Farewell to Nancy Wake, “The White Mouse” of WWII

For the remainder of the war she was involved in ambushing German convoys and destroying bridges and railway lines. When 10 men in her camp refused to perform their water-carrying duties she persuaded them by emptying a bucket over each. She interrogated a woman spy and ordered her execution, but saved two girls she considered innocent.

She was also on a raid that destroyed the Gestapo’s headquarters in Montluon, leaving 38 Germans dead. It was, she wrote later, “the most exciting sortie I ever made. I entered the building by the back door, raced up the stairs, opened the first door along the passage way, threw in my grenades and ran like hell.”

On her 32nd birthday — shortly after the liberation of Paris — her Maquis comrades paraded in her honour at the chateau they had appropriated for their headquarters. “When we were fighting we were fighting,” she said “When we weren’t we were having a jolly good time. I never was scared.”

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When I first met her for the Herald at her Port Macquarie apartment in April 2000, I raised the subject of whether she would accept an honour from the Australian Government. “No,” she said with a ferocity that shocked me. “The last time there was a suggestion of that I told the government they could stick their medals where the monkey stuck his nuts. The thing is, if they gave me a medal now, it wouldn’t be given with love, so I don’t want anything from them.”