1. Nancy Wake participated in a battle between the Maquis and a large German force in June 1944.
52 Facts About Nancy Wake
1. 2.
Nancy Wake was a recipient of the George Medal from the United Kingdom, the Medal of Freedom from the United States, the Legion d'honneur from France, a Companion of the Order of Australia from Australia, and the Badge in Gold from New Zealand.
3.
Nancy Wake was Maori through her great-grandmother Pourewa, believed to be of the Ngati Mahanga iwi, who was reportedly one of the first Maori women to marry a European.
4.
In Sydney, Nancy Wake attended the North Sydney Household Arts School.
5.
Nancy Wake witnessed the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement and "saw roving Nazi gangs randomly beating Jewish men and women in the streets" of Vienna.
6.
In 1937, Nancy Wake met wealthy French industrialist Henri Edmond Fiocca, whom she married on 30 November 1939.
7.
Nancy Wake was living in Marseille, France when Germany invaded.
8.
Nancy Wake was later captured, tortured, and executed by the Gestapo.
9.
In early 1943, in the process of getting out of France, Nancy Wake was picked up with a whole trainload of people and was arrested in Toulouse, but was released four days later.
10.
Resistance leader Henri Tardivat discovered Nancy Wake tangled in a tree.
11.
Nancy Wake wanted money and arms from the allies but was not cooperative until the French Forces of the Interior in London, the umbrella organization for the disparate resistance groups in France, instructed him to cooperate.
12.
Nancy Wake's duties were pinpointing locations at which the material and money were parachuted in, collecting it, and allocating it among the maquis, including pay to individual soldiers.
13.
Nancy Wake carried with her a list of the targets the maquis were to destroy before the invasion of France by the Allies.
14.
Nancy Wake's objective was to demonstrate that the resistance was able to liberate areas from the Germans with its own forces.
15.
The nearest SOE radio and operator were in Chateauroux, Nancy Wake said she borrowed a bicycle and rode it to Chateauroux, found a radio near there, updated London on the situation, and then bicycled back to Saint-Santin, traveling 500 kilometres in 72 hours.
16.
Nancy Wake said that she and Tardivat initiated a series of attacks on German convoys and fought off an attack on their camp by the Germans in which seven French maquisards were killed.
17.
Nancy Wake claimed that she participated in a raid that destroyed the Gestapo headquarters in Montlucon, killing 38 Germans.
18.
At one point Nancy Wake said she discovered that the men were using three girls as prostitutes and mistreating them.
19.
Nancy Wake coerced the maquis to release the women, to whom she provided a wash and new clothes.
20.
Nancy Wake set two of the girls free, but she suspected that a third was a German spy.
21.
Nancy Wake claimed that the spy girl spat and stripped naked in front of her before facing the firing squad.
22.
Nancy Wake said that she killed an SS sentry with her bare hands to prevent him from raising the alarm during a raid.
23.
Immediately after the war, Nancy Wake was awarded the George Medal, the United States Medal of Freedom, the Medaille de la Resistance, and thrice, the Croix de Guerre.
24.
Nancy Wake worked for the intelligence department at the British Air Ministry, attached to embassies in Paris and Prague.
25.
Nancy Wake stood as a Liberal candidate in the 1949 Australian federal election for the Sydney seat of Barton, running against Dr Herbert Evatt, then deputy prime minister, attorney general, and minister for external affairs in the Ben Chifley Labor government.
26.
Nancy Wake ran against Evatt again at the 1951 federal election.
27.
Nancy Wake left Australia just after the 1951 election and moved back to England.
28.
Nancy Wake worked as an intelligence officer in the department of the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff at the Air Ministry in Whitehall.
29.
Nancy Wake resigned in 1957 after marrying an RAF officer, John Forward, in December of that year.
30.
Nancy Wake became a resident at the Stafford Hotel in St James' Place, near Piccadilly, formerly a British and American forces club during the war.
31.
Nancy Wake had been introduced to her first "bloody good drink" there by the general manager at the time, Louis Burdet.
32.
Nancy Wake was welcomed at the hotel, celebrating her ninetieth birthday there.
33.
In 2003, Nancy Wake chose to move to the Royal Star and Garter Home for Disabled Ex-Service Men and Women, in Richmond, London, where she remained until her death.
34.
Nancy Wake died on 7 August 2011, aged 98, at Kingston Hospital after being admitted with a chest infection.
35.
Nancy Wake had requested that her ashes be scattered at Montlucon in central France.
36.
Nancy Wake's ashes were scattered near the village of Verneix, which is near Montlucon, on 11 March 2013.
37.
Nancy Wake's obituary was included in The Socialite Who Killed A Nazi With Nancy Wake's Bare Hands: And 144 Other Fascinating People Who Died This Year, a collection of New York Times obituaries published in 2012.
38.
Nancy Wake was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1970 and was promoted to Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1988.
39.
In February 2004, Nancy Wake was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.
40.
Nancy Wake's medals are on display in the Second World War gallery at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
41.
On 3 June 2010, a "heritage pylon" paying tribute to Nancy Wake was unveiled on Oriental Parade in Wellington, New Zealand, near the place of her birth.
42.
Nancy Wake wrote her own account with the original title, The White Mouse.
43.
Nancy Wake was featured in a 2012 article in Military Officer.
44.
An Australian television mini-series was released in 1987 entitled Nancy Wake, which is based on the 1956 biography by Russell Braddon.
45.
Nancy Wake was played by Australian actress Noni Hazlehurst and Nancy Wake herself made a cameo appearance in the role of Madame Fouret.
46.
Nancy Wake was made a consultant for the film but only after the script had been written.
47.
Nancy Wake criticised the script upon reading it, and she did so again at the launch of the mini-series.
48.
Nancy Wake was disappointed that the film was changed from an 8-hour resistance story to a 4-hour love story.
49.
Nancy Wake candidly criticized aspects that she felt were not a true depiction of events, and continued for the rest of her life to criticize the script.
50.
In 2002, Melissa Beowulf's portrait of Nancy Wake was a finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize.
51.
Christine Croydon's Underground, a play reviewing Nancy Wake's life opened at The Gasworks Theatre in Melbourne in March 2019.
52.
On 27 August 2020, it was announced that Elizabeth Debicki would star and executive produce a limited series about Nancy Wake titled Code Name Helene, based on Ariel Lawhon's novel of the same name.