Catch Me If You Can: Nancy Wake Playing Cat & Mouse with the Nazis
- Alicia Gruenert
- 19 hours ago
- 8 min read
The endless rivalry between Tom and Jerry is a story as old as time. The cat-and-mouse chase has manifested across literary, cinematic, metaphoric, historic, and political realms. One of the most striking examples being the story of Nancy Wake (1912-2011), or, as the Nazis called her, "The White Mouse." Always outsmarting, manipulating, and evading brutal adversaries hiding behind their uniforms with her feminine charms, Nancy Wake, much like Jerry escaping from Tom each time, consistently eluded the Nazis' grasp. This earned her the fitting nickname: "The White Mouse."1
As a secret agent for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British organization created in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in German-occupied Europe, Wake honed her expertise in espionage, becoming a singular public enemy in the eyes of the Gestapo.2 She was placed on their most-wanted list with a bounty of five million francs on her head.3 Defying the stereotypical, misogynistic social conventions of her time and standing as a fierce advocate for humanity, Nancy Wake’s fiery spirit and bravery instilled fear in the supposedly "fearless" Nazi regime.4
The 20th century was globally plagued with a cycle of turbulent uncertainty. When many people fled from the disarray taking gruesome shape, Nancy Wake chose instead to survive, thrive, and seek out the chaos. At age 20, she left her quiet life in Australia and began her career in journalism in 1932 London. Young, ambitious, and driven by a passion for uncovering the truth, Nancy quickly immersed herself in the rapidly shifting political landscape of Europe in the years leading up to the Second World War. As a journalist, she was able to travel and witness first-hand the monstrosity and cruelty of the Nazi regime towards Jews. “In the middle of that beautiful city of Vienna, there was a big wheel in the square, and the Jews were tied to the wheel. The SS was whipping them. If ever I could do something one day, I’ll do it,” Nancy recalled in an interview decades after the incident.5 Amid Europe’s turmoil, Henri Fiocca, a wealthy French industrialist, captured Nancy's heart, and the two wed shortly after meeting. Their matrimony transpired in 1939, the same year World War II would commence.
The UK and France then declared war on Germany in 1939. When Nancy offered to serve at a British recruitment centre, she was informed that she was not required and that she would be working only in the canteen.6 Greater opportunities awaited her in France, where her husband Henri was called up in 1940 to fight with the French Army. In the meantime, Nancy contributed to the Allied cause by helping neighbours, delivering clandestine messages, supporting soldiers staying at local hotels, and purchasing a car to use as an ambulance driver.7
Even being financially able to flee the growing unrest, Nancy and Henri chose to fight back. Their shared interest and resistance were well-suited to them as strong allies against Hitler's growing regime. When Germany invaded France in 1942, there emerged a loose association of resistance to Nazi occupation, called the French Resistance, and Nancy discovered her calling. She distributed clothing, false identification papers, and identity cards to help men avoid capture by the Nazis. With Henri, she purchased a hideaway house near Marseille to house escapees and organize underground operations.8
With her insurgent work, Nancy became acquainted with the top resistance leaders, including Ian Garrow, a British officer who established the O'Leary Line, an escape route for British prisoners of war. Her contact with such leaders and growing prominence soon placed her at the head of the Gestapo hit list. Despite regular encounters with Nazi officers, Nancy Wake successfully transported secret messages, coordinated safe houses, and orchestrated prison breaks, all while avoiding capture. She achieved this not only through meticulous planning and bravery but also by skilfully manipulating perceptions; by leaning into her femininity, through fluttering her eyelashes, seductive language, and the disarming charm of a femme fatale. Nancy often engaged Nazi officers in conversation without arousing suspicion, using flirtation as a calculated tool to make herself appear non-threatening and above suspicion.9
Her keen intelligence and aptitude for espionage soon made her too great a threat to ignore. By 1943, she was placed on the Gestapo's Most Wanted list, prompting an extensive manhunt. Aware she had to flee alone to avoid suspicion, she left Henri behind. Her three-month journey to England was nearly cut short when she was captured by the Milice, a paramilitary force aligned with the Nazis. After four days of interrogation and physical abuse, they failed to uncover her identity or her codename, “the White Mouse.” She was released after Garrow claimed she was his mistress, allowing her escape to continue.10
Nancy's flight was the turning point. Discovering about the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an organization set up by Churchill to hamper Nazi operations, she enlisted. Having undergone months of intensive training, she became a fully trained spy and agent (a rare role for a woman at the time), ready to take the fight back to Europe.
