Nancy Wake, ‘White Mouse’ of World War II, dies at 98

Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, the youngest of six siblings, was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on Aug. 30, 1912. Her father, a journalist, abandoned the family in Sydney. He also sold the family’s home, forcing his wife and their children to find new lodgings.

Ms. Wake left home at 16 and, buffered by a small inheritance from an aunt, booked passage to England.

(Australian War Memorial/ASSOCIATED PRESS) - Nancy Wake, shown in 1945, was a spy and became one the Allies' most decorated servicewomen for her role in the French resistance during World War II.

In London, she bluffed her way into journalism by telling a Hearst newspaper executive that she was fluent in Egyptian— Egypt being a favorite topic of his. She wrote shorthand gibberish that resembled hieroglyphics and passed it off as the language.

The news executive sent her to Paris as a roving European correspondent, where she said she was awakened to the growing atrocities of Adolph Hitler.

In 1939, she married Henri Fiocca, heir to a Marseille shipping concern. She later told the Daily Telegraph: “He was tall. He could dance the tango. And if you dance the tango with a nice, tall man, you know what eventually will happen, don’t you?”

After the Germans rolled into France in 1940, she became an ambulance driver and gradually deepened her involvement in the escape line from her home in Marseille. She hid people on the run, paid exorbitant bribes to prison guards to free those captured by the local authorities and became a dependable courier for the resistance.

She became a threat to the Germans, and her handlers advised her to make her way to England via Gibraltar. Her husband promised to come after settling family business but was shot by the Nazis after refusing to reveal her whereabouts.

With the escape route in constant peril and Germans patrolling the trains, it took several tries before Ms. Wake was able to make it to Spain on the back of a coal truck. She had earlier been forced to jump from a slow-moving train, drawing the fire of German soldiers.

She arrived in England in June 1943, then underwent eight months of training in the Special Operations Executive. She was subsequently parachuted into the Auvergne region of central France as a liaison between London and the Maquis.

After the war, Ms. Wake tried to find a job that suited her energies. She ran unsuccessfully for political office in Australia, returned to England to do intelligence work and, in 1957, married former British air force pilot John Forward. He died in 1997. She never had children.

In recent years, she lived in a nursing home for retired veterans. She passed much of the day clutching a gin and tonic at the nearby hotel bar, the same watering hole where she had her first “bloody good drink” after the war.

Ms. Wake was the subject of two biographies in addition to her 1985 memoir. A TV miniseries aired in the late 1980s; she was typically scornful of its factual liberties.

“For goodness sake, did the allies parachute me into France to fry eggs and bacon for the men?” she asked. “There wasn’t an egg to be had for love nor money, and even if there had been, why would I be frying it when I had men to do that sort of thing?”