New Zealand born, Australian raised Nancy Wake, awarded just about every decoration under the sun for her work with the French resistance in the Second World War, has died of a chest infection. Her wartime exploits were widely recounted, for instance in the Channel 7 miniseries of the 1980s.
One thing I wasn’t aware of was that she stood for public office for the Liberal Party a couple of times, standing in Doc Evatt’s seat in 1949 and coming quite close to winning. She stood again in 1966, again receiving a substantial swing but failing to take Kingsford-Smith.
I can’t help contrasting the travails inflicted on her entire generation, with the supposed ills bedeviling contemporary middle-class Australia. Our problems mostly look pretty trivial by comparison, don’t they?
A Towering legend for all Australians.
They do, Rob. They do.
Too early to tell.
Nancy Wake was unusual in that she was one of the relatively small number of participants who wasn’t conscripted.
In other words most participants had no choice but to follow orders.
In that sense, Wake has more in common with the insurgents of the 1960s than with other members of the so-called “Greatest Generation”.
She was an incredibly resourceful, brave and ruthless warrior.
Katz, you realise something like 80% of all those Australian servicemen who saw battle in that war were volunteers, right?
Not that Wake was representative of that cohort, of course.
I do realise that Australian service personnel comprised a vanishingly small proportion of all who served in WWII, the vast majority of whom were conscripts.
Robert, your final para redoubles the poignancy of what that generation faced. While many who served maintain quiet dignity, the shrieks and whinges of the entitled middle class grow ever more deafening.
Politicians: Enough. We’ve OD’d on the poor bugger me “empathising” schtick. Time to reflect on just how good we’ve got it, and just how much that generation gave to make it possible.
On the 6pm bulletin on ABC she was quoted as follows:
“I thought the only good German was a dead one.”
Not the kind of clarion call one would hope for from a courageous fighter for the dignity of all humans, and downright offensive to those Germans who fought the N@zis or those who survived transfer to the death camps.
The only Germans she encountered during wartime were implicated in the destruction of France. The were all legitimate targets.
After the war, no doubt she met many Germans whom she did not kill, strange to say.
True Fran, but she was talking in the past tense about how she felt during WW2 and as she operated in occupied France, where such Germans as she came into contact with were not likely to be fighting against Germany and weren’t in its death camps, it is an understandable and forgivable sentiment.
Perhaps after WW2 she had time to reflect and revised her views. Weary Dunlop and Tom Uren were admirable in this regard about the Japanese people.
I like to imagine Nancy Wake and Josephine Baker having an post WWII catch-up. I bet they’d have some stories to swap.
GregM:
Exactly. My great-grandfather was “gassed back to Blighty” on the Western Front during WW1 by the Germans and was understandably filled with bitterness and hatred towards Germans as a result during his shortened life following the war. I’d like to think that if he had lived longer he would have forgiven them in time.
I have not read Peter Fitzsimons’s biography but when you consider that Nancy Wake would have only been in her early 30′s at the end of WW2 it makes for a lot of living ”unbesmirched’ by wartime exploits. She was nearly a Lib parliamentarian, had a fierce temper….what else?
Well there is being an Officer of the French Legion of Honour and three French War Crosses, having the British George Medal, the American Medal of Freedom and being a Companion of our Order or Australia because of her extraordinarily distinguished war service in the liberation of Europe from the vilest tyranny and in saving hundreds of Allied lives.
But then if that is not good enough for you then the problem isn’t with her but with you.
At least Fran had the decency to only point out that she wasn’t perfect and a paradigm for all time.
Poltically far right accused Evatt of being a Communist and would have been elected if not for W being after E. NLA Trove brings up some stories!
GregM said:
Yes, but did you see the clip on ABC News 24 tonight? Whatever she intended, the statement was not qualified in the way you suggest.
I’d never heard of the White Mouse until I found her biography in a book shop. She should be up there with Simpson and his Donkey.
Her husband was tortured and killed by the Germans. Hardly unsuprising that she enjoyed killing box heads.
Having one’s husband tortured and executed by the Gestapo does not help one be well disposed to Germans. What would have been harder for Wake is that she didn’t even know of her spouse’s fate until the end of the war.
But as Fran quotes: “I thought…”, and “thought” is the past tense of “think”. Perhaps this heroine reflected on her emotions and views after the war, as Dunlop and Uren did. I hope she did. It would have been a waste to be stuck in hatred over six decades.
