Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy Read online

  ‘Albert,’ she called the barman. He came across to her. ‘Put these away for me, will you? I’ve got a date but it might go wrong. If it does, I don’t want a thousand good cigarettes to go with it.’ He asked no questions, just stowed her parcel away behind his bar. A few minutes later, Nancy saw her ‘date’ walking towards the bar from the other side of the road. He was not alone.

  With him were two other young men, one of whom sported the largest and silliest moustache Nancy had seen for years. Looking at it she laughed delightedly. ‘Give me back my cigarettes, Albert,’ she ordered. ‘ No German would ever grow a thing like that!’

  They came in, introduced themselves, the other two both being fellow officers of her friend’s, thanked her profusely for the cigarettes, and then went shopping with her. They bought huge supplies of food and fruit and Nancy paid for all of it. Then they accepted her invitation to come to her flat for dinner that night. And so, casually, unthinkingly, Nancy Fiocca began her career as an active enemy of Hitler and of the Third Reich in Occupied France.

  3 DOUBLE LIFE

  Nancy shopped heavily that afternoon, buying food for a dinner suitable for three extra guests who were both English and ravenous. Then she walked home, up the long steep hill that led to her flat, cursing the weight of her purchases and petrol rationing and the icy wind which had her teeth chattering and her fingers numb round her parcels.

  She let herself into the flat and called Claire.

  ‘We have three guests for dinner,’ she explained, pointing at the heap of food on the armchair where she had dropped it. ‘Englishmen,’ she added casually.

  ‘Pardon, Madame?’

  ‘Englishmen,’ Nancy repeated. ‘God, this flat’s cold. You know, one of the things I find it hardest to forgive the Germans for is no coal for heating. I don’t suppose there’s any hot water?’

  ‘None, Madame.’

  ‘All right, Claire. You start with the dinner. I’ll get into something warmer.’

  She went into her room and put on a warmer dress and, over it, a bathrobe. This bathrobe was a lavish affair in blue, yellow and red. On the shapely Madame Fiocca it looked very exotic indeed. Then she returned to the drawing room and poured herself a stiff brandy. She gulped it down in a way that she knew would have horrified her husband but she was nevertheless gratified to feel its warmth creeping through into her hands and feet. She poured herself a second drink and then sat back comfortably to work out just what she was going to do with three interned Englishman for the rest of the War. The doorbell rang, and Claire, appearing miraculously from nowhere, answered it promptly. Nancy’s guests had arrived.

  As they came into her drawing room and saw her, apparently clad only in a bathrobe and sipping brandy from a large crystal goblet, all three looked anxious. They had been convinced, when first they met her, that she was British. But no Englishwoman would receive male guests dressed only in a negligee. Obviously their hostess was very, very French – and this made them feel like intruders. They grew sheepish and so excessively English that Nancy wondered what on earth was wrong with them.

  ‘Sorry the place is so cold,’ she told them. ‘No central heating any longer and only one hour’s gas for cooking.’ They nodded awkwardly and sat around saying very little, waiting for their hostess to make her next move.

  ‘A drink?’ she offered. This, they all recognised, was the next move. They accepted her offer and she walked briskly across to the bar, her bathrobe swinging interestingly as she did so.

  ‘Brandy or whisky?’ They asked for brandies. Not only must she be French, they decided, she must also be depressingly rich. She passed their drinks across the bar and they drank each other’s health. When they had each had two brandies she began to feel warmer. Her guests were then suddenly petrified to observe her in the act of flinging off her negligee – until it was revealed that under her somewhat suggestive gown was an impeccably modest and well-cut dress. They began to laugh.

  ‘What’s amusing you?’ Nancy demanded, liking nothing better than a joke herself. They gulped heavily and stopped laughing.

  ‘Nothing,’ they muttered, embarrassed. Nancy stared at each man in turn; stared thoughtfully and long. She decided that something must be wrong, probably they wanted to go to the lavatory. After all, they had had a long walk in the cold, so she made an excuse to leave them alone.

