France World War

“Faced with the political disaster, I had to become France.” This was how Charles de Gaulle answered the call of history. One of the few French battlefield leaders to have distinguished himself in May 1940, he had become the undersecretary of state for national defense. But when the government rejected his calls to fight on and prepared to capitulate to Hitler, he escaped to London. There he instigated a resistance calling on “all the French who want to remain free to listen to me and follow me” in the legendary radio address of June 22.

Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist. When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth.

1925. Among the ancient honey-coloured walls of the tiny island of Malta, strangers slip into the shadows and anyone can buy a new name. Rosalie Delacroix flees Paris for a dancer’s job in the bohemian clubs deep in its winding streets. 1944. Running from the brutality of war in France, Florence Baudin faces a new life. But her estranged mother makes a desperate request: to find her vanished sister, who went missing years before. Betrayals and secrets, lies and silence hang between the sisters.

In the tradition of Agent Zigzag comes this breathtaking biography, as fast-paced and emotionally intuitive as the very best spy thrillers, which illuminates an unsung hero of the French Resistance during World War II - Robert de La Rochefoucald, an aristocrat turned anti-Nazi saboteur - and his daring exploits as a résistant trained by Britain's Special Operations Executive.

The fateful days and weeks surrounding June 6th, 1944, have been extensively documented in histories of the Second World War, but less attention has been paid to the tremendous impact of these events on the populations nearby. The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy tells the inspiring yet heartbreaking story of ordinary people who did extraordinary things in defense of liberty and freedom.

On June 29, 1919, one day after the Treaty of Versailles brought about the end of World War I, nearly seventy cyclists embarked on the thirteenth Tour de France. From Paris, the war-weary men rode down the western coast on a race that would trace the country’s border, through seaside towns and mountains to the ghostly western front. Traversing a cratered postwar landscape, the cyclists faced near-impossible odds and the psychological scars of war. Most of the athletes had arrived straight from the front, where so many fellow countrymen had suffered or died.

A true narrative of events surrounding the Nazi occupation of France… Few nineteen-year-old girls had the opportunity to spend their junior year of college abroad in 1929, much less middle-class Montana girls like Elizabeth Matheson. Her brave and adventurous spirit led her to study French at Le Sorbonne in Paris that year, where she fell in love—with the language, the country, and much later, a Frenchman. Elizabeth returned to the States and became a teacher in Faribault, Minnesota. Some years later, her students were paired as pen pals with the students of a Monsieur Jean Darbelnet at...

The United Nations is one of the most famous bodies in the world, and its predecessor, the League of Nations, might be equally notorious. In fact, President Woodrow Wilson’s pet project was controversial from nearly the minute it was conceived. At the end of World War I, Wilson's pleas at the Paris Peace Conference relied on his Fourteen Points, which included the establishment of a League of Nations, but while his points were mostly popular amongst Americans and Europeans alike, leaders at the Peace Conference largely discarded them and favored different approaches.

The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present. Speaking a mystifying array of languages and lugging outdated weapons, the Austrian troops were hopelessly unprepared for the industrialized warfare that would shortly consume Europe.

On October 2, 1918, Maj. Charles W. Whittlesey led the 77th Division in a successful attack on German defenses in the Argonne Forest of northeastern France. His unit, comprised of men of a wide mix of ethnic backgrounds from New York City and the western states, was not a battalion nor was it ever "lost", but once a newspaper editor applied the term "lost battalion" to the episode, it stuck.

Nobody asked questions, nobody demanded money. Villagers lied, covered up, procrastinated, and concealed, but most importantly they welcomed. This is the story of an isolated community in the upper reaches of the Loire Valley that conspired to save the lives of 3,500 Jews under the noses of the Germans and the soldiers of Vichy France. It is the story of a pacifist Protestant pastor who broke laws and defied orders to protect the lives of total strangers.

Raymond Poincaré was President of the Third French Republic at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. These memoirs deal with the political, diplomatic and military events of the war between its outbreak and the end of the year. This translation is the first ever to be made of Poincaré's war memoirs - from the edition published in Paris in 1928 by Librarie Plon - and offers a unique perspective on the war, not just from the French point of view - too often ignored in British and other histories - but from that of the head of state of one of the world's major powers in a global war. ...

France, July 1944: a month after the Allied landings in Normandy, and the liberation of Europe is under way. In the Pas-de-Calais, Nathalie Mercier, a young British Special Operations executive secret agent working with the French Resistance, disappears. In London, her husband, Owen Quinn, an officer with Royal Navy Intelligence, discovers the truth about her role in the Allies' sophisticated deception at the heart of D-Day.

In the autumn of 2020 Ned Boulting (ITV head cycling commentator and Tour de France obsessive) bought a length of Pathé news film from a London auction house. All he knew was it was film from the Tour de France, a long time ago. Once restored it became clear it was a short sequence of shots from stage 4 of the 1923 Tour de France. No longer than 2.5 minutes long, it featured half a dozen sequences, including a lone rider crossing a bridge. Ned set about learning everything he could about the sequence – studying each frame, face and building – until he had squeezed the meaning from it.

If the Wright brothers' 1903 flights in Kitty Hawk marked the birth of aviation, World War I can be called its violent adolescence - a brief but bloody era that completely changed the way planes were designed, fabricated, and flown. The war forged an industry that would redefine transportation and warfare for future generations.

In the spring of 1940, the Germans launched a military offensive in France and the Low Countries that married superb intelligence, the latest military thinking, and new technology. It was a stunning victory, altering the balance of power in Europe in one stroke, and convincing the entire world that the Nazi war machine was unstoppable. But as Lloyd Clark, a leading British military historian and academic, argues, much of our understanding of this victory, and blitzkrieg itself, is based on myth.

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.

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

In this thrilling historical spy novel from New York Times best-selling author Alan Furst, two heroic resistance fighters smuggle valuable information to occupied Paris to turn the tide of the World War II and defeat Nazi Germany.

ONE WOMAN'S ODYSSEY OF LIFE AND LOVE ACROSS NAZI GERMANY AND POSTWAR EUROPE “I want to live an extraordinary life.” Inge Krumm-Heller yearned to live the life of a modern, independent woman in Nazi Germany. From her childhood in East Prussia and labor service with the Reichsarbeitsdienst, to the hardships and air raids of the Second World War, Inge emerged ready to face a bold new world turned upside down by the American occupation. When a mysterious stranger brings news of Inge’s missing parents, she embarks upon an odyssey across the ruins of Europe to find them and, ultimately, to...