N.Z. Born Girl Was Terror Of Germans

Wanganui Chronicle, 29 June 1948, Page 7

N.Z. Born Girl Was Terror Of Germans

The toast at a champagne party in Paris recently was “Nancy the Killer”—pretty, dark-haired Mrs. Nancy Fiocca, who was wearing the George Medal presented to her a few hours earlier.

Formerly Miss Nancy Wake, New Zealand-born and brought up in Britain, she married a French industrialist in 1939. He was killed by the Germans.

Nancy’s shy smile and attractive, deep-set eyes, which greet travellers at the British Consulate in Paris, give no c.ue to her wartime bravery as a silent killer and saboteur. Yet these were some of her heroic deeds for the Allies:—

For three years, speaking faultless French, she heiped hundreds of R.A.F. flyers to escape. In 1943 she was captured and tortured by Vichy police, but escaped to Spain by walking for 47 hours across hte Pyrenees. In Britain she learned shooting and sabotage, parachuted back into France, and became the terror of the Germans.

Nancy shot to kill, and “logged” four German officers in solo attacks, and several more in Maquis raids.

“I also learned to make home-made explosive and all about false identity papers—and how to be a first-class liar,” Nancy told a “Daily Mail” reporter. Sir Oliver Harvey, the British Ambassador in Paris, presented the George Medal to her.