Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

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Nancy Wake left the planet yesterday - she was one of the most decorated servicewomen of all time.  I wish someone would make her life story into a movie.  She was simply amazing:

"Nancy was living in Marseille, France when Germany invaded. After the fall of France in the 1940s, she became a courier for the French Resistance and later joined the escape network of Captain Ian Garrow. The Gestapo called her the White Mouse. The French Resistance had to be very careful with her missions as her life was in constant danger and the Gestapo were tapping her phone and intercepting her mail.

By 1943, she was the Gestapo's most-wanted person, with a 5 million-franc price on her head. When the network was betrayed in December 1943, she had to flee Marseille. Her husband, Henri Fiocca, stayed behind where later, unknown to Wake, he was captured, tortured and executed by the Gestapo on 16 October 1943. She was not aware of his death until the war was over. Wake had been arrested in Toulouse, but was released four days later. She succeeded, on her sixth attempt, in crossing the Pyrenees to Spain.

After reaching Britain, Wake joined the Special Operations Executive and on the night of 29–30 April 1944 she returned to occupied France, being parachuted into the Auvergne and becoming a liaison between London and the local maquis group headed by Captain Henri Tardivat. She coordinated resistance activity prior to the Normandy Invasion and recruited more members. She also led attacks on German installations and the local Gestapo HQ in Montluçon.

From April 1944 to the complete liberation of France, her 7,000 maquisards fought 22,000 SS soldiers, causing 1,400 casualties, while taking only 100 themselves. Her French companions, especially Henri Tardivat, praised her fighting spirit, amply demonstrated when she killed an SS sentry with her bare hands to prevent him raising the alarm during a raid. During a 1990s television interview, when asked what had happened to the sentry who spotted her, Wake simply drew her finger across her throat. On another occasion, to replace codes her wireless operator had been forced to destroy in a German raid, Wake rode a bicycle for more than 500 miles (800 km) through several German checkpoints.

Immediately after the war, Wake was awarded the George Medal in 1945, the United States Medal of Freedom, the Médaille de la Résistance and thrice the Croix de Guerre. She was not awarded any Australian or New Zealand decorations.[7] She also learned that the Gestapo had tortured her husband to death in 1943 for refusing to disclose her whereabouts. After the war she worked for the Intelligence Department at the British Air Ministry attached to embassies of Paris and Prague. She was married for the second time in 1957, to an English ex-RAF fighter pilot, John Melvin Forward."

She married twice but had no children. She died in a home for retired veterans. I'm going to download her autobiography The White Mouse for our trip to Norway.