During the second world war, the servicewoman Nancy Wake, who has died aged 98, became known as "the White Mouse", a nickname given to her by the Gestapo for her elusiveness. In the run-up to D-day, Wake, who was born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was eager to recruit French-speaking women to serve as couriers.

Vera Atkins, who worked in the SOE's French section, remembered her as "a real Australian bombshell. Tremendous vitality, flashing eyes. Everything she did, she did well". Her training reports record that she was "a very good and fast shot" and had a good eye for fieldcraft. On several occasions, she "put the men to shame by her cheerful spirit and strength of character".

In April 1944, Wake was dropped by parachute into the Auvergne region along with Major John Farmer, leader of the Freelance resistance circuit. Wake was a woman of very high energy, he said, with "very clear ideas of how she wanted everything done". On landing, her parachute got stuck in a tree. One of the Frenchmen greeting her said he hoped all trees could bear such beautiful fruit. "Don't give me that French shit," she replied with her customary bluntness – or so she liked to chuckle when retelling the story.

Circumstances gave her considerable freedom of action. The circuit's orders were to help organise and arm the local maquis, and soon Wake was fighting alongside them in pitched battles with the Germans. "I liked that kind of thing," she said, although she had to prove herself first as an honorary man, a feat easily accomplished by regularly drinking her French comrades under the table. "I had never seen anyone drink like that," confessed Farmer, "and I don't think the maquis had either. We just couldn't work out where it all went."

Two weeks after D-day, a major attack by some 10,000 Germans using armoured cars, tanks, artillery and aircraft was made on their positions, during which they got separated from the circuit's radio operator, Denis Rake. To try to re-establish contact with London, Wake walked more than 200km (125 miles) and biked another 100km in an effort to make contact with an operator from another SOE group. Later, working with two American officers when the Germans launched an attack on another maquis group, she took command of a section whose leader had been killed and with exceptional coolness directed the covering fire while the group withdrew with no further loss of life.

Wake claimed to have dispatched a German sentry with the silent killing method she had learned during her training in Scotland, and once had even ordered a captured French spy, a woman, to be shot. "It didn't put me off my breakfast," she said. "After all, she had an easy death. She didn't suffer."

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Wake moved with her parents and five siblings to Sydney, Australia, when she was two. Shortly afterwards, her father abandoned the family, and at 16 she rebelled and ran away. With financial help from an aunt, in 1935 she sailed for Europe and trained as a journalist in London. She worked in Paris, saw nazism at work in Germany and Austria, and in France, in 1939, married a wealthy industrialist, Henri Fiocca. Together, they enjoyed a life of champagne, caviar and travel.

After Henri was called up for service following the outbreak of war, she enrolled as an ambulance driver. She began to help British soldiers trapped by the collapse of France to escape back home, and this led to her heroic undercover work with the famous escape line organised by Pat O'Leary (in reality, a Belgian army doctor named Albert Guérisse). Eventually, she caught the Gestapo's eye and in May 1943, knowing they were hot on her trail, she escaped from France to Spain. Henri promised to follow. But he was picked up by the Gestapo and shot. She blamed herself for his death: if it had not been for her, she mourned, he would have survived the war. After the liberation of France, Wake returned to London, where she was awarded the George Medal. The French gave her three Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance, and later made her Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. The Americans awarded her the Medal of Freedom.

She never quite adjusted to peace. A desk-bound job in the British embassy in Paris quickly drove her wild with boredom, and she returned to Australia, where she stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate in 1949 and 1951. Still restless, she moved to London and married John Forward, an RAF bomber pilot. He liked a drink, enjoyed a joke, and they were well matched. They relocated to Australia and had a gregarious life marked by dining, golfing, occasional trips to Europe and interviews with journalists about wartime exploits.

Wake was among the first of the SOE's female agents to be celebrated in print, although the 1956 biography by Australian journalist Russell Braddon was lamented by the official historian of the SOE in France as being frivolous in tone. Her autobiography was published in 1985 and inspired a television drama in the late 80s. One scene provoked a typically scornful response. "For goodness sake, did the allies parachute me into France to fry eggs and bacon for the men?" she asked. "There wasn't an egg to be had for love nor money, and even if there had been why would I be frying it when I had men to do that sort of thing?" Behind the jokey veneer, however, lay a woman of considerable ability and sincerity.

Her second husband died in 1997. She later returned to live in Britain. Well into her 90s, perched on her specially reserved bar stool in the Stafford hotel in London, gin and tonic in hand, she remained as feisty and outspoken as ever. There was little she enjoyed better than "a bloody good drink", and to fund her lifestyle she had sold her war medals. "There was no point in keeping them," she explained, "I'll probably go to hell and they'd melt anyway."

In 2004, she was finally made a Companion of the Order of Australia. Latterly she lived in the Star and Garter home for ex-servicemen and women in Richmond, Surrey. "When I die," she once said, "I want my ashes scattered over the hills where I fought alongside all those men."

• Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, resistance agent, born 30 August 1912; died 7 August 2011