From 1943 until the war's end, Nancy's dedication to the cause was clear through her deployment to France, where she conducted missions against the Nazis and led numerous resistance networks.11 However, being part of a war entails great sacrifice, something that Nancy could not fight off. This sacrifice would be the death of her late husband, the love of her life Henri. Call it intuition, but Nancy vividly remembered having a troubling dream about her husband’s death just before he was killed in 1944. Executed by the Nazis, Fiocca's actions and involvement as a resistance fighter led to his capture.12 Facing imminent execution, Henri showed no fear or remorse, paying the ultimate price for his loyalty to his country and love for his wife.
War is the material expression of novel practices. No matter war's cyclical form (rising tension, mobilization, fighting, and the escalation of conflict), war's nature is uncertainty, the product of human behaviour's complexity. Not only in the practice of war as a whole but also in the roles and knowledge of women does this uncertainty surface, best attested to by Nancy Wake's experience.13 My main argument is that war, in disordering the social order, presents moments of resistance and redefinition by people, primarily women like Wake, against deeply ingrained societal attitudes. The twentieth century's prevailing vision of women as wives, mothers, and homemakers narrowly restricted their education and working lives, with the likes of Nazi Germany reinstating domestic responsibilities for girls while preparing boys for warrior life.14 But with wars forcing record-breaking societal upheaval, women like Nancy Wake transferred to the fields of nursing, factory labour, and, in Wake's case, combat and intelligence gathering.15 Not only did her actions thwart the Nazis but also undermined their rigid concepts of womanhood by using her femininity as a strategic weapon.16It is evident from Wake that war reveals and has the ability to dismantle the foundations of what is expected of society. It is evident from Wake that war reveals and has the ability to dismantle the foundations of what is expected of society. Yet, despite the radical nature of her contributions, Wake’s story is often side-lined in mainstream war historiography, which tends to centre male combatants or cast women primarily in support roles.
Nancy Wake's affiliation with the Special Operations Executive illustrates the idea of complexity in historical thinking by presenting contradictions and complexities in the wartime roles of women. Rather than adhering to one or stereotypical story, Wake embodied multiple identities: femme fatale, strategist, and combatant, which illustrates how her action violated women's role expectations in the early twentieth century. Her history interrupts traditional narrative by revealing how war reaffirms and deconstructs cultural norms. The Nazi state enforced a rigid dichotomy of male virility and female domesticity, but Wake worked and manipulated within and against those limits with both her intelligence and her gendered expectation to her benefit.17 Her history closes off easy binary oppositions such as hero or criminal, feminine or militant, victim or agent. Rather, it calls for a closer look at the socio-political forces driving and driven by individual agency in times of war. Ultimately, Wake's legacy demonstrates how the choices of historical actors are driven by, and drive changes in, broader ideological, cultural, and political systems.
Nancy Wake became the most decorated British servicewoman, celebrated for her courage, resilience, and ingenuity in resisting the Nazis. The once-feared men of steel were reduced to fools in their failure to capture the elusive "White Mouse”… a petite yet formidable force. Wake redefined what it meant to be a modern rebel, pioneering a new path in female espionage. She weaponized her gender and femininity, using charm and flirtation to escape enemy grasps and exploit the widespread belief that a woman couldn’t possibly outsmart them. Like Jerry evading Tom, she consistently outwitted brutal men hiding behind uniforms, earning her infamous nickname.
