Nancy Wake

Nancy Wake, who has died in a London nursing home aged 98, was a spy who became one the most decorated Allied servicewomen during the Second World War for her role in the French Resistance

Code named The White Mouse by the Gestapo during the war, she was trained by British intelligence in espionage and sabotage and helped to arm and lead 7000 resistance fighters in weakening German defences before the D-Day invasion.

While distributing weapons, money and code books in Nazi-occupied France, she evaded capture many times and reached the top of the Gestapo’s wanted list, according to her biographer, Peter FitzSimons.

“They called her ‘la Souris Blanche’ – ‘the White Mouse’ –because every time they had her cornered, she was gone again,” Mr FitzSimons said.

“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 d’Honneur, as well as three Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance.

The United States awarded her its Medal of Freedom, and Britain the George Medal. Her only Australian honour did not come until 2004, when she was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.

Born in the New Zealand capital of Wellington, Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was the youngest of six siblings. When she was two years old the family moved to Sydney, Australia, but her father left the family soon after and returned to New Zealand.

Ms Wake became a nurse before an inheritance from a New Zealand aunt enabled her to run away from home in 1931 and fulfil her dream of travelling to New York, London and Paris.

After studying journalism in London, she became a correspondent for The Chicago Tribune in Paris and reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. A 1933 trip to interview Hitler in Vienna, Austria, led her to become committed to bringing down the Nazis.

“I saw the disagreeable things that he was doing to people, first of all the Jews,” she recalled in a 1985 interview. “I thought it was quite revolting.”

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, she was living in the French city of Marseille with her first husband, French industrialist Henri Fiocca. She helped British servicemen and Jews escape the German occupying force.

Her husband was eventually seized, tortured and killed by the Gestapo. But she managed to escape in 1943 through Spain to London, where she received the espionage training before helping to lead the French resistance in its final days.

She continued working for British intelligence in Europe after the war until 1957, when she moved back to Australia and married British fighter pilot John Forward. She moved back to Britain in 2001, four years after Mr Forward’s death. She never had children.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said yesterday: “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.”

According to her wishes, Ms Wake’s body is expected to be cremated privately and her ashes scattered next spring at Montlucon in central France, where she fought in a heroic 1944 attack on the local Gestapo headquarters.