Nancy Wake

Agent of the Special Operations Executive, courier and organiser for the French Resistance, and in 1943 the Gestapo's most wanted person in France. Born on 30 August 1912 in Wellington, New Zealand, and raised in Sydney. She worked as a journalist in Europe in the 1930s and saw Nazi Germany at first hand. In 1939 she married the French industrialist Henri Fiocca and settled in Marseille. From 1940 she worked in the escape line that moved downed Allied airmen and escaped prisoners of war over the Pyrenees into Spain. Hundreds passed through her hands. The Germans tapped telephones and opened mail hunting for the elusive courier they called the White Mouse; by 1943 she headed their wanted list, with five million francs on her. In 1943 she crossed the Pyrenees herself, reached Britain and trained with SOE. In April 1944 she parachuted into the Auvergne and became the link between London and maquis groups some seven thousand strong, arranging drops, distributing weapons and coordinating operations. After a German sweep in which the codes were lost, she rode a bicycle some five hundred kilometres in seventy hours through checkpoints to restore contact with London. Her husband was seized by the Gestapo, tortured and executed in 1943; he did not give her up. She learned of his death only after the liberation of France. She received the George Medal, the Croix de Guerre, the Medal of the Resistance, the Legion of Honour and the American Medal of Freedom. She died on 7 August 2011.