In the Shadows of War: An American Pilot's Odyssey Through Occupied France and the Camps of Nazi Germany - Hardcover

Childers, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805057528 ISBN 13: 9780805057522

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2003

Synopsis

The dramatic true story of an American pilot, a French schoolteacher, and a British-trained leader of the French underground in the climactic year of World War II
In a small village in France during the fateful summer of 1944, three disparate lives converged in an unlikely secret alliance. Just after D-Day, Colette Florin hid downed American bomber pilot Roy Allen in her rooms above the tiny girls' school where she taught. While concealing him not only from the Germans but from her neighbors in the small village, she was drawn deeper into the clandestine world of the regional underground. There she met the local leader of the resistance: Pierre Mulsant, a young Frenchman trained by the British secret service who had parachuted into France in the spring of 1944.
Drawn from extensive interviews, letters, and archival documents in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, In the Shadows of War tells their interrelated stories, following these three fascinating people from their Resistance activities in rural France, to Paris and captivity by the Gestapo, to Germany and Buchenwald concentration camp. It is a human story of love and loss, of courage and sacrifice by ordinary people who did not make policy or formulate strategy but whose lives were profoundly altered by war.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas Childers is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of four previous books on World War II, including The Wings of
Morning. He lives in Media, Pennsylvania.

From Publishers Weekly:

The paths of three unlikely comrades-a schoolteacher in a rural French town, a downed bomber pilot from Philadelphia, a British-trained French bourgeois saboteur-meet and merge between November 1943 and May 1945. Local teacher Colette Florin, active as support for various resistance operations, provides intermittent shelter on the school's unused upper floor for Pierre Mulsant, who might otherwise have lived comfortably off his family's construction business, after he parachutes in from England in 1943. American flyer Roy Allen, after several successful missions, is shot down in June 1944 and ends up at Florin's schoolhouse as well. Florin is at risk of betrayal not only from collaborators but from neighbors with "petty jealousies and old grievances." As the friendship of the three develops, Allen, restless in confinement, attempts an ill-advised passage to liberated Paris only to be delivered to the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald. He soon meets up with Mulsant, who has also been betrayed. Mulsant is executed. Allen makes it though the war and visits Florin before returning to the States. University of Pennsylvania historian Childers (The Nazi Voter) delivers this grim, stirring account with rich characterization, believable dialogue, graphic scene setting, telling details and pacing that are rare for military history. He places his heroic central figures among their families, their co-workers (the plane's crew, the transmitter operator, the demolition expert), their co-conspirators (the milkman, the postman, the public prosecutor), those who assist them, those who betray them and those who are their captors and torturers. Using military archives, private papers and interviews as well as memoirs and firsthand accounts, Childers gives us an extensive, pointed cross-section of the war in France from the perspectives of those who knew the stakes, and acted.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0805057528
• ISBN 13: 9780805057522
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464