  ‘I’ll get you some coffee,’ she announced and walked out to the kitchen. When she returned she found the three men almost crying with laughter.

  ‘Come on,’ she ordered them, ‘let’s have it. What are you all so hysterical about?’

  ‘Well, you see, we thought when we met you that you were British – you know, that we could let you help because you were one of us . . . I mean, all that food and inviting us back here to your flat. But then we saw that bathrobe . . . Well, we thought then you couldn’t be British. I mean . . .’ But they didn’t have to finish. By this time Nancy herself was shrieking with laughter.

  ‘We were so glad to see a dress on underneath your dressing gown or whatever it is,’ the moustached officer announced. ‘Honestly, I mean, you know what French girls are supposed to be like. We didn’t even know which one of us you were after!’

  ‘Oh, all of you, of course,’ Nancy vowed and then they all laughed again. It was not long before Henri returned and, when he did, the joke had to be repeated, so that, for the third time, the flat shook with their mirth. Then they had dinner and got down to the discussion of more serious things.

  The Englishmen told Nancy that Fort St Jean held two hundred or so officers, all anxious to escape back to England. Naturally, they could not escape whilst actually on parole, but they could organise escape attempts at this time.

  For her part Nancy declared that she would be glad to feed and entertain four or five of the two hundred every day of the week, and to provide what food and help she could for the rest who, in the meantime, stayed behind in the fort.

  They talked a lot that night, the three Englishmen and Nancy and her husband. Eventually, more than a little drunk, the internees departed – bearing with them the radio Nancy had given them. When they had gone, Nancy noticed that Henri looked worried but he would not tell her what it was that worried him. She decided not to pester him and so they went to bed.

  Now it was Henri’s turn not to sleep. He was torn by conflicting duties. There was first of all his duty to protect Nancy herself. Although she had a French identity card it revealed, by giving the place of her birth, that she was in fact a British subject in Nazi-conquered Europe, and the Nazis were still very much at war with Britain and the Empire. If Nancy did anything rash she would almost certainly suffer frightful consequences from the Gestapo. On the other hand, precisely because she was British, and even more so because he himself was a passionate admirer of Britain, he felt that he must allow her to do whatever she thought best about the men in Fort St Jean – even if her idea of what she ought to do went as far as he suspected it would.

  Next was his duty to his father and mother and family. If Nancy should attract the unwelcome attentions of the Gestapo, he knew very well that those attentions would not be confined to Nancy and himself. The entire Fiocca family and the vast Fiocca business would probably be destroyed.

  Finally, as a Frenchman, was it his duty to adopt an attitude of laissez-faire towards the Vichy administration (much as he loathed it) since presumably it aimed at protecting France from further horrors at the hands of Germany, or was it his duty to sympathise with any attempt to oppose Vichy and to resume the war in his own country? Whichever way he looked there was some pressing loyalty tugging at his heart to make him look the opposite way. Whatever he did could bring him only recrimination and never any reward. Most painful of all, his strongest instincts pointed the way which his realistic mind told him offered the ghastliest end. The true horror of his situation was finally demonstrated when, in 1943, as he had feared, he fell into the hands of the Gestapo.

  This, however, was only th
e latter end of 1940. Every day now the Fiocca flat was cheerfully invaded by four or five English officers from Fort St Jean and every day they were well fed and provided with cigarettes and soap and other comforts to take back with them to their comrades.

  One day a Captain Ian Garrow arrived. He was very tall, strongly built, clean-shaven and good-looking – a Scot of great charm and considerable cunning. When, a little later, contacts were made by escaping officers on the Spanish frontier and in Gibraltar, he created an embryo escape route. And having observed the generous and somewhat reckless way in which Nancy entertained the men from St Jean, he decided then to channel her hospitality and contempt for all Vichy authorities into his own escape-route business.