Yes Saigon, but “I only wish I’d killed more” is in the present tense.
Heard Peter Fitzsimons talking about her today and my impression was that she might have been quite lost after the war. Imagine having lived in a forest on adrenaline, alcohol and short rations for a few years, being widowed (and what happened to her first husband was horrific), then coming back with her second husband to the Australia of the 1950s. Highlight of the week is putting on a hat and gloves to go to Town, or having a tea-party with women whose experience of the war was entirely different from your own. All the other surviving SOE women are in the UK and France. No wonder she went in for politics (and I’m sure would have been diminished by it if she had succeeded), then back to Paris. Her French flat was chockers with memorabilia from her Maquis years, Fitzsimons said. Even her British nursing home was one for ex-service-people, so she would have felt understood there. But I suspect it was a very long, dreary life after the war.
Fran, “I only wish I’d killed more” refers to the past, and to ending Nazism a little faster. (You DO know what happened to SOE women who were caught?)
Hard to believe people not touched by WW2 judge others that were. My father was wounded at the D Day landings WW2 he didn’t like Germans either funny that. Dads brother was in Changi for two years didn’t have a lot of time for the Japanese. Comments around the tea table when I was a kid went along the lines of “Pity they didn’t drop the bomb on Berlin” I remember visiting my old man in hospital in the fifties and watching or should that be listening? To the old vets coughing their lungs up from mustard gas poisoning, from WW1 Yep not a nice sound.
Nancy Wake RIP could probably give a flying f*&% of what we may or may not think of what she said. For mine it’s none of my damn business.
@18
In the biography I read of Nancy, she claimed to have a dream that her husband was murdered and woke up screaming. She said from that moment, she knew Henri was dead. It wasn’t confirmed until later of course, but the dates of the dream and his abduction were in the same ball-park.
Katz @ 5, good, now explain to us how the huge number of Soviet and Chinese conscripts fit in with your inverse culture war tropes argument about how the ‘Greatest Generation’ were sheeple compared to the individualistic sixties hippy rebels.
Maybe the Split wouldn’t have happened if Nancy had beaten Evatt?
(Waits for people who don’t know the actual details of the 1954/55 federal intervention into the Victorian branch of the ALP to declare, “No, it still would have happened exactly as it did.”)
David Hare and Fred Schepisi addressed this subject in ‘Plenty’.
For what it’s worth I worked with Nancy in the (then) NSW Department of Sport and Recreation back in 81 and into 82.
She was a lot of fun, down to earth, kind, interested, loved a drink and a chat, *never* talked about her wartime exploits (my dad set me straight on those), didn’t suffer fools in the slightest, but had time for an awkward young fellow like myself.
Have to say she never seemed overly bored with her post-war lot in life – neither more nor less than any of the rest of us get at times.
But … she could certainly dish out some sustained and ferocious character assessment. A bloke working temporarily for the Department and administering some sort of healthy lifestyle program paid the price for being … well … German. She tore massive strips off the man for wandering out of his office to get stuff from the printer in just his bare feet. Poor bast**d looked thoroughly traumatised by the end of it !!
God bless you Nancy.
Fran I didn’t see the clip on ABC News 24. I only took your earlier quotation where according to you her words were about her past thoughts. That is all I commented on and hoped that with the benefit of hindsight she would have developed the attitudes towards her former enemies that two great Australians, Tom Uren and Weary Dunlop, developed.
But since you invite me to I will compare her with some people who have posted here on WW2 having fully the benefit of hindsight and therefore have none of the excuses we may hope for her; those who advocated the complete blockade of Japan and thus the killing of many thousands and maybe millions, of Japanese children and old people through starvation; those who advocated the taking of hostages on false pretence, a war crime at the time and now, and those who thought that the continued conventional bombing of Japanese cities until Japan was reduced to surrender at the cost of many hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions, of lives, was an acceptable way to reduce Japan to surrender, and so on.
When you reflect upon those people I hope you’ll understand that with such ethically compromised people about we should not be too harsh about Nancy Wake’s reflections upon her war experience.
I think that if you do you’ll agree with me that she was a far better person than they could ever hope to be.
GregM
I’m going to resist your invitation to threadhijack. This isn’t about me but about the late Ms Wake.
I reject your characterisation of my position on military tactics on Japan. I didn’t support conventional bombing, though I did support blockade. This need not have led to significant casualties, and in any event, as I noted at the time Japan was pressing for surrender, and would have done so if permitted.
