Under a War-Torn Sky (28 page)

“Nothing, Lieutenant. I'm proud to have brought you home. It gives me hope that my two boys will be home by Christmas.”

Henry adjusted his uniform's tie and hat. Then, trembling all over, he eased himself out the door.

Speed danced around him, moaning, hopping, and blocking his way to the house.

“Hey, boy, easy. Easy, now. I'm glad to see you, too, fella.”

Dipping his head, whining and wagging, the dog refused to budge from Henry's side. Henry knelt down to pet him. “Good boy, Speed. Everything's okay now.”

Henry heard the screen door creak open. He looked up and was thrilled to see his mother standing in it. But she didn't run to him. She kept the door in front of her as if to protect herself from something. “Can I help you, sir?” she called in an uncertain voice.

Henry straightened up, Speed still jumping all over him. Lilly kept standing there, her hand to her heart. Henry realized she wasn't sure who he was. Had he really changed that much? “Get down, boy,” he said gently to Speed, trying to clear his path to his mother.

“Strange,” Lilly murmured. “I haven't seen Speed act that way since… Oh, my Lord.” She flung open the door. “Henry! Henry!”

She flew down the stairs. Henry rushed to embrace her. She seemed so tiny to him now. They held each other a long, long time. Biscuits, apples, sugar, she still carried that wondrous scent of warm things baking in the kitchen. “I'm so glad to see you, Ma,” he whispered into her hair.

Lilly looked up at him, her eyes shining.

“Hey, Henry.”

It wasn't until then that Henry realized Patsy stood patiently by the front door steps, giving Lilly her time. Henry caught his breath. She was even more beautiful than he remembered. Still holding his ma's hand, he strode over to Patsy and caught her in a tight embrace with his other arm. He kissed her once and gave her a smile that promised more later.

“What's going on here, Lilly?”

The three of them turned together. Clayton was struggling up the hill with two big wire baskets crammed full with eggs. About a hundred per basket, remembered Henry. Mighty heavy.

“Go on, honey,” Lilly said in a low, emotion-choked voice. She let go of Henry's hand and stepped back, pulling Patsy with her. “Go on to your father.”

Henry stood in a kind of awkward attention. He'd composed a dozen different speeches for this moment and he couldn't think of one word of them.

Clayton stopped short, confused by all the commotion. “Lilly, is that…?” But before she could answer him, Clayton knew.

Eggs flew as Clayton threw up his hands and ran to his son. He caught Henry in his arms.

For a moment, Henry wasn't sure what to do. Clayton had never hugged him. But it only took a moment. Henry reached up, patted his father's shoulder, then held onto him tightly.

When Clayton finally stepped back, he kept his hands on his son's shoulders. They stood eye to eye, Henry now as tall and straight as his dad. Clayton's eyes brimmed with tears. “Where did you come from, son?”

Henry thought of the confusion, the contradictions, of all he'd seen – the beautiful mountains and sunflowers, the ancient villages, the destruction, the death, the hatred, the courage, and the kindness. He saw the faces of the people who'd helped him and whom he'd lost.

He shook his head. “I'm not really sure, Dad. But I'm home now.”

“May you think sometimes of the reasons you are free.”
– Pierre Meunier, general secretary of the National Council of the Resistance

This novel was inspired by the stories my father told me of his and his friends' experiences with the French Resistance during World War II. Like Henry, my father was a B-24 pilot who spent several harrowing months behind the lines. As resourceful as he was, it is doubtful that he would have survived without the amazing willingness of some French people to protect a stranger, their quick-witted courage and self-sacrifice. He met many individuals like Pierre and his mother, Claudette, and the Resistance fighters. He did, in fact, surprise his parents by arriving unannounced at their farm after months of being missing in action. Eggs did fly.

But this is fiction. It is not the story of just one young idealistic farm boy who grew up at war. Although my father's resilient and kind spirit permeates the character, Henry's odyssey is culled from the experiences of thousands of American aircrew who had to bail out or land crippled airplanes on enemy territory.

