Hey Ian! Nancy Wake RIP ...

Interesting Pat

I'm waiting for the Hollywood version that has them both working through the OSS.:laugh:
 
In their dotage?

or back when. I kinda like the idea of an octogenarian agent saboteur-how about you? :p:p

What these people did in the face of what they faced is too much. I remebering reading somewhere that as a teenager Audrey Hepburn was a courier for the underground resistance in- Belgium? Holland? can't place it. Do you know that story?
 
Not soon see another like her...

Quite a lady!

Wake was so successful with the Resistance that she soon graduated to taking groups of refugees and downed Allied pilots or Jewish families from one “safe house” to another until they reached the base of the Pyrenees, where other guides would get them across into neutral Spain.
So busy was she that the Gestapo came to call her “the White Mouse”, in part, it seems, because whenever they felt they had this beautiful woman they had heard about cornered, she was able to disappear. Once, the Gestapo almost caught her — but she was able to escape while bullets whistled around her ears, before getting over the Pyrenees herself.
​
Wake soon went to Britain to train with munitions coordinator, and was put in charge of visiting units and determining the supply they needed–or deserved. She won the grudging respect of the officers with her ability to drink them under the table and once killed an SS officer with her bare hands. Her toughness became the stuff of legend.
One evening Wake was dining with friends in the reopened British Officers Club in Paris when she got into a blue — not for the first or last time — with an uppity waiter. This waiter thought he had won the confrontation by saying he would much prefer to serve the Germans than the likes of her and her noisy friends.
She reflected on this for perhaps half a second before leaping to her feet and knocking him senseless with a right hook. As she recounted, as soon as another alarmed waiter rushed to his fallen colleague with a glass of brandy, she grabbed it, drained it in two seconds, said “Merci,” and walked on out the door. That was Nancy Wake.
​
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/08/08/nancy-wake-obit/
 
Yep, she's made the news down here too, mate!

Strange how great people like Nancy don't seem to show up much in the news................until they die! :sigh:

Even tho she was born a Kiwi, I gotta admit (reluctantly) that she spent most of her younger days in Oz! :cry:
Certainly a woman that needs to be widely recognised for her bravery in Europe in WW2!

cheers, Ian - NZ
 
Nice biog there Colonel

True bravery has no borders. These dames were dynamite. We see few of their ilk nowadays. :boxing:
 
Ian. Never was a descriptive noun

So badly debased me old mate.
These operatives suffered unbelievable privations, torture and anonymous burial. They were heroic in all regards.
Socialites, pop stars, ageing rockers, ex Premiers (with the notable exception of Roosevelt) and aspirational 'celebrities' are no more than flea bites on the butt of history by comparison.

Mind you, your trouble is pretty bloody exceptional when you see who she married!:rolleyes::)
 
Dave, have you seen the...

Daniel Craig film about the Bielski resistance group? I think it is called Defiance. Harrowing to say the least. It's Hollywood but the story is worth knowing.
 
Yep. Seen and enjoyed

But, like a classical Russian morality book, it takes a while to absorb the cruel truth of the portrayal.
 
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