Heroic spy who fought with French Resistance dies at 98

Code named The White Mouse by the Gestapo, Ms Wake died in a nursing home in London on Sunday.

Trained by British intelligence in espionage and sabotage, Ms Wake helped to arm and lead 7,000 resistance fighters in weakening German defences before the D-Day invasion in the last months of the war.

“They called her la Souris Blanche – the White Mouse – because every time they had her cornered... she was gone again,” her biographer Peter FitzSimons said.

Her staggering achievements earned her France’s highest military honour, the Legion d’Honneur, as well as Britain’s George Medal and other honours.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1912, Nancy Wake became a nurse before an inheritance from an aunt enabled her to leave home in 1931 and fulfil her dream of travelling to New York, London and Paris.

After studying journalism in London, she became a correspondent for The Chicago Tribune in Paris and reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. A 1933 trip to interview Hitler in Vienna, Austria, led her to become committed to bringing down the Nazis.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, she was living in Marseille with her first husband, French industrialist Henri Fiocca. She helped British servicemen and Jews escape the German occupying force.

Her husband was eventually seized and killed by the Gestapo but she managed to escape in 1943 through Spain to London, where she received espionage training.