205-The White Mouse

Futility Closet

Greg Ross

History

4.8 • 748 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2018

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1928 Nancy Wake ran away from her Australian home and into an unlikely destiny: She became a dynamo in the French resistance, helping more than a thousand people to flee the Germans and then organizing partisans to fight them directly. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the White Mouse, one of the bravest heroes of World War II.

We'll also marvel at mailmen and puzzle over an expensive homework assignment.

Intro:

The town of Agloe, New York, was invented by a pair of mapmakers.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise contains two hidden poems.

Sources for our feature on Nancy Wake:

Peter FitzSimons, Nancy Wake, 2001.

Nancy Wake, The White Mouse, 1985.

Russell Braddon, The White Mouse, 1956.

"Dispatches," World War II 26:4 (November/December 2011), 16.

"History in the Media," History Today 55:4 (April 2005), 9.

"Sound Off," Leatherneck 85:6 (June 2002), 2.

Adam Bernstein, "Nancy Wake, 'White Mouse' of World War II, Dies at 98," Washington Post, Aug. 9, 2011.

Paul Vitello, "Nancy Wake, Proud Spy and Nazi Foe, Dies at 98," New York Times, Aug. 13, 2011.

"Obituary: Nancy Wake," Economist 400:8746 (Aug. 13, 2011), 82.

Chris Brice, "The Mouse That Roared," [Adelaide] Advertiser, June 2, 2001.

Bruce Wilson, "Forever in Her Debt," [Brisbane] Courier-Mail, Feb. 15, 2003, 34.

"War Heroine Nancy Wake Dies," ABC Premium News, Aug. 8, 2011.

"Prince Helps Pauper Heroine," [Adelaide] Advertiser, Feb. 11, 2003, 22.

"Australian 'White Mouse' Was a Guerrilla to Nazis Selling Her War Medals Did Not Endear Her to Countrymen, Though," Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1994.

Sandra Laville, "Penniless Resistance Hero Stays On ... and On ... at Hotel," Vancouver Sun, Feb. 11, 2003, A16.

Red Harrison, "All Guts and Garters," Weekend Australian, June 9, 2001.

Lydia Clifford, "Secrets and White Lies," Daily Telegraph, June 1, 2001, 117.

Bruce Wilson, "Penniless Wake Is Also Priceless," Daily Telegraph, Feb. 14, 2003, 23.

Nate Rawlings, "Nancy Wake," Time 178:8 (Aug. 29, 2011), 20.

Roderick Bailey, "Wake, Nancy Grace Augusta," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Jan. 8, 2015.

Listener mail:

A 1797 George III Cartwheel penny, a handgun, and a selection of pottery and pipes found on the Thames foreshore.

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle's "Police Reports."

The neural net that Dave Lawrence fed them through.

This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Simone Hilliard, who sent this corroborating link (warning -- this spoils the puzzle).

You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset.

Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- you can choose the amount you want to pledge, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website.

Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.

If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history.
0:14.1	Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from an impromptu town to a hidden sonnet.
0:23.4	This is episode 205. I'm Greg Ross.
0:31.0	And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1928, Nancy Wake ran away from her Australian home and into an unlikely destiny.
0:38.5	She became a dynamo in the French resistance, helping more than a thousand people to flee the Germans and organizing partisans to fight them directly. In today's show, we'll tell the story of the White Mouse, one of the bravest heroes of
0:43.9	World War II. We'll also marvel at mailmen and puzzle over an expensive homework assignment.
1:00.1	Nancy Wake was born in New Zealand in 1912 and had a traumatic childhood. Her father moved the family to Sydney when she was a toddler and then not only abandoned them but sold their home,
1:04.7	which forced her mother to find new lodgings and raise the children by herself. She never got
1:09.0	along with her mother, and when she was 16, she left home literally through the window. One day she said she was going out, her mother said
1:14.5	she couldn't, so she jumped out the window and vaulted over the fence. She took a clerical
1:19.0	job with the shipping company and was still wondering what to do with her life when a sympathetic
1:22.4	aunt sent her 200 pounds, and she set out to see the world. She made her way to Vancouver, then New York,
1:27.9	and finally London, where she enrolled in a journalism school and got her degree at 21. She went
1:33.1	for an interview with Hearst newspapers, and the interviewer told her the Middle East was an area
1:37.1	of growing interest, so she showed him that she could write in Egyptian, and he gave her a job
1:41.2	at a Paris News Bureau. In fact, she didn't know Egyptian. She just
1:44.4	wrote shorthand backward and then pretended to read it back. She said, I was so good at that kind of thing,
1:48.9	I should have been a criminal. That got her to Paris, where she got a small apartment. Her writing
1:53.4	began to appear in Hearst Newspapers across America, and she made connections with other journalists. In October 1934, she headed to Marseille to report on a visit by King
2:01.6	Alexander I of Yugoslavia. During his stay, he was shot by an assassin. The rise of fascism was
2:06.9	the story of the day, and Hitler was rising to power, so she headed to Vienna to learn more.
2:11.7	The city was overrun with brown shirts, and she saw roving gangs of Nazis randomly beating
	...

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