France World War

Deep in the Blitzkrieg, one unlucky tourist must fight to survive. When aspiring pilot John Archer finds himself caught in the middle of the devastating Nazi invasion of France, he quickly realizes that his vacation could cost him his life. As an American swept up in a wave of refugees fleeing the chaos of the German advance, deep down he knows he’s in way over his head. When an unfortunate capture leads to Archer discovering vital information about the Nazi’s plans, he knows he has no choice but to slip out from under his enemy’s nose and tell the Allies what he’s found.

Agnès Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Though she might well have weathered the oppressive regime, Humbert was stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed. In an act of astonishing bravery, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an organized resistance - very likely the first such group to fight back against the occupation. (In fact, their newsletter, Résistance, gave the French Resistance its name.)

Alan Riding introduces a pageant of 20th-century artists who lived and worked under the Nazis and explores the decisions each made about whether to stay or flee, collaborate or resist. We see Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf singing before French and German audiences; Picasso painting and occasionally selling his work from his Left Bank apartment; and Marcel Carné and Henri-Georges Clouzot, among others, directing movies....

The 1942 raid on Dieppe was an attempt to test the enemy readiness, and take some pressure off the Russian front. It was a costly disaster, but lessons learned there were of the utmost importance to the D-Day planning. After a massive build up of men and materials, the D-Day landings finally took place in Normandy on June 6th, 1944. Despite vicious battles and stubborn resistance, within 12 weeks the Allied forces invaded Paris.

The loss of British bombers over Occupied Europe began to reach alarming levels in 1941. Could it be that the Germans were using a sophisticated form of radar to direct their night fighters and anti-aircraft guns at the British bombers? British aerial reconnaissance discovered what seemed to be a rotating radar tower on a clifftop at Bruneval, near Le Havre. The truth must be revealed. The decision was taken to launch a daring raid on the Bruneval site to try and capture the technology for further examination.

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.

Having escaped the Nazi vampire hunter, SS officer Kurt Hesselman, the Contessa Gabriella Doria finds herself in neutral Switzerland and in the company of American spy master Allen Dulles. Dulles sends Gabriella on a mission that might cut short the war by a year. She is to infiltrate occupied France, contact Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and persuade him to change sides and fight on the side of the allies. But Gabriella will soon face peril from all sides, including from an enemy that she had thought dead and buried. A direct sequel to Gabriella’s first World War II adventure, Dark Sanction.

When America entered World War I in April 1917, state National Guard units had never planned to mobilize for this kind of war, and the men who made up the hometown companies of each regiment never imagined that they would be asked to fight in what was then the most savage war in human history - they were “innocents” being thrown into a horrendous European conflagration. Made up of companies from 10 Ohio towns, the 166th Infantry Regiment became part of the famous 42nd Division, known as the “Rainbow Division”.

The terrors of a young soldier come to life in shocking, almost hallucinatory detail in a powerful first novel that follows in the footsteps of The Red Badge of Courage and Farewell to Arms.

When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a trunk full of his late aunt's personal belongings, he was unaware of where this discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden past. The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the trove of love letters, journals, and photographs, surrounded by suitors and living the precarious existence of a British citizen in a country controlled by the enemy during World War II.

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.

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.

Les Français ? Ils sont plus de quarante millions en juin quarante lorsque les Allemands occupent la France. Et ce livre raconte leur vie quotidienne. Au moment d'entamer le longues recherches, Henri Amouroux s'est aperçu, lorsqu'il évoquait les années d'Occupation, que ceux-là mêmes qui doutaient de l'opportunité d'un tel travail étaient très vite emportés par leurs souvenirs et qu'ils multipliaient alors les anecdotes. L'entreprise valait donc d'être tentée.

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.

D.M. Sorlie is the author behind the Sue Lee Mysteries and the new prequel Sebastian books, weaving a gripping tapestry of espionage, science, and the looming shadow of war in this thrilling new mystery. Set against the backdrop of a tense Europe on the brink of conflict, our protagonist, Sebastian, finds himself entrenched in a perilous covert operation, summoned by none other than Winston Churchill himself. Tasked with a critical mission, Sebastian is to meet two distinguished nuclear scientists from the Joliot-Curie group—trailblazers who, back in 1934, had unveiled the explosive ...

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.

London, 1952: Forty-six-year-old Elizabeth Dalloway feels she has failed at most everything in life, especially living up to her mother, the elegant Mrs. Dalloway, an ideal socialite and model of perfection until she disappeared in the summer of 1923—and hasn’t been heard from since. When Elizabeth is handed a medal with a mysterious inscription from her mother to a soldier named Septimus Warren Smith, she’s certain it contains a clue from the past.

France: An Adventure History is a profoundly original and endlessly entertaining history of France, from the first century BC to the present day, based on countless new discoveries and thirty years of exploring France on foot, by bicycle and in the library. Beginning with the Roman army’s first recorded encounter with the Gauls and ending with the Gilets Jaunes protests in the era of Emmanuel Macron, each chapter is an adventure in its own right. Along the way, listeners will find the usual faces, events and themes of French history.

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.

In this detailed study, Terri Blom Crocker provides the first comprehensive analysis of both scholarly and popular portrayals of the Christmas Truce from 1914 to present. This new examination shows how a variety of works have both explored and enshrined this outbreak of peace amid overwhelming violence. The vast majority of these accounts depict the soldiers as acting in defiance of their superiors. Crocker, however, analyzes official accounts as well as private letters that reveal widespread support among officers for the détentes.