  Nancy did not need much encouragement before she agreed, and so Henri’s anguished fears for her, born on the first night when Englishmen had visited their flat, began to materialise. Yet when Nancy now began to ask him for considerable sums of money, to help finance Garrow and his contacts, he gave them – in spite of his own persistent need of liquid capital for business affairs – unfailingly. Thus the Fiocca flat rapidly became a planning centre for the escaping activities of British prisoners of war.

  Steadily, after that, the Fioccas’ life grew more unorthodox. Civilian contacts in the escape racket were brought along by the British officers and Nancy offered them all exactly the same open-armed welcome that she offered the officers, although she relied implicitly on her intuition and bluntly warned away any whom she did not like.

  Christmas Day 1940 arrived. They invited fifteen officers, Antoine (the Corsican waiter) and a number of personal friends to dinner, and she and Henri gave scarves or ties to all the officers except Garrow. He had always been the perfect gentleman and he had constantly declared that he felt naked without a gentleman’s hat. For him Nancy bought a brown homburg initialled I. G. G. She had looked forward mischievously to presenting Garrow with this last touch to his sartorial elegance, but to her dismay he was ill on the day and had to remain in the fort, so that Henri had to deliver the hat to him in hospital. Her disappointment at this detail was largely expunged, however, by the noisy success of the party as a whole and by Henri’s present to her – another gold bracelet to replace the one she had lost after her birthday.

  Garrow, who had just escaped from the fort and was in hiding in Marseille, one day asked her if she would be prepared to take messages to other towns, most particularly Cannes and Toulon.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a bit risky,’ he warned.

  ‘What isn’t?’ she retorted. ‘Anyway, why shouldn’t I travel to Toulon or Cannes, or anywhere else, if I want to? My papers say I’m a respectable married Frenchwoman. I’ve got every right to go anywhere I like. The police can look at my identity card till they’re blue in the face. They still can’t prove that I’m not Madame Fiocca of Marseille. I’ll take any message you like.’

  So began a regular routine of train journeys from Marseille to Cannes, and from Cannes back to Marseille.

  One of their friends, whom Nancy and Henri particularly admired, was a Commander Busch. They had first met him in Marseille shortly after France fell and was divided into two zones. He was a refugee from the northern occupied zone.

  Busch’s father and grandfather had both been ruined by German wars. He had quickly shown which way his sympathies lay in 1940 by helping the men of Fort St Jean as much as possible.

  Early in 1941 he met Nancy casually one day and she told him that she was going to Cannes.

  ‘Will you deliver a package for me at Toulon, on the way, to a man who will be waiting?’ Busch asked. Nancy said at once that she would. Later she delivered a second package. Then the Toulon contact asked her to take a package for him to Lyon. She agreed and also told him that she had a chalet in Névache that he could use for his men whenever he wished. She told him where the keys were always hidden so that if she was not there the chalet could nevertheless be entered.

  When she delivered his package – a suitcase containing a radio transmitter – to the contact at Lyon, she also gave this man her Névache address.

  Thus she became a member of a French Resistance organisation as well as of Garrow’s group, and to her list of towns to be visited, Toulouse and Nice were now added. Her life was getting strenuous. To make it a little more secure she obtained, from a friendly police officer, new papers which, though they still identified her as Mme Fiocca of Marseille, tactfully omitted to mention the fact that she was also a British subject. Armed with these she went on more and more train trips, always with the greatest confidence. Each trip meant another group of men on its way from one place to another (eventually from France into Spain, then from Spain into Gibraltar, finally from Gibraltar back to England). Each trip meant more evaders on the move, often under Nancy’s guidance, but it also meant more people who knew Nancy and so more chance of arrest or betrayal. Right throughout both circuits Nancy was now known as ‘ L’Australienne de Marseille ’, the woman who always laughed. And though this was flattering, and the companionship of her fellow adventurers was agreeable, it was also dangerous.

  To combat growing gossip about her activities, Nancy also lived an ostentatiously normal life in Marseille. She continued to meet all her friends, to entertain, to be seen in restaurants and hotels. Very few of even her most intimate friends knew that she led a dual life. Daily the strain of it grew worse – the sheer exhaustion of being two complete people every day when there were only twenty-four hours in a day – and yet still she accepted more and more responsibility on the circuits. Fortunately, she had a volatile temperament and the excitement of the life she led lent her extra energy.

