Storageheater

One of the thirty-nine women who worked as agents in the French section of SOE was Nancy Wake, an Australian who’d been a journalist in Sydney before marrying a Marseilles businessman. After war broke out she drove an ambulance and helped a number of British prisoners of war to escape. Arrested and questioned by French police, she talked her way out of trouble and eventually, at the fifth attempt, got away over the border to Spain. After SOE training in Britain she parachuted back into the Auvergne in 1944, apparently carrying two revolvers and a pair of high-heeled shoes. An energetic and exuberant twenty-six-year old, she coordinated resistance groups in an area where German troops outnumbered the Maquis, as the resistance were known, by three to one. There was no doubting her bravery under fire: she led attacks on German installations, including grenading a Gestapo headquarters, and was known to have killed a German sentry with her bare hands to keep him from alerting the guard during an attack on a factory.
-Kate Adie, “Corsets to Camouflage”