War exposes the worst of humanity, but also its best. Nancy’s fearlessness pushed her to fight for justice against tyranny, and her sharp mind kept her one step ahead. Everyone becomes an outlaw in war, and she was no exception. Yet she knew her actions were justified in the name of freedom. Time and again, she slipped through the Nazis’ fingers with almost playful precision, moving with the kind of boldness that bordered on cockiness, as if daring them to catch her. They called her “The White Mouse,” a name as fitting as it was telling: like a certain clever cartoon mouse endlessly outwitting his pursuers, Nancy turned evasion into an art form. She helped shape history not just through violence or victory, but through conviction. Nancy Wake ran toward the fire when the world was burning. Her story is not just one of resistance, but of rewriting who gets remembered. To honour her is to demand space for women in the history books, not as exceptions, but as essential.
1 Nancy Wake, The White Mouse: The Autobiography of Australia’s Greatest War Heroine (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985), 1
2 The National Archives (UK), “Nancy Wake – Special Operations Executive,” accessed April 22, 2025, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/nancy-wake/.
3 National Archives of Australia, “Nancy Wake: Second World War Heroine,”
https://www.naa.gov.au/students-and-teachers/student-research-portal/learning-resource-themes/government-and-d e mocracy/activism/second-world-war-heroine-nancy-wake.
4 Peter FitzSimons, Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2001), 98. 5 NZ On Screen, Nancy Wake Remembered, 2019, https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/nancy-wake-remembered-2019.
6 Russell Braddon, Nancy Wake: SOE’s Greatest Heroine (London: Cassell, 1956), 64.
7Ibid., 78.
8 FitzSimons, Nancy Wake, 123.
9 Wake, The White Mouse, 105.
10 Braddon, Nancy Wake, 99.
11 The National Archives (UK), “Nancy Wake – Special Operations Executive.”
12 FitzSimons, Nancy Wake, 150.
13Nancy Wake, The White Mouse: The Autobiography of the Woman the Gestapo Called the White Mouse (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985).
14 Women and the National Community, Facing History & Ourselves, last modified August 2, 2016, https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/women-national-community.
15“Women of Steel: LIFE With Female Factory Workers in World War II,” TIME, March 8, 2017, https://time.com/4679011/women-factory-workers-wwii-life/.
16“Nancy Wake, the White Mouse,” War History Online, June 21, 2017,
17 Nancy Wake, The White Mouse: The Autobiography of the Woman the Gestapo Called the White Mouse (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985).
Bibliography
Primary
Wake, Nancy. The White Mouse: The Autobiography of Australia’s Greatest War Heroine. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985.
Wake, Nancy. The White Mouse: The Autobiography of the Woman the Gestapo Called the White Mouse. South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985., https://archive.org/details/nancywhite-mouseautobio1985 - The National Archives (UK). “Nancy Wake – Special Operations Executive.”
Wake, Nancy. The White Mouse: The Autobiography of the Woman the Gestapo Called the White Mouse. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985.
NZ On Screen. Nancy Wake Remembered. Documentary, 2019.
Secondary
Facing History & Ourselves. Women and the National Community. Last modified August 2, 2016. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/women-national-community. - FitzSimons, Peter. Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2001.
https://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Wake-Fitzsimons-Peter/dp/0732295254 - Braddon, Russell. Nancy Wake: SOE’s Greatest Heroine. London: Cassell, 1956.
"Nancy Wake, the White Mouse.” War History Online. June 21, 2017. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/nancy-wake-white-mouse.html - National Archives of Australia.“Nancy Wake: Second World War Heroine.” https://www.naa.gov.au/students-and-teachers/student-research-portal/learning-resource t hemes/government-and-democracy/activism/second-world-war-heroine-nancy-wake - “Women of Steel: LIFE With Female Factory Workers in World War II.” TIME, March 8, 2017. https://time.com/4679011/women-factory-workers-wwii-life/.
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