Ms Wake was undoubtedly a person of very considerable courage, and evaluating her as a soldier, I’ve no reason to suppose she behaved unethically in doing what she fairly took to be her duty in the struggle against the N@zi war machine. Her efforts undoubtedly rendered a service to humanity, whatever her thoughts.
That all said, I dislike hagiography, particularly when it is based in part on glossing over the shades of grey that mark even the best of folk.
I wonder!
Leni, after all.
If that isn’t hagiography what is it?
Sorry, just being mischievous.
If you’ve read what I’ve written about Lenin, GregM, you will note, if you are candid, that it’s not hagiographic.
I am an egalitarian, and am thus offended by hero worship. Accordingly, I actively seek out the flaws in those who are seen by most as admirable, including even those I see as admirable.
You are wrong about Japan, Fran. The majority of the leadership were prepared to fight to the last and they barely agreed to surrender even after the atomic bombs.
The “nuclear fear” starting with Hiroshima and Nagasaki is also a myth – at the time, dropping the bombs were overwhelmingly supported by the Allied public – unsurprising given Japanese war crimes.
Nuclear fear started in the 1950s.
Getting back to Nancy Wake’s attitude towards the Germans, both of my parents served in World War II (although not on the front line) and my mother, as recently as 1982, had a very hostile attitude towards the Japanese people on the basis of the Japanese army’s wartime behaviour (especially towards Australian POWs). She was not the only Australian of her generation to feel this way. Nor should we be surprised that citizens of countries which opposed and/or were occupied by the Axis powers, and who either experienced Axis atrocities personally, had friends and family who experienced such atrocities, or who became aware of such atrocities, should have developed similar attitudes. Totalitarian oppression and militarism, by their very nature, drive even the best of the people they oppress to, or beyond, breaking point. Those of us who have had the good fortune to live our entire lives in peacetime Australia and to have the freedom and leisure to develop magnanimous and mutually beneficial relationships with our German and Japanese contemporaries need to show a bit of imaginative sympathy towards previous generations who were less fortunate.
Not quite. Here is Admiral Blandy, Commander of Operation Crossroads, 1946, referring to stated alarm of people at that early date.
Despite his assurances, the alarming radiation released by the first tests forced curtailment of Crossroads.
Crossroads energised anti-nuclear sentiment, but that sentiment already existed, especially in left-wing scientific circles.
I totally get all that Paul (though I think the word you want is not sympathy but empathy.
Hatred, in a context like this (“othering” if Adrien is following) is an adaptive emotion, driven at least in part by the need to breach taboos about killing/being indifferent to the suffering of other human beings.
By definition, it is a wound, a harm to humanity, on a gross scale like the callous that professional guitar and bass players acquire playing their instruments. One desensitises, ansd it’s a useful work around in crazy times, but it’s antithetic to the attitudes one must hold if humanity is to achieve equity in its dealings and advance in the direction of liberation.
It would be far better if one could respond based on an understanding of the prosimal and distal causes of the conflict into which as a soldier, one had been swept up, seeing this as a system failure with ugly consequences, rather than a commentary on the inherently subhuman status of those with whom one was in military conflict. That after all, was precisely how the Japanese and German military high commands encouraged the their forces to see their enemies. That attitude was, at least notionally, the key warrant for resisting their military conduct, arms in hand. It was why, officially at least there were post-war war crimes trials, and the Universal Declaration and similar …
So yes, I get it and I get why, but one should refrain from tossing these things down a hagiographic memory hole.
You are kidding yourself Fran if you believe that. You started off with a paean of praise for Leniin as that “other most important political figure” your life:
followed by a generally banal but at times bizarre defence of your hero over several posts.
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2011/04/22/friday-salon-easter-edition-2/
In no sense were you critical about Lenin. You were at all times his apologist to the point that you were his hagiographer. At no time did you seek out the flaws in your hero, but sought at every time to rationalise them away, excuse them and blame others for them.
You have accorded Nancy Wake none of the consideration that you extended to your god not because you are critical or rational, still less because you are in any way ethical, but because you are a hater, pure and simple. Like your god.
However here is a cheery little song for you to sing along with:
GregM
The very passage you quote belies the allegation of hagiography. My focus was the ethical principle — at the heart of the ethics of every human being lies the struggle of the working people of the planet to shape public policy to serve humanity rather than to serve the privileged
That you can miss this underlines the role of your own paradigm in framing the world.
