France World War

By Cecile depicts post-World War II France as it reels from war and recovery. In Paris, an orphan girl, Cecile, finds refuge with an older man. He introduces her to nightclubs, intellectuals, artists (Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eartha Kitt!), and non-monogamy. When she falls for his mistress, she begins to live a life she deems worthy of writing about...but only under the pseudonym of her husband.

Raised in a lush suburb of 1920s Paris, Noor Inayat Khan was an introspective musician and writer, dedicated to her family and to her father’s spiritual values of harmony, beauty, and tolerance. She did not seem destined for wartime heroism. Yet, faced with the evils of Nazi violence and the German occupation of France, Noor joined the British Special Operations Executive and trained in espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance. For crucial months of the war, Noor was the only wireless operator in France sending critical information to London.

Gallipoli: the mere name summons the story of this well-known campaign of the First World War. And the story of Gallipoli, where in August 1915 the Allied forces made their last valiant effort against the Turks, is one of infamous might-have-beens. If only the Allies had held out a little longer, pushed a little harder, had better luck, Gallipoli might have been the decisive triumph that knocked the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War.

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. As architects of the most punitive measures in the Treaty of Versailles following World War I, the French government made natural targets for Teutonic retribution, so the Maginot Line, a series of interconnected strongpoints and fortifications running along much of France's eastern border, helped allay French fears of invasion.

In this revisionist account of France's crushing defeat in 1940, Philip Nord argues that the nation's downfall has long been misunderstood. Nord assesses France's diplomatic and military preparations for war with Germany, its conduct of the war once the fighting began, and the political consequences of defeat on the battlefield. Ultimately, he finds that the longstanding view that France's collapse was due to military unpreparedness and a decadent national character is unsupported by fact.

Airpower over the Rhine is a critical new perspective on the air battle between the French Air Force (FAF) and the Luftwaffe in the skies over France during May and June 1940. Author James F. Slaughter III examines how each country's leadership created the circumstances that enabled the Luftwaffe's victory over the FAF and Germany's ultimate defeat of France.

Susan Tate Ankeny was sorting through the belongings of her late father - a World War II bombardier who had bailed from a burning B-17 over Nazi-occupied France in 1944 - when she found two boxes. One contained her dad's Air Force uniform, and the other an unfinished memoir, stacks of envelopes, black-and-white photographs, mission reports, dog tags, and the fake identity cards he used in his escape. Ankeny spent more than a decade from that moment tracking down letter writers, their loved ones, and anyone who had played a role in her father's story.

England 1922. It’s been four years since Rudy’s brother Edgar went missing in war-torn France. Still deep in mourning and grappling with unanswered questions, Rudy and his mother struggle to move on. When the enigmatic Mariette arrives unexpectedly at the family’s manor claiming to be Edgar’s widow, and the mother of his child, Rudy urges her to stay, hoping she’ll shed light on the missing pieces.

In 1917, after Arlene Favier’s home burns to the ground, taking her father with it, she must find a way to support her mother and younger brother. If she doesn’t succeed, they will all be impoverished. Job opportunities are scarce, but then a daring possibility arises: the American Women’s Hospital needs ambulance drivers to join a trailblazing, all-female team of doctors and nurses bound for war-torn France.

Based on official American, French, and German documents, histories, personal memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's key participants, Escape from Paris crosses the traditional lines of World War II history with tense drama of air combat over Europe, the intrigue of occupied Paris, and courageous American and Allied pilots and French resistance fighters pitted against Nazi thugs. All of this set in one of the world's most beautiful and captivating cities.

In Where the Wild Cherries Grow by Laura Madeleine, it is 1919, and the end of World War I has not brought peace for Emeline Vane. Lost in grief, she is suddenly alone at the heart of a depleted family. And just as everything seems to be slipping beyond her control, in a moment of desperation, she boards a train and runs away.

The remarkable untold WWII story of the US airman who was shot down over Nazi-occupied France and evaded Gestapo pursuers for more than six months. Arthur Meyerowitz was on his second air mission over France when he was shot down in 1943. He was one of only two men on the B-24 Liberator known as Harmful Lil' Armful who escaped death or immediate capture on the ground. After fleeing the wreck, Meyerowitz knocked on the door of an isolated farmhouse....

Nick Hewitt draws on fascinating new material to describe the violent sea battle which mirrored the fighting on land, and the complex campaign at sea which enabled the Allied assault. Aboard ships ranging from frail plywood landing craft to sleek destroyers, sailors were active combatants in the operation of June 1944, and had worked tirelessly to secure the Seine Bay in the months preceding it. They fought battles against German submarines, aircraft, and warships, and maintained careful watch to keep control of the English Channel.

Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, is a compilation of articles Wharton wrote for Scribner’s Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, reporting from the Western Front during WWI. Living in Paris, she was trapped in France when travel became impossible after Germany declared war and French mobilization began. She was one of a number of expatriate American writers living there, primarily women, who became involved in war charities during the opening months of the conflict, years before the United States abandoned its official policy of neutrality.

This is the true story of four brave women secretly sent into the darkness of Nazi-occupied France to carry out Winston Churchill’s plan to "set Europe ablaze." Caught in a web of deception surrounding the preparations for the D-Day invasion, their mission ended in betrayal and sacrifice. An engrossing history based on first-hand interviews with agents of the Special Operations Executive and revelations about the secret organization and the courageous women who served it.

As arts editor for one of Vienna's principal newspapers, Moriz Scheyer knew many of the city's foremost artists, and was an important literary journalist. With the advent of the Nazis he was forced from both job and home. In 1943, in hiding in France, Scheyer began drafting what was to become this book. Tracing events from the Anschluss in Vienna, through life in Paris and unoccupied France, including a period in a French concentration camp, contact with the Resistance, and more.

The challenges facing General Dwight Eisenhower before the Invasion of Normandy were not merely military, but political as well. He knew that to liberate France, and to hold it, the Allies needed local help, which would necessitate coordinating with the highly independent French resistance groups known collectively as the maquis. The Allies' objective was to push the Germans out of France. The French objective, on the other hand, was a France free of all foreign armies, including the Allies.

When Daniel Guiet was a child and his family moved country, as they frequently did, his father had one possession, a tin bread box, that always made the trip. Daniel was admonished never to touch the box, but one day he couldn't resist. What he found astonished him: a .45 automatic and five full clips; three slim knives; a length of wire with a wooden handle at each end; thin pieces of paper with random numbers on them; several passports with his father's photograph, each bearing a different name.

In The Last of the Doughboys, Richard Rubin introduced readers to a forgotten generation of Americans: the men and women who fought and won the First World War. Interviewing the war’s last survivors face-to-face, he knew well the importance of being present if you want to get the real story. But he soon came to realize that to get the whole story, he had to go Over There, too. So he did, and discovered that while most Americans regard that war as dead and gone, to the French, who still live among its ruins and memories, it remains very much alive.

From 1941 to 1944, Bignor Manor, a farmhouse in Sussex, provided board and lodging for men and women of the French Resistance before they were flown by moonlight into occupied France. Barbara Bertram, whose husband was a conducting officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), became hostess for these daring agents and their pilots during their brief stopovers in their house.