"For goodness sake, did the allies parachute me into France to fry eggs and bacon for the men?" she asked. One scene provoked a typically scornful response. Her autobiography was published in 1985 and inspired a television drama in the late 80s. Wake was among the first of the SOE's female agents to be celebrated in print, although the 1956 biography by Australian journalist Russell Braddon was lamented by the official historian of the SOE in France as being frivolous in tone. They relocated to Australia and had a gregarious life marked by dining, golfing, occasional trips to Europe and interviews with journalists about wartime exploits. He liked a drink, enjoyed a joke, and they were well matched. Still restless, she moved to London and married John Forward, an RAF bomber pilot. A desk-bound job in the British embassy in Paris quickly drove her wild with boredom, and she returned to Australia, where she stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate in 19. The Americans awarded her the Medal of Freedom. The French gave her three Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance, and later made her Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. After the liberation of France, Wake returned to London, where she was awarded the George Medal. She blamed herself for his death: if it had not been for her, she mourned, he would have survived the war. But he was picked up by the Gestapo and shot. Eventually, she caught the Gestapo's eye and in May 1943, knowing they were hot on her trail, she escaped from France to Spain. She began to help British soldiers trapped by the collapse of France to escape back home, and this led to her heroic undercover work with the famous escape line organised by Pat O'Leary (in reality, a Belgian army doctor named Albert Guérisse). Together, they enjoyed a life of champagne, caviar and travel.Īfter Henri was called up for service following the outbreak of war, she enrolled as an ambulance driver. She worked in Paris, saw nazism at work in Germany and Austria, and in France, in 1939, married a wealthy industrialist, Henri Fiocca. With financial help from an aunt, in 1935 she sailed for Europe and trained as a journalist in London. Shortly afterwards, her father abandoned the family, and at 16 she rebelled and ran away. She didn't suffer."īorn in Wellington, New Zealand, Wake moved with her parents and five siblings to Sydney, Australia, when she was two. "It didn't put me off my breakfast," she said. Wake claimed to have dispatched a German sentry with the silent killing method she had learned during her training in Scotland, and once had even ordered a captured French spy, a woman, to be shot. Later, working with two American officers when the Germans launched an attack on another maquis group, she took command of a section whose leader had been killed and with exceptional coolness directed the covering fire while the group withdrew with no further loss of life. To try to re-establish contact with London, Wake walked more than 200km (125 miles) and biked another 100km in an effort to make contact with an operator from another SOE group. Two weeks after D-day, a major attack by some 10,000 Germans using armoured cars, tanks, artillery and aircraft was made on their positions, during which they got separated from the circuit's radio operator, Denis Rake. We just couldn't work out where it all went." "I had never seen anyone drink like that," confessed Farmer, "and I don't think the maquis had either. "I liked that kind of thing," she said, although she had to prove herself first as an honorary man, a feat easily accomplished by regularly drinking her French comrades under the table. The circuit's orders were to help organise and arm the local maquis, and soon Wake was fighting alongside them in pitched battles with the Germans. "Don't give me that French shit," she replied with her customary bluntness – or so she liked to chuckle when retelling the story.Ĭircumstances gave her considerable freedom of action. One of the Frenchmen greeting her said he hoped all trees could bear such beautiful fruit. On landing, her parachute got stuck in a tree. Wake was a woman of very high energy, he said, with "very clear ideas of how she wanted everything done". In April 1944, Wake was dropped by parachute into the Auvergne region along with Major John Farmer, leader of the Freelance resistance circuit.
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