I’ve repeatedly noted Lenin’s misreading of the situation in 1917 and onward, his policy on the run approach, his dispersion of the CA, and his failure to insist upon an early ceasefire with the Germans, his failure to think through the consequences of a prolonged isolated barracks regime beyond a mere acknowledgement of the likelihood of failure, and especially, the ban on factions at the 10th Party Congress.
He was indeed an unusually insightful activist, but he too was flawed, and very much a man of his times. He railed at Zetkin over issues of sexual morality for example, once complaining that “sex should not be like drinking a glass of water”.
These days, I don’t even use the term Leninist, in part because I regard his schema as excessively formalistic and also regard him as having been shown to have been wrong in concluding that capitalism had indeed exhausted all of its scope to build the productive forces after August of 1914 with the conclusion that the era of capitalist reform had come to a final close. The period after WW2 shows the contrary.
I reject utterly the suggestion that I am his uncritical admirer.
And for the record, I don’t hate anyone, however much I might object to their conduct.
You simply don’t have the intelligence to realise that in associating Lenin, as you did, and in the unqualified way you did, to the point of naming, or nicknaming your child after him, with what you describe as what you call your ethical principles you were identifying a person with what what you say are your highest values and therefore necessarily and implicitly imbuing him with them. You presented him as your god.
Your lack of insight is amazing although unsurprising.
I knew Nancy Wake quite well and she hated Germans, not just Nazis, with a pathological passion.
She was a client of my mum’s who had a hairdressing salon in Chatswood, a northern Sydney suburb.
My mother was a courier for the Polish underground army the AK during the war and ended up on the run from the Gestapo with two separate warrants for her. She was eventually caught and spend 10 days in the condemned cells in Radom prison. As the German authorities couldn’t reconcile the two warrants, and being sticklers for bureaucratic correctness, they sent her to Auschwitz while they sorted the problem out. Luckily for her, the war ended.
Nancy and my mum hit it off famously and became as thick as thieves both sharing hatred of all Germans, both believing that it was a nation of degenerates.
As this was just some 15-18 years after the war ended, their experiences were still relatively fresh.
Coming home from school I dropped by the salon (78 Archer St) and there was Nancy and my mum having a cup of tea and bikkies, Nancy her head swathed in curlers and covered by a net. Two little old ladies (in their mid 50s, but to a 14-year-old they seemed old), both rather tiny and chubby in floral prints, a picture of good natured suburban bon homie.
We got onto the topic of war and women in it and prevailing male attitudes to females as soldiers. Nancy related that one time she came to the farmhouse she and some members of the Maquis were occupying and her French comrades in arms had finally unmasked and confronted a spy in their midst, a girlfriend of one of the maquisards.
“So where is she now?” Nancy asked.
They motioned to a closed door to a small room. Well, are we gonna knock her off, or what?” asked Nancy.
“No, no, Madame, zis not poseeble, it eez not done to keeel a woooman,” one of them said. “Nobody wants to keel a woman…”
Here Nancy did a Gallic shrug with outstretched palms and pursed her lips the way the frogs do, in imitation.
“Oh yeah? Just watch me,” Nancy said.
“I went into the room,” Nancy related, “and the bitch was filing her nails. “When she saw me she shit her self and dropped the nail file. I shot her in the head.”
My mum nodded approvingly and sipped her tea and they exchanged glances.
War does funny things to people’s heads.
Further to Nancy running as a Liberal candidate in Kingsford Smith in 1966 standing against ALP stalwart and ex-boilermaker Danny Curtin. The campaign was fought on our entry into the Vietnam War and was marked by massive protests, with objects being thrown at Nancy as well as abuse.
Nancy was a staunch anti-communist and was parachuted by the Brits into occupied France (having escaped the Gestapo earlier via Spain). It was very brave of her to go back knowing she was a marked woman. The Brits were worried that the underground may be infiltrated by the Communists and they wanted a “reliable” person as a liaison. The Brits dropped cash and arms on the say-so of Nancy (she had her own short-wave radio operator).
Furthermore, probably because of her anti-left stance the Labor government after the war refused to recognise her achievements or award her any bravery medals, although the Brits, the US and of course the French (croix de guerre) showered her with medals. She was naturally very dirty with the ALP for that. And she was a hater par excellance.