Nancy Wake "The White Mouse"

Nancy Wake The White Mouse SOE Agent with German Officer Prisoner

In the early days of Thomas Gunn, we released a female resistance fighter, SS035. She has been forever popular and we are constantly being asked to release further figures in a similar genre, so we have an all new female fighter in the form of Nancy Wake and a German SS Officer as her prisoner.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Wake grew up in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. By the 1930s, Wake was living in Marseille with her French industrialist husband, Henri Fiocca, when the war broke out. After the fall of France to Germany in 1940, Wake became a courier for the French Resistance led by Ian Garrow and, later, Albert Guerisse. As a member of the escape network, she helped Allied airmen evade capture by the Germans and escape to Spain. In 1943, when the Germans became aware of her, she fled to Spain and then went to the United Kingdom. Her husband was captured and executed.

After reaching Britain, Wake joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) under the code name "Hélène". On 29-30 April 1944 as a member of a three-person SOE team code-named "Freelance", Wake parachuted into the Allier department of occupied France to liaise between the SOE and several Maquis groups in the Auvergne region, which were loosely overseen by Emile Couladon (code name "Gaspard"). She participated in a battle between the Maquis and a large German force in June 1944. In the aftermath of the battle, a defeat for the Maquis, she claimed to have bicycled 500 kilometers to send a situation report to SOE in London.

She was often very brazen when working in German occupied territory, she described her tactics like this: "A little powder and a little drink on the way, and Id pass their (German) posts and wink and say, Do you want to search me? God, what a flirtatious little b**astard I was."

The Germans put out a reward for her and from then on Nancy often had to change her appearance to avoid recognition, this served her well as she survived the war in what was one of the most dangerous jobs for female officers at the time.