During the conflict with Germany over Europe, fifty-one thousand men in the American Air Forces went missing; many were captured and interned. It is less clear exactly how many airmen – young, often badly hurt, certainly terrified, and all alone – managed to evade capture or escape prison and then make their way through Nazi-controlled land to Allied front lines. Many died in the attempt, perhaps lost in mountain ranges, perhaps executed without any record of who they were. However, MI9, the British escape service that helped Resistance movements establish underground escape lines, calculated that more than four thousand British and American servicemen were brought out of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France along these escape routes before the Normandy landings in June 1944. Allied forces liberated another six hundred servicemen after D-Day. (Several thousand men also made it to Allied front lines in Italy and Russia.)

Each successful escape, however, carried a high price. MI9 estimated that for each Allied serviceman who made it to safety, one Resistance worker died.

This novel, then, is also the story of the French children, women, and men, who risked everything to help American boys. The schoolteacher, Madame Gaulloise, Pierre and his mother, the teenage guide, Claudette, and Martin are fictional, but represent ordinary people who did extraordinary things to save lives and to resist Hitler's oppression.

Children as young as Pierre did serve as guides and couriers. Teenage boys, particularly scouts, filled the ranks of the armed fighting groups known as the
maquis
(pronounced ma-KEE). These youngsters had to fight like grown-ups because so many of France's adult men had been shipped off to work in German factories under compulsory-labour laws. The
maquis
leaders who organized them were typically not trained soldiers. In the Morvan region, for instance, one chief had been a dance-band leader, another a lawyer, yet another a veterinarian. War and necessity taught them how to fight back.

Women, young and old, operated radios, broke secret codes, and forged identity papers. They baked bread for the
maquis
guerrilla groups, stored their guns, and hid escaping servicemen in their closets, attics, barns, and even outhouses. They carried messages and the parts of radio transmitters, guns, and explosives. Since women and girls were expected to be out daily doing grocery shopping and other household errands, females like Claudette had a better chance of transporting clandestine items hidden in umbrellas, handbags, and bicycle baskets.

Europe still adhered to a rigid class system in the 1940s. This attitude allowed well-dressed, well-spoken women such as Madame Gaulloise to slide through checkpoints and other dangerous situations by intimidating regular German foot soldiers with their wit, fashionable clothes, and aristocratic elegance. Teenage girls, on the other hand, had to improvise in other ways. A girl guide – like the one who helped Henry in the Swiss train station – might play-act a tearful, passionate good-bye with an airman she'd just met to embarrass a passing German soldier into looking the other way and forgetting to check their identification papers. One twenty-year-old agent, code-named “Michou”, who often used that ploy, is credited with helping one hundred and fifty American and British airmen to escape. 

Even nuns braved arrest to shelter airmen. If German troops searched their cloisters, the sisters might choose to lead them straight to a clinic where airmen had been told to feign madness, an illness that many Germans of that day feared.

The Resistance movement began in simple, nonviolent ways. In May 1940, Hitler's forces rolled through Western Europe in a
Blitzkrieg
or “lightning war”. They overran Denmark in one day, Holland in four and Belgium within three weeks. The French army held on six weeks, but eventually was overpowered by German tank squadrons, known as Panzer divisions. On June 14 German forces marched into Paris. Brave French citizens immediately began defying the Nazis who occupied their homeland. They gave incorrect directions or pretended not to understand German soldiers who asked for their help. During the night they would scrawl
Vive la France
(Long live France) on prominent buildings to keep up French morale. Anti-Nazi newspapers sprung up and were passed out by schoolchildren. Railway operators adopted a noncooperative, “go-slow” attitude. And as the Nazis began to deport Jews, many French hid and helped to evacuate their Jewish neighbours.

The price for defiance was high. On Bastille Day 1941, for instance, many Parisians publicly celebrated their independence day despite Hitler's ban of the holiday. One man was gunned down simply for singing the French national anthem. Hitler also held more than one million French soldiers hostage. For each German killed by Resistance workers – whom the Nazis labelled “terrorists” – several French prisoners were taken out and shot.

