Fascinating stories that are full of courage that weve never heard about. This evening he will share from his new book escape from paris, a true story of love and resistance in wartime france which is based on official american french and german documents, history, personal memoir and as well as personal interviews. It is a thrilling wartime adventure story of american aviators rescued by fighters taken to not the and hidden under the noses of gestapo. Please join me welcoming stephen harding. No pressure there. I would like to personally thank you all for coming, i really appreciate it when people show up, and hope not to bore you. I want to give you some quick background on my stuff, people wonder how you military history. I was born and raised in Southern California long time ago and my father and all my uncles fought in world war ii in the pacific. So i grew up hearing their stories of fighting the japanese in sealing the broad ocean and Everything Else. When i was 19 i am listed in the United States army in 1971 and in retrospect it was not the best decision i ever made because six months later i got run over by an Army Personnel carrier. As a result im a disabled veteran and i will tell you armored personnel carriers are very heavy and they dont give much. I spent over a year in Army Hospitals in germany and the United States and this was obvious the way before the internet, there wasnt a whole lot else to do but read or else they could not sit up. Whatever i was going to do i had to be able to hold over my head. Every couple of days a volunteer become from whatever library the hospital was attached to and being in a Military Hospital most of what they had an offer was military fiction or military history. So it reawaken my interest in military history. I eventually got out of the hospital but wearing several kinds of braces, the army decided i could no longer be in infantryman so for reasons i still dont understand the meaning of journalist. I spent the last year of my time in the army doing regular television. Journalism, i got out of the army and i immediately went back to school at the university of california in Santa Barbara which will tell you is absolutely the best place on the planet to go to college especially if you like to serve which i did rather indelibly in those days. I have 2 degrees in history from the university of california, i immediately went to work for the federal government and i initially was a historian for the bureau of Land Management which is interesting because i was doing historical studies at the Indian Tribes which i knew nothing about because i was not military historian, iran and museum on Treasure Island in the middle of symphysis go by which is a wonderful place to work, and not being a staff historian for the air force and army it was in the army i was working at the u. S. Army of u. S. Military history in d. C. But i heard the story that became the last battle, the story and the only time in world war ii when americans and germans joined forces and fought together and they did it to defend the castle in austria that was filled with ear training french vips were about to be murdered by the ss. Its also the only time in American Military history that u. S. Soldiers defended the castle. Its a great story going to be developed into a movie. Other books followed in bringing us up to escape from paris, when i finished the last book my agent as all agents he said what is your next book. And i said im not sure i want to write another book, how about the history of tsunamis or ocean and he said no, no youre a military historian. I said you have any suggestions and he said yes i have three ideas. Paris, world war ii and americans. I said that is a fascinating idea except there were not any americans that occupied france and he said im sure youll find some. So 18 months of Research Later i did indeed find out that there were americans in german occupied peers in world war ii. There were aviators who had been shot down over occupied france and had managed to come under the wing of the French Resistance. They were generally moved to larger cities largely paris because Young Americans who did not speak french would stand out like a sore thumb outside of a big city. Paris at that time, 3 Million People, lots of places to hide. So the story that i first found was on a particular day in 1943 and july 14, there was a bombing raid conducted the 94th bomb group which was based in sussex england. There was just one group, there were several groups involved, over 100 airplanes bombing different targets and around peers. For the 94th bomb group it was the old air drum which had turned into a german airfield. Even before the 94th group got there for b17s from the 94 bomb group were shot down in about 20 minutes. That is actually not true, three of them were shot down and ill tell you what happened to the fourth in a minute. I found that story and i thought i wanted to do a story about the air force but i also wanted to do a story about the French Resistance and i also wanted to write something that told the role of women in world war ii because its usually overlooked concept and it just so happened that i came together that this book rings all the threads together. So i found the story about the 94th bomb group and i thought i still dont have it yet. Guys getting shot down, what is not about. And i managed to find the one guy who became the focus of my story a guy named joe from Washington State he was a waist gunner and wanda b17. In joes aircraft b17 bombers in world war ii carried ten men and on his plane that day there were 11 people because in addition to the regular crewmen they had on board Jefferson Davis dixon, jeff dixon. Yes, he was from the south, jeff dixon was a fascinating guy and i thought about building the book around him although for residual here in a minute it did not work out. Jeff dixon had been in the u. S. Army in world war i and served in france and he had been in a photographic unit and after world war i he after a lot of Young Americans who had never been this france but they wanted to experience it. They stayed in france, took a discharge and they managed to become a millionaire by promoting boxing matches, horse races, bicycle races and in fact he owns a hippodrome in paris. He just happened to be in new york city when pearl harbor happened and he immediately turned his back on his entire business which at that point was taken over by the germans and reenlisted in the United States army specifically in the army air forces. They made him an officer and a moche enter Motion Picture photographer and sent him to europe with a bunch of people that youve heard of and that you havent heard of tissue Aerial Combat sequence for training purposes for documentary films, some of it ended up in the original film about that and some ended up in clark gables film which most people had never seen and if you google clark gable and b17 you can watch it online, is a brilliant documentary that he made and as a matter fact he flew on a gunner estimate of the