Tuesday - August 09, 2011

‘Allo ‘Allo and Goodbye

Blisteringly sexy, she killed Nazis with her bare hands and had a 5 million-franc bounty on her head. As she dies at 98, the extraordinary story of the real Charlotte Gray

She stares into the camera with a coquettish half-smile and an unflinching come-hither look. The eyebrows are plucked, the lips full, the long auburn hair a classic 1940s style, falling onto the shoulders of her khaki uniform. She could easily have been one of the sassy songbirds who brightened up World War II. But this was the face of Nancy Wake, one of that conflict’s bravest underground fighters against the Germans in France — and certainly the most stylish. A male comrade-in-arms in the French Resistance summed her up as: ‘The most feminine woman I know, until the fighting starts. And then she is like five men.’ She lived up to both parts of that compliment.
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... after being parachuted into France as a Special Operations Executive agent, she disposed of a German guard with her bare hands and liked nothing better than bowling along in the front seat of a fast car through the countryside, a Sten gun on her lap and a cigar between her teeth, in search of Germans to kill.
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Passionate and impulsive, with a tendency to draw attention to herself, she was not the ideal undercover agent. Her superiors didn’t think she would last long behind enemy lines. But Wake proved them wrong and died this week, aged 98, in a nursing home for retired veterans in London. Her death brought to an end a life of such daring, courage and glamour that she was the inspiration for the Sebastian Faulks novel Charlotte Gray, which was made into a film starring Cate Blanchett.
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(in 1939, ) Nancy was visiting London, for, of all things, a slimming course, when war was declared in September 1939. When she tried to join up to fight she was pointed, to her disgust, in the direction of a Naafi (Navy, Army and Air Force) canteen. So she went back to France and, when that country fell to the invading Germans, she proved herself as brave and as aggressive as any man — and more than most.
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in London she volunteered for SOE’s French section and, despite reservations that she was too much of a party-girl, she was taken on and trained in survival skills, armed combat, Morse code and surveillance.  Six weeks before D-Day, she was parachuted into the heavily-forested and mountainous Auvergne region of central France to prepare local Resistance groups, the Maquis, for the job of harrying the Germans and delaying their reinforcements once the invasion began.
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Nancy proved her mettle, arranging air drops and hiding supplies of weapons, travelling between the groups, paying out money, urging them to co-operate, knocking them, as best she could, into shape. She was as tough as the old army boots she eschewed for heels. With an escort of Maquisards, she shot her way through enemy patrols and roadblocks.
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She led attacks on German convoys and even took on armoured cars. When asked why she insisted on travelling in the lead vehicle, she said it was because she couldn’t bear dust being thrown up in her face by cars in front. In one mini-battle, her car was strafed by German fighter planes but she crawled out of the wreck, hanging onto her prized possessions — a jar of face cream, a packet of tea and a satin cushion. When the roads were too dangerous to travel by car, she cycled more than 300 miles in three days to find a working radio set to contact London.
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She was festooned with honours — a British George Medal, the French Legion d’Honneur and three Croix de Guerre. She remarried, returned to Australia to live, took up politics for a while, then came back to Britain to retire in 2001. Her body is to be cremated, but at her request the ashes will be scattered in the Auvergne.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/09/2011 at 07:50 AM   
Filed Under: • FRANCE • War-Stories •  
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