back.

Bonjoure, Madame.

She smiled.

She kept pedaling.

72 hours after she left, she arrived in Chaturu.

Her hands were blistered.

Her legs were shaking.

She could barely stand when she got off the bicycle.

She found the SOE operator.

She updated London.

She obtained the new codes.

And while she was waiting for confirmation to come through, the operator said he had received a message from Marles about Henri Fioa.

Nancy stopped.

Henri had been arrested by the Gestapo months after her escape.

They had questioned him.

He had said nothing about where she was, who was helping her, or how to find her.

Not one word, not under anything they did to him.

He had protected her completely to the end.

He had been executed.

Nancy sat with that for a long time.

the man who had told her to go, who had stayed behind so her escape would be less conspicuous, who had been arrested and tortured and killed while she was in England training while she was parachuting into fields while she was cycling through checkpoints and planning operations and leading 7,000 men through the mountains of France.

He had died for her to keep going, and she hadn’t known.

For all of it, she hadn’t known.

She stood up.

She took the new codes.

She walked outside.

She picked up the bicycle.

I have to get back.

7,000 people are waiting.

She cycled 500 km back through occupied France alone with that news inside her and she didn’t stop once.

When she returned to the Overia, she told no one.

Contact with London was restored.

The supply drop was confirmed.

Weapons, food, and ammunition arrived by parachute.

7,000 men continued the fight.

Nancy coordinated operations, crossed forests, sat in planning sessions, and kept the weight of what she knew entirely to herself.

The liberation came.

On August 25th, 1944, Paris was freed.

The south of France followed in the weeks after.

The Germans retreated.

The resistance emerged from the shadows.

Nancy Wake was 32 years old and standing in a country she had spent years helping to save.

The liberation was everything I had worked for, she said later, and the most painful day of my life.

After the war, she returned to Marseilles for the first time since her escape.

She went to the house where she and Enri had lived.

She confirmed everything the radio operator had told her.

Henri Fioa had been arrested months after she crossed the Pyrenees.

He had never said a word.

He had been killed while Nancy was still fighting.

She had not known, not through any of it.

Tonight, he died.

So I could keep going and I didn’t even know the decorations came.

Nancy Wake became the most decorated servicewoman of the Second World War.

Honored by three separate countries from Britain, the George Medal and the MBE.

From France, the Lejon Donur, the Cuadare three times, and the Medai de la Resistance.

From the United States, the Medal of Freedom.

In 1987, Australia added the companion of the Order of Australia.

She tried to rebuild her life.

Marseilles was impossible.

Too much of Henry in every street.

She moved to London, attempted a political career it didn’t take.

She married a British RAF officer.

It lasted years.

But it wasn’t what she and Henri had been.

She moved between London and Australia for decades, refusing film deals and book offers with the same stubbornness she had brought to everything else.

My story is mine.

In the 1980s, she finally authorized a biography.

The book called The White Mouse became a bestseller.

In one of her last major interviews, a reporter asked whether she had any regrets.

Nancy thought about it for a moment.

My only regret is not killing more of them.

A pause.

And not being able to say goodbye to Ari.

My story is mine.

She died on August 7th, 2011 in Kingston upon Tame’s London.

Regret.

She was 98 years old.

She had asked that her ashes be scattered over the mountains of the Overia, the place where she had led 7,000 men, where she had returned from 500 km of cycling with the worst news of her life, where she had kept going anyway.

The request was honored.

Nancy Wake saw a man being beaten on a street in Vienna in 1933.

She was 20 years old.

She was a foreign reporter.

She had every practical reason to walk away and write the story and move on.

Instead, she wrote a sentence in a notebook.

Anything in my power.

She spent the next 12 years finding out what that meant.

It meant 2,000 people through the Pyrenees.

It meant 7,000 men in the mountains.

It meant 500 km on a borrowed bicycle with a dead husband’s secret in her chest, pedalling back to the people who needed her.

It meant asking to be buried in the place where she had honored her promise because that was where she had been most alive.

This is the story of Nancy Wake, the journalist who became the most wanted woman in Nazi occupied France, who cycled 500 km through enemy checkpoints to save 7,000 lives, who only learned what her husband had sacrificed for her when the war was already over, and who 98 years after that clear morning in New Zealand, when she was born with nothing, chose to spend eternity in the mountains of France.

Nancy Wake 1912 to 2011.

The White Mouse, the most wanted woman in Nazi occupied France and the one they never caught.