missions. So i found this guy and i said he is an interesting guy. And then i tracked down his stepson who lives in olympia washington and he is now in his late 70s and the man name nick idolizes and truly loved his stepfather and when i contacted him my wife and i were in california and they said would you mind if i fly up if you have anything to show me and memorabilia i love to see it and he said i have a whole footlocker. For any researcher thats like i am there. So i flipped to olympia and i drove there and sure enough he had laid the stuff on the table in his garage and it was photographs and metals and parts in uniforms and logbooks and letters from friends and relatives but there was one thing that caught my eye and it was a simple black Leather Wallet and it was one that joe had carried on the day he died in 1978 i think it was. Its been a while since i wrote the book. I said do you mind if i look through this and he said sure, go right ahead. I opened it up and of course theres a drivers license, social security, a va health card, much like the one i carry and inside on a very hard to see inside pocket i saw crinkle paper. I pulled it out and opened it up and it was a letter in french written a couple of weeks after joe got out of occupied france and went back to europe or england. It was signed and that and i thought the story got interesting. So nate had never seen the letter, i showed it to him and he was now particular Interest Income i copied it as they did with his permission with all the other stuff and then i started digging into who this woman was. That took another five or six months because of course at that point i was assuming she was gone. She was not gone, she just turned 99 years old, she lives in a home near a small town which i want attempt to announce pretty speak german and my wife speaks french and german is not a language you want to use when youre integrating world war ii resistance fighters. So we went to france, we had research to doing paris and we were able to talk to her and we got a excellent bottle of champagne. So that all came together and how this book sort of jelled. I wont tell you all about it because i hope you will read the book, to me it is an interesting story, it combines military history, a love story in a memoir in ways that i wont express right now, it also involves concentration camps. It is a very involved book. It covers a lot of ground. The only one negative review that ive had so far was a gentleman who got a copy and said i dont know why you put a stupid love story in the great world war ii book. So i think the gentleman missed the point. So if joe and yvette are the two key personalities, im sure youre familiar with the huge multiacre campus just south of the river among other things museums and military barracks and hospital in wenzhou and several of his friends were taken to paris, he and one other guy were given over to a family, i apologize for the pronunciation. The father was george and the mother was denise and their daughter was yvette, usually in that kind of situation it would only be on the ground and occupied france for two weeks. Just as long as it took for the French Resistance to organize a way out. That way it was generally walking to the mountains with neutral spain. And train to get there from back to england. That was called homerun if you made it back to england. In joes case there were various difficulties involved, some involving gestapo, he ended up being in paris for several months living with them in their small apartment and he and yvette developed a very deep relationship and they went so far as to go to the local parish priest and get officially engaged in tending to be married after the war. When joes time came he went out in a completely different way. In the story continues from there. I will tell you that not long after he left the family was arrested. That is the latter part of the book. To me its a very affecting story. Which event when we talk to her did not really want to talk about. For obvious reasons. Fortunately in doing the research i found several documents a couple of books and several magazine articles that were written by other people had been arrested and deported to germany on exactly the same train that denise and her parents were and they describe the entire journey and i crossreference that with one or two things that event said i realized it was the same train, same journey so that was the way i was able to describe that she did not want to describe. In doing the history especially when people are still alive, you have to be really aware of the sensitivities, one of which was a very deep and important relationship that the very elderly woman had in her youth, she was 22. And she remembered all of her life. When i realize that john kerry that letter for 50 some odd years and he had been happily married after the war for reason i will not go into he was not able to marry event her. She was reading her copy of the book and she got all the way through the book and she was in the last chapter and i was watching a movie on the flight and i turned over and she was sobbing. So i figured, okay i mustve told the story and understandable way. So really without getting into too many things this book i suffer from a very rare not that rare but a lot of writers have it its called Research Rapture. [laughter] it means you are so into finding things out that is very difficult to put that aside and start writing. It happened on this book too. There was a lot to be found out, my wife with her french was incredibly helpful and i hired an American Woman who is living in france for the last 30 years he used to be an Associated Press journalist and very good friends of ours who did a lot of the Archival Research because even though i have Research Rapture i hate archives. And especially any archive that you have to put in an order in the morning and wait eight hours until he comes up in generally you get it right before you supposed to turn back and so i do tend to hire people to do that for me but also i do a lot on my own and having worked at the military history for a while as a staff historian im pretty good with army records, im pretty good with air force records but a lot of this was nonmilitary documentation, letters between people one of the ways i flushed out the romance between joe and yvette was because several other american aviators and british aviators who had been hidden there briefly at the same time describe the relationship and letters to other people. They thought it was such an amazing thing. So that is how you flush out or thats how i flush out the story when some of the principles are no longer with us or not necessarily dont want to be not forthcoming about it. I sent a copy to yvette and her daughter who is also named denise after her mother and unfortunately none of them read english so i think theyre having somebody painstakingly read it to them and i think they will find it surprising in a lot of ways because eva and joe sort of lost touch and this will fill in a lot for her. I also