Hitler's pervasive racism extended to the French, whom he dismissed as “the monkeys of Europe”. Following their leader's twisted thinking, some Nazis – primarily his elite Gestapo and the SS – could be horrifyingly cruel in their treatment of captured Resistance workers. Ironically, their ruthlessness was matched by a French unit of “shock troops” called the Milice, which had been formed by the French puppet government in Vichy. These French police were just as fanatically anti-Jewish and pro-Hitler.

The first organized groups of French fighters came into being to smuggle out British soldiers trapped at Dunkirk during the
Blitzkrieg
. They led them into neutral countries: Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden. They continued operating escape lines for the Allied aircrew who seemed to fall out of the sky like rain. Workers would watch the skies for parachutes and race on bicycles to try to reach downed crewmen before Nazi troops did. After the Allies' invasion of Normandy, however, most escape routes disintegrated in the fray. Many airmen had to remain with the
maquis
groups then, helping to unload supplies parachuted down by the Allies, repairing trucks, cars, and radios, or building explosives.

The Resistance was also critically important to the Allies in providing information about Nazi troop movements, encampments and fortifications, and advancing bomb technology. Resistance spies discovered, for instance, two secret German weapons that had devastating capabilities – the V1 buzz bombs and V2 sonic rockets. Both unmanned rockets could be launched from ramps in German-occupied France to hit Britain. Anti-aircraft guns could not down the rockets once they were in the air. The only way to destroy them was to bomb the launch sites. French agents provided the Allies with the location of V1 and V2 launch sites. One man discovered a hundred launch sites before he was killed by a German patrol.

On the eve of D-Day, Britain's BBC and the Free French radio broadcast two seemingly nonsense messages: “It is hot in Suez” and “The dice are on the table”. But Resistance workers knew what they meant. The Allied invasion was on. The Resistance cut telephone and telegraph wires, and blew up bridges and railroad tracks to prevent German troops deep inside France from coming to the aid of those stationed on the Normandy beaches.

Already in the French countryside, the
maquis
had been harassing German troops throughout the war. The guerrilla bands hit German convoys and patrols, then darted back into the cover of mountain ranges such as the Morvan and the Vercors.
Maquis
is a word in the dialect of Corsica for the dense forests and undergrowth on the hills of that French Mediterranean island.
Maquis
groups were fiercely independent of one another, each identifying with one particular strong leader. Before the war, France had been divided by its politics – there were Communists, Socialists, and Fascists. Such division was replicated among the
maquis
groups. But they united in their resolve to oust the Nazis, especially as the war dragged on and more and more outrages were committed against French civilians.

The barbaric massacres at Oradour-sur-Glane, Dun-les-Places, and Vassieux-en-Vercors did occur. Horrifying Gestapo interrogations did as well. So, too, however, did French executions of captured Germans suspected of spying. The
maquis
and their supporters could retaliate with brutality against citizens believed to have collaborated with the Nazis. In “popular trials”, some suspected collaborators were shot without a chance to legally defend themselves. Women thought to have had romantic relationships with German soldiers were shaved in front of large, jeering crowds. It is one of the great marvels of humankind that during such madness, there were individuals – on both sides – brave and compassionate enough to act with kindness, generosity, mercy, and conscience.

There is a small, very moving museum to the Morvan's
maquis
in St-Brisson, a pastoral village located a few miles from Dun-les-Places. Lining its walls are photographs of
maquisards
and villagers who helped them. Most haunting are the clear-eyed, hopeful faces of several teenage agents who simply disappeared, never to be found.

There are also heartbreaking letters. Perhaps foreseeing that he would die in his fight against Hitler, twenty-three-year-old Paul Sarrette prepared his will and wrote: “I'm going to fight, not for a word, not for glory or for a flag, but for you – men, women, and children – so that you may live without knowing the horrors of a war.”