Silent Heroes
Downed Airmen and the French Underground
-
- $34.99
Publisher Description
In the early years of World War II, it was an amazing feat for an Allied airman shot down over occupied Europe to make it back to England. By 1943, however, pilots and crewmembers, supplied with "escape kits," knew they had a 50 percent chance of evading capture and returning home. An estimated 12,000 French civilians helped make this possible.
More than 5,000 airmen, many of them American, successfully traveled along escape lines organized much like those of the U.S. Underground Railroad, using secret codes and stopping in safe houses. If caught, they risked internment in a POW camp. But the French, Belgian, and Dutch civilians who aided them risked torture and even death.
Sherri Ottis writes candidly about the pilots and crewmen who walked out of occupied Europe, as well as the British intelligence agency in charge of Escape and Evasion. But her main focus is on the helpers, those patriots who have been all but ignored in English-language books and journals.
To research their stories, Ottis hiked the Pyrenees and interviewed many of the survivors. She tells of the extreme difficulty they had in avoiding Nazi infiltration by double agents; of their creativity in hiding evaders in their homes, sometimes in the midst of unexpected searches; of their generosity in sharing their meager food supplies during wartime; and of their unflagging spirit and courage in the face of a war fought on a very personal level.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The British bombed occupied Europe and Germany by night; American aircraft bombed by day. German fighters and flak gunners downed hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of airmen found themselves hunted by the Germans on the ground or in offshore waters. Enter the French Resistance. Independent scholar Ottis has produced a valuable addition to the "hidden" history of WWII, showing us the men, woman and sometimes children who helped Allied airmen evade capture, with more than 5,000 crewmen returned to England. Ottis, using primary and secondary materials as well as her own interviews with French civilians, tracks in suspenseful detail the three major routes for getting the airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Whole villages sometimes were at risk if the Gestapo found and cracked down on a "line." Executions and deportations to concentration camps were commonplace. Ottis also reports on postwar reunions, including a trek that reenacted one of the lines into Spain. This is the first documented (including 30 b&w photos) study of escape routes in almost 30 years, and it makes for a valuable addition to WWII history.
