SILENT HEROES: Downed Airmen and the French Underground

The British bombed occupied Europe and Germany by night; American aircraft bombed by day. German fighters and flak gunners downed hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of airmen found themselves hunted by the Germans on the ground or in offshore waters. Enter the French Resistance. Independent scholar Ottis has produced a valuable addition to the "hidden" history of WWII, showing us the men, woman and sometimes children who helped Allied airmen evade capture, with more than 5,000 crewmen returned to England. Ottis, using primary and secondary materials as well as her own interviews with French civilians, tracks in suspenseful detail the three major routes for getting the airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Whole villages sometimes were at risk if the Gestapo found and cracked down on a "line." Executions and deportations to concentration camps were commonplace. Ottis also reports on postwar reunions, including a trek that reenacted one of the lines into Spain. This is the first documented (including 30 b&w photos) study of escape routes in almost 30 years, and it makes for a valuable addition to WWII history. (May)

Forecast: American encounters with the Resistance is an underexplored area of Franco-American relations and should draw readers from beyond the WWII market. The individual stories Ottis has unearthed are detailed enough to interest producers.