Nancy Wake

Prominent Second World War resistance fighter Nancy Wake is the most decorated woman in military history as well as my hero.

Nancy always said that cycling 400-500km across 71 hours to retrieve a French resistance radio was her bravest act of the whole war. She had to ride through several German checkpoints but she never flinched. She once walked into a bar and shot several Nazi thugs without hesitation because of their barbarism that she had personally witnessed across Europe. 
 

She saved thousands of lives of Allied airmen and Jewish refugees all the while holding to her mantra “The only good Nazi is a dead one.” She was way ahead of her time and her bravery was unparalleled. She even killed an SS man with her bare hands to stop him sabotaging a resistance raid when she was devoid of a weapon. 

Nancy, who was Maori through her great-grandmother Pourewa, received France’s Legion d’honneur, as well as three Croix de guerre, and a French Resistance Medal, Britain’s George Medal and the US Medal of Freedom, and was also made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2004. But tragically there was no recognition from New Zealand.  

In 1944, Nancy was parachuted back into France, where she fought alongside the Allied Armies after D-Day. The love of her life, her first husband, Henri Fiocca, was tortured and killed by the Gestapo. Nancy kept his photo next to her bed until the end of her long life in 2011. She was once jailed and beaten for four days but the Nazis didn’t realise that they were holding ‘The White Mouse’ so a male friend pretended she was his mistress and got her out.  

In 2006, she became the first woman to be awarded the RSA Badge in Gold from the New Zealand Returned and Services Association at Buckingham Palace.  Australian historians have wasted no time in claiming that she was Australian, but Nancy was a Kiwi even if she felt her country rejected her after the war. 

I firmly believer in the scripture ‘Whoever saves one life saves the whole world’. Nancy saved thousands of lives when instead she could have lived in luxury in the South of France and ignored the plight of Nazi victims. That she didn’t and put her own life on the line every minute of every day to save so many people is surely her greatest legacy.