World War Ii History France

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

The incredible true story of British special agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne, sisters who risked everything to fight for freedom during the Second World War. When elderly recluse Eileen Nearne died, few suspected that the quiet little old lady was a decorated WWII war hero. Volunteering to serve for British intelligence at age 21, Eileen was posted to Nazi-occupied France to send encoded messages of crucial importance for the Allies, until her capture by the Gestapo.

In the tradition of Ben MacIntyre, Game of Spies tells the story of a lethal spy triangle in Bordeaux between 1942 and 1944 - and of France's greatest betrayal, by aristocratic and right-wing Resistance leader Andre Grandclement. The story centres on three men - one British, one French and one German - and the duel they fought out in an atmosphere of collaboration, betrayal and assassination, in which comrades sold fellow comrades, Allied agents and downed pilots to the Germans as casually as they would a bottle of wine.

In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and cultural history, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a vivid and compelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation. Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War.

What was it like to be a citizen fighting the Nazis? Lucie Aubrac, of Catholic and peasant background, was teaching history in a Lyon school and had just married Raymond, a Jewish engineer, when World War II erupted and divided France. This is Lucie's harrowing account of her participation in the Resistance, when, though pregnant, she planned and took part in raids to free comrades - including her husband, under Nazi death sentence - from the prisons of the infamous "Butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie.

The first full history of the pioneering Special Forces units of World War II, dropped behind German lines into France to assist with the D-Day landings, told by a former U.S. Special Forces colonel with unique access to surviving veterans.

Emerging from France's catastrophic 1940 defeat like a bedraggled and rather sinister phoenix, the French State – better known to history as Vichy France or the Vichy Regime after its spa-town capital, stands in history as a unique and bizarre creation of German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's European conquests. A patchwork of paradoxes and contradictions, the Vichy Regime maintained a quasi-independent French nation for some time after the Third Reich invasion.

When Company A of the US 116th Regiment landed on Omaha Beach in D-Day's first wave on June 6, 1944, it lost 96 percent of its effective strength. Sixteen teams of US engineers arriving in the second wave were unable to blow the beach obstacles, as first wave survivors were still sheltering behind them. This was the beginning of the historic day that Landing on the Edge of Eternity narrates hour by hour.

Le 18 juin 1940 : naissance de Charles de Gaulle. Naissance à Londres derrière un micro avec des mots qui promettent à la France, vaincue par les chars et les avions, la victoire par les chars et les avions. Mais la France n'est pas à l'écoute. La France est sur les routes, dans les villes surpeuplées du Sud-Ouest et du Midi, dans les camps de prisonniers. La France ne parle le 18 juin que d'un seul appel, d'un seul discours, celui que le maréchal Pétain a lancé le 17 juin pour dire qu'il fallait cesser le combat et demander l'armistice. Et la France est d'accord.

Nous sommes à l'aube du 6 juin 1944. Il est six heures du matin lorsque les forces alliées débarquent sur les plages de Normandie. L'enjeu est de taille : il s'agit de porter un coup fatal au IIIe Reich d'Adolf Hitler et de libérer les territoires occupés. Le jour le plus long vient tout juste de se lever. Ce livre audio vous permettra d'en savoir plus sur : le contexte politique et social de l'époque ; les acteurs majeurs du conflit ; le déroulement du débarquement et sa chronologie ; les raisons de la victoire alliée.

The French Army crumbled swiftly under the powerful blows delivered to it in 1940 by Nazi Germany's confident Wehrmacht. Launching a massive feint into Belgium to lure mobile French armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) away from the actual point of attack, the weakly protected Ardennes Forest, the Germans struck past the Maginot Line. In a lightning campaign, Heinz Guderian's panzers punched through to the coast, dividing Allied forces with a steel cordon across France and forcing the evacuation of the BEF from the port of Dunkirk.

Of course,Paris was not destroyed before the Allies liberated it, but it would take more than four years for them to wrest control of France from Nazi Germany after they took the country by storm in about a month in 1940. That said, it's widely overlooked today given how history played out that as the power of Nazi Germany grew alarmingly during the 1930s, the French sought means to defend their territory against the rising menace of the Thousand-Year Reich.

On October 2, 1918, Maj. Charles W. Whittlesey led the 77th Division in a successful attack on German defenses in the Argonne Forest of northeastern France. His unit, comprised of men of a wide mix of ethnic backgrounds from New York City and the western states, was not a battalion nor was it ever "lost", but once a newspaper editor applied the term "lost battalion" to the episode, it stuck.

Death in the City of Light is the gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris. As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld. The main suspect was Dr. Marcel Petiot, a handsome, charming physician with remarkable charisma.

The French painter Jean Hélion’s unique and deeply moving account of his experiences in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps prefigures the even darker stories that would emerge from the concentration camps. This serious adventure tale begins with Hélion’s infantry platoon fleeing from the German army and warplanes as they advanced through France in the early days of the war. The soldiers chant as they march and run, “They shall not have me!” but are quickly captured and sent to hard labor.

During World War II many escape-line organizations contributed to the Allied cause by funneling hundreds of servicemen out of occupied Europe. As the Germans tightened their noose, the risk of discovery only grew for the servicemen who needed safe passage across the Pyrenees. In early 1944 two important escape-line organizations operated in southwestern France, handing over many fugitives to French passeur Jean-Louis Bazerque. Along with several of his successful missions, his only failure as a passeur is recounted in gripping detail in So Close to Freedom.

The fateful days and weeks surrounding June 6th, 1944, have been extensively documented in histories of the Second World War, but less attention has been paid to the tremendous impact of these events on the populations nearby. The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy tells the inspiring yet heartbreaking story of ordinary people who did extraordinary things in defense of liberty and freedom.

Following the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938, frightened parents were forced to find refuge for their children, far from the escalating anti-Jewish violence. A courageous group of Belgian women organized a desperate and highly dangerous rescue mission to usher nearly 1,000 children out of Germany and Austria. Of these children, 93 were placed on a freight train, traveling through the night away from their families and into the relative safety of Vichy France.

As far as the public knew, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) did not exist. After the defeat of the French Army and Britain's retreat from the Continent in June 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the top-secret espionage operation to "set Europe ablaze". Of the many brave men and women conscripted, two Anglo-American recruits, the Starr brothers, stood out to become legendary figures to the guerillas, assassins, and saboteurs they led.

In Americans in Paris, tales of adventure, intrigue, passion, deceit, and survival unfold season by season as renowned journalist Charles Glass tells the story of a remarkable cast of expatriates and their struggles in Nazi Paris. Before the Second World War began, approximately thirty thousand Americans lived in Paris, and when war broke out in 1939 almost five thousand remained.