  So month succeeded month and the two organisations, which had started life as uncertain, stumbling infants, grew steadily to confident maturity. Meantime, in April 1941, Yugoslavia and Greece were both attacked by Germany and quickly occupied. Two months later Russia was also reeling under the first Nazi blows. Then came the next step in the path that led Nancy Fiocca so spectacularly through the War. She heard the odd story of a man called O’Leary who had just been sent by the Vichy authorities to the prisoner-of-war camp at St Hippolyte-du-Fort.

  O’Leary, it seemed, had been arrested by a Vichy patrol on the coast and had told the patrol that he was a French naval officer attempting to escape to England. Promptly, therefore, the Vichy authorities charged him with desertion and sent him to Toulon for a court martial.

  Thereupon O’Leary changed his tune. Halfway through the court martial, which was going very badly for him, he declared, ‘I am sorry, but I have lied. In actual fact I am a British naval officer.’ This plea was accepted and he was interned. The story reached Marseille and there Garrow at once suspected that a stool pigeon was being planted upon them by the Nazis. From his secret hideout he went to St Hippolyte to inquire. Advice from O’Leary himself convinced him that O’Leary was concerned with espionage and that this fact would, on inquiry, be confirmed by London.

  On his return to Marseille, at large but in danger, Garrow cabled London through his usual sources and then, impatiently and suspiciously, awaited London’s reply. When it came it surprised everyone. It instructed him not to attempt to send O’Leary back to England via the escape route but, instead, to keep him in France and to accept him as his main assistant in the circuit.

  O’Leary’s escape from St Hippolyte-du-Fort was then contrived. But no sooner had he broken out of the camp than the alarm sounded. He was passing a convent and already he could hear cars and trucks pursuing him. He entered the convent, told the Mother Superior that he was an escaper and asked for sanctuary.

  The Mother Superior said nothing – just opened a door and pushed him in behind it. Then came a pounding on the front door. The Mother Superior walked to it calmly and opened it.

  ‘Have you a strange man in here?’ she was asked.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she replied, ‘this is a convent!’ The searchers departed and O’Leary was safe.

  When Na
ncy heard this story she said at once to Garrow, ‘Bring him here. I’d like to meet him.’

  4 DISASTER

  O’Leary’s history – like that of everyone connected with Nancy Fiocca – was a fantastic one. On being captured by the Vichy shore patrol he had claimed first French then British nationality, and it was as a Briton that he had finally been interned. Actually he was Belgian.

  He had crossed to Britain after King Leopold’s surrender and had there been assigned to HMS Fidelity , to assist in clandestine operations along the coast of Occupied Europe.

  Fidelity had originally been a French vessel which her commandant had taken to Britain upon the fall of France. There he had offered his own and his ship’s services to the Allied cause – his name was Pérès and he spoke perfect English. He declared it also to be the desire of himself and his crew that half of any prize money they might receive should be devoted to a fund for purchasing Spitfires.

  Pérès was a little surprised, therefore, when enrolled in the Royal Navy, to find that the rings of rank on his sleeve were different from those of other captains. Suspiciously, he inquired about this discrepancy and was informed that his braid rings indicated that he was a reserve officer, not a regular. They were, in fact, wavy rings rather than straight rings and he was Wavy Navy not regular Navy.

  ‘If I am only Wavy Navy, then I and my ship do not fight,’ he declared stoutly. ‘I must be straight Navy.’

  Unavailingly did numerous high officials explain to him that all ships which served as his was serving became Wavy Navy.

  ‘If I am not straight Navy I do not fight,’ Pérès repeated stubbornly, and he refused to sail his ship.

  The matter was taken to the Admiralty and the Admiralty debated it at length. Eventually, anxious to get the ship into operations, it was agreed that Pérès should be allowed to become straight Navy.