Nancy Wake
NANCY WAKE
DSK/AFP/Getty Images
The Gestapo called her the “White Mouse” for her ability to elude capture. For a time, Germany considered her the most wanted woman in the country. Meet Nancy Wake.
Wake, the wife of a wealthy Frenchman, was the most decorated woman of the Allied forces. During her early days in the Resistance, Wake spent her time smuggling men out of France and transporting falsified documents and contraband supplies. While at one point captured and interrogated for several days, Wake never once gave up any secrets.
After escaping in 1943 to Britain, Wake joined the Special Operations Executive, an agency of British intelligence. After being trained in skydiving and weapons, she was dropped back into France as an official British spy.
Wake would go on to lead 7,000 Maquis guerilla troops, blowing up Nazi buildings and sabotaging vehicles and supplies. She once killed an SS Sentry with her bare hands.
Not losing her spunk with age, an 89-year-old Nancy Wake said, “Somebody once asked me, ‘Have you ever been afraid?’ … Hah! I’ve never been afraid in my life.”
Jacqueline Cochran
Jacqueline Cochran
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No stranger to hard work, Jacqueline Cochran spent her childhood working in a Georgia cotton mill starting at age six. As a teen, she was hired to sweep the floors of a beauty shop, kicking off her early career as a beautician and saleswoman.
She took her then-high profile beauty business to new heights when in 1936, she earned her commercial pilot’s license in just three weeks. While Cochran initially did this to gain advantage over her beauty industry rivals, aviation soon became her business, and Cochran quickly began earning medals in air races.
When learning of an imminent war, she proposed an all-women’s flight division to Army Air Force General Henry H. Arnold, who rejected it.
Later, after Cochran broke all sorts of flight records (the 100 kilometer and international 2,000 kilometer speed records; the woman’s national altitude record; the international open-class speed record for both men and women, and the title of outstanding woman pilot four years in a row), Cochran found out that a women’s military program very similar to hers was now underway — and she was furious.
Cochran lobbied for her Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP) program to absorb the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), which was headed up by Nancy Harkness Love. The new, larger program would include more than just ferrying; Cochran would train pilots for the rest of the war.
After earning the U.S. Distinguished Service Medal in 1945, Cochran continued to break flight records, becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier in May 1953. Cochran was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio — the first woman to be admitted — in 1971.
Jacqueline Cochran holds more international speed, distance and altitude records than any other pilot – male OR female.
Virginia Hall
Virginia Hall
Wikimedia Commons
It was once a Nazi imperative to find the unknown “woman with a limp.” In the words of the Gestapo, this woman was “the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.”
The Gestapo spoke of Virginia Hall. Baltimore-born Hall became the first female operative of Britain’s Special Operations Executive to be sent into France, where she worked in the country as a spy for three years.
When the Nazis flooded the country, Hall was forced to escape on foot through the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, a monumental task for anyone – but even more amazing for a woman who had lost a leg years before in a hunting accident.
Hall, using a prosthetic leg which she had nicknamed “Cuthbert,” trekked through the frozen landscape and sent a message to SOE headquarters explaining that she was having difficulty with her artificial limb. The reply: “If Cuthbert is giving you difficulty, have him eliminated.”
When she arrived in Spain, Hall was initially imprisoned for not having valid entry papers. Upon her release six weeks later, Hall worked as an undercover correspondent in Madrid for the Chicago Times, before eventually joining the Office of Strategic Services.
At her request, Hall was sent back into occupied France where she worked as a wireless radio operator, reporting the movements of German troops and organizing supply and arms drops. To avoid detection, she remained on the move – staying in attics or barns. Hall disguised herself as an elderly milkmaid in order to make her way through the French streets, shuffling her feet to disguise the limp that all SS soldiers were on the lookout for.
In recognition of her courage, Hall was awarded the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross — the only civilian woman to have earned one. She joined the CIA in 1951, working as an intelligence analyst. Hall retired in 1966.
Ruby Bradley
Ruby Bradley
Wikimedia Commons
While she only “[wanted] to be remembered as just an Army nurse,” Ruby Bradley was so much more than that. Bradley, a surgical nurse who served at Camp John Hay, was captured three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor and became a prisoner of war at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila.
At the POW camp, Bradley was regarded as an “angel in fatigues,” giving medical care to her fellow captives and saving some of her food for others struggling. “I’d save part of my food for the children later in the day, when they started crying and being hungry,” she said.
Bradley was held for 37 months, all the while performing over 230 surgeries and assisting in childbirths under the camp’s inadequate conditions – and smuggling in food and medical supplies. Bradley weighed only 80 lbs. when she was finally liberated from the camp in 1945.
Her experience at the camp did not deter her from future service: Just five years later, Bradley stood at the front lines in the Korean War, working as chief nurse at an evacuation hospital.
Even when surrounded by 100,000 Chinese soldiers, Bradley refused to abandon the facility until all injured persons were loaded onto a plane. “You got to get out in a hurry when you have somebody behind you with a gun,” Bradley said. She was the last one on the plane – right before her ambulance exploded from the hit of an enemy shell.
Leaving Korea in 1953, Bradley received a full-dress honor guard ceremony – the first woman ever to be bestowed this honor, nationally or internationally. After three decades of service, dozens of medals, and being only the third woman to achieve the rank of colonel, Ruby Bradley retired from the military in 1963. Even after her retirement, she worked as a supervisor in a private duty nursing service.
Susan Travers
Susan Travers
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When German troops surrounded the Bir Hakeim fort in Libya, Britain-born Susan Travers – the daughter of a Royal Navy admiral – refused to leave with the other female personnel. The only woman in the French Foreign Legion, she held out inside the fort with the other soldiers for 15 days in an attempt to withstand the heavy artillery of the Germans.
When food and supplies ran out, Travers and her lover General Marie-Pierre Kœnig knew that no help was coming, and it was up to them to save those who remained. And so they decided to make a run for it.
With Travers driving the lead truck, the remaining Free French soldiers made a daring escape. The Germans were none the wiser – until one of the trucks struck a landmine and exploded. When Kœnig told Travers “If we go, the rest will follow,” Travers hit the gas and darted their vehicle through the desert under heavy fire.
Her lead vehicle would take 11 bullets in total, but would make it to the border – along with the 2,500 Free French soldiers that she helped save. Travers went on to drive a “self-propelled anti-tank gun” in France, and became an official member of the Legion by leaving her gender off the application.
Travers was the recipient of the Legion d’Honneur, the Medaille Militaire, and the Croix de Guerre, all very high honors in the French Military. Of her desert dash? “My main concern was that the engine would stall,” Travers said. “It is a delightful feeling, going as fast as you can in the dark.”
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr
The Coincidental Dandy/Flickr
A Hollywood starlet from the 1930s until the 1950s, Hedy Lamarr was known as “the most beautiful woman in Europe” – but her looks and acting skills were far from the defining aspects of her life.
When not acting, the Austrian immigrant dabbled in tech. During the early stages of WWII, Lamarr and composer George Antheil created a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes.
“She understood that the problem with radio signals was that they could be jammed,” Lamarr’s biographer, Richard Rhodes, wrote. “But if you could make the signal hop around more or less randomly from radio frequency to radio frequency, then the person at the other end trying to jam the signal won’t know where it is.”
Lamarr and Antheil successfully developed a means to prevent the jamming of torpedoes’ frequency hopping – along with spread spectrum technology. The invention — which would lead to the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and guided missile systems — was patented in 1941, but the Navy did not put their invention to use until the 1960s during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Hedy Lamarr was honored in 1997 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, a BULBIE (basically the Oscars of inventing) and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Noor Inayat Khan
Noor Inaya Khan
Wikimedia Commons
When war broke out in 1939, the descendant of Indian royalty Noor Inayat Khan trained as a nurse with the French Red Cross. Quiet and unassuming, Khan was passionate about her father’s pacifist teachings – so it was a surprise to some when Khan joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force after escaping to England during the German occupation of France. There, she was trained as a wireless radio operator.
Shortly after, Khan was recruited into the Special Operations Executive for service in Nazi-occupied France. Some doubted her suitability for the job, but her fluent French and the shortage of agents had her flying to Paris as a radio operator for the resistance network, under the code name “Madeleine.”
After the arrest of many in the Paris resistance, Khan continued to move around undercover, sending messages back to London HQ. In October 1943 she was betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo. She managed to escape for a few hours, but upon her recapture she was sent to solitary confinement at Pforzheim prison in Germany. She was held in chains and tortured, but never revealed any information about the resistance.
From the German prison, Khan was sent to Dachau Concentration Camp where she was brutally beaten and possibly sexually assaulted. When she still revealed no secrets, the young Muslim woman was shot execution-style in the back of the head. Her last word as the firing squad took aim was “Liberté.”
Noor Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross for courage in 1949, and the French military decoration, the Croix de guerre, or Cross of War.