Download Silent Heroes: Downed Airmen and the French Underground AudioBook Free
In the first many years of World Battle II, it was an incredible feat for an Allied airman taken down over occupied European countries to make it back to England. By 1943, however, pilots and crewmembers, given "escape kits", understood they had a 50 percent potential for evading capture and returning home. Around 12,000 French civilians helped make this possible. More than 5,000 airmen, many of them American, successfully traveled along escape lines prepared much like those of the united states Underground Railroad. If captured, they risked internment in a POW camp. However the French, Belgian, and Dutch civilians who aided them risked torture and even loss of life. Sherri Ottis writes candidly about the pilots and crewmen who strolled out of occupied European countries, as well as the United kingdom intelligence agency in charge of Get away and Evasion. But her main target is on the helpers, those patriots who have been all but overlooked in English-language books and journals. She instructs of the extreme difficulty they had to avoid Nazi infiltration by dual agents; with their creativity in concealing evaders in their homes, sometimes amid unexpected searches; with their generosity in sharing their meager food equipment during wartime; and of their unflagging spirit and courage in the face of a warfare fought on a very personal level.
