In the mid-1930s, an Australian journalist visited Germany to report on the rise of fascism and interview Adolf Hitler. The atrocities she saw there, which included the public beating of Jews, forever changed the course of her young life. Nancy Wake, who died Sunday at age 98, would spend World War II fighting Nazism tooth and nail, saving thousands of Allied lives, winding up at the top of the Gestapo’s most-wanted list and ultimately receiving more decorations than any other servicewoman.
Wake made her way from Spain to Britain, where she convinced special agents to train her as a spy and guerilla operative. In April 1944 she parachuted into France to coordinate attacks on German troops and installations prior to the D-Day invasion, leading a band of 7,000 resistance fighters. In order to earn the esteem of the men under her command, she reportedly challenged them to drinking contests and would inevitably drink them under the table. But her fierceness alone may have won her enough respect: During the violent months preceding the liberation of Paris, Wake killed a German guard with a single karate chop to the neck, executed a women who had been spying for the Germans, shot her way out of roadblocks and biked 70 hours through perilous Nazi checkpoints to deliver radio codes for the Allies. (via)
I’m going to keep talking about this until you all buy her god damn biography. Because I don’t think you guys understand.
She was NUMBER ONE on the Gestapo’s most wanted list during the war. There was a 5 MILLION FRANC prize on her head.
They called her the White Mouse because of her skill for escaping certain death.
She was parachuting into a camp once and got tangled in a tree. A French soldier saw her flailing around and said, “I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year.” She answered only, “Don’t give me that French shit.”
She would smuggle messages, food, and supplies in a supply truck and when she passed German posts she’d wink at the soldiers and say, “Do you want to search me?” They never did.
She found out at one point that her men had been hiding a female German spy, protecting her. The rule was to kill them, but the men didn’t have the heart. But Nancy Wake did. And she never regretted it.
When she killed a man with her bare hands, it was an SS sentry who’d spotted her and she killed him to prevent him from raising the alarm during the raid. She would later say of it, “They’d taught us this judo-chop stuff with the flat of the hand at SOE, and I practiced away at it. But this was the only time I used it – whack – and it killed him all right. I was really surprised.”
She died in 2011, 3 weeks before her 99th birthday.
If you don’t think Nancy Wake deserves a movie and a TV show and all the damn recognition in the world, you’re wrong.
Yaaassssssss can we get a movie? This is like inglorious bastards BUT REAL AND WITH A WOMAN