sent a copy to the stepson and his wife has told me that he is fascinated by it and it makes him sad in a good way because that is the part that he never knew about joke cornwalls wartime experience other than he got shot down. Ultimately that is how this book came together and apparently there is a chance it may be a movie although my experience so far there is called development hell where they will auction your book, write a script and look for actors and for some reason it takes years to do that so im hoping that this one will go a little bit more quickly because i think its a great story and obviously have a certain prejudice involved in that but i just really enjoy it and to me being able to write honestly and concisely and yet an entertaining way about people most of whom ive never met and was not a life and doing whatever they were doing and can be very satisfying if you do it right and i hope that theyve done it right. At this point i would like to open it up for questions. I spoke a little less than i might have because when i do radio tv interviews they always tell the story i would say dont tell the complete story because we want people to read the book but i would be happy to answer any questions you might have on this for my other books were life in general. I can make the assumption that you know the canon of World War Ii History pretty well. In your perspective, how does the story and your telling of it give a different angle or add or what is already in existence. One thing i did not know his other out a lot of things with the French Resistance priest several books about aviators shot down and being held by the resistance not only in france but belgium netherlands, italy and i had not realized that the european Resistance Movement between 1942 for the british part between 1939 in 1945 and for the u. S. Roughly 1942 in 1945 because 1942 is when they started operating over occupied europe. In the allied Resistance Movement or those that were working on behalf of the allies helped 6000 aviators evade capture by the germans and return to ally territory. If you think about that, given example between 1944 and 1945 just talking about the u. S. Eighth air force which was the primary american Aviation Unit operating out of britain this was farmers, fighter planes, transports, between 1942 in 194,518,000 aircraft went down in some of those are accidents, those that were shot down or went down for reasons we still do not know. If you think about the b17 as i said earlier a ten man crew for airplanes, that is a lot of people, most that will not make it back either is because they are dead and i cant tell you to much without giving too much away the 11 people only three got out. Which is about what happened. In the film that we see these days from memphis to whatever when you see the planes cascading out of control a b17 will only fly up to a certain point with a certain amount of damage and then it becomes a hunk of metal and it will fall no matter what and we saw this a few weeks ago with the b17 carrying two of the passengers crashed in connecticut and killed seven people. I had written on the plane 20 years ago and i sat in the plexiglas because is by far the best view you will ever get flying but i do remember thinking if we lose an engine or two engines, i dont want to be sitting here and unfortunately the people that were killed several weeks ago most were in the front of the airplane. And in combat, the people who generally tend to get out of b17 and be 24s were going down with the people on the aircraft, the waste covers, the radioman, the people in the front office were trying to keep the plane study so the rest of them could get out. That is what happened in this case. That was a longwinded answer but the ability to tell a larger story about the French Resistance but also the majority of the resistance workers who are not carrying guns out in the countryside, the majority of people working to help aviators were women. That is primarily because even by 1943, the majority of frenchmen between 18 and 40 were either still in german camps or working or in hospitals so things naturally fell to the women and they were very good at it. Even though paris had 3 Million People in 1943 there had been a mass activist from the city in 1940 so there were a lot of empty apartments, empty warehouses and a lot of places to hide people. It was the women primarily who move them from place to place. Once it was time to go to the pyrenees they would give them to actual guides which mustve been a grueling trip even in good weather. And unfortunately joe did not have to go out that way. I went on and on, anything else. Im curious about your book, do send copies. Generally all of the people who provided those snippets are not necessarily people i know, i love his books. Fortunately i have been able to be good friends with them over several years and is a novelist who wrote about the period in paris and there was a lot of scoping around in wine and stuff like that. I read several of his books. Which is why part of the reason i wanted to write about paris. So when you have the meaning script on your publisher will generally say who would you like us to send this to and they will send it to a lot of other people, whatever. Are there core people that you want to have in this book. And in my line of work as a military historian in a magazine author i have been able to meet a wide range of writers and i picked these folks and they got advance copies of their book and i do this for other writers. This is on its way to be a hbo miniseries for the last 15 years prehe wrote about the eighth air force and is a really good friend of mine. And a british author, i did not know that she had read one of my earlier books and i was happy to do it. In the business they are called blurbs and you ask people that you admire to tell you honestly, i fortune had never had one go i will pass. So that is how that comes about. We would like to hear more about your initial contact and how you went over. That was quite an event. I start off the she was dead. Joe advised in the 1970s but alan hampton was a friend of ours and i had her initially going to the french archives which can be a mindnumbing experience because of bureaucracy in france. But she had been handling as a journalist for years so she knew people went to the right people and it would be really great if that was a lie. I looked for a 90yearold frenchwoman, currently i spend a lot of time on that and one day i get an email and she says i found her, she is a life in a blooming away, and number one can you talk to her initially, here are some questions because she is fluent in french and she is a delightful southern accent. And she was able to find her, at that point she was living in this town. So we set up a trip to go to paris i needed to see the ground, i had been there several times and spent five years in germany so i had been different several times. But i was fortunate to be offered the chance to go up on top of napoleons tomb. I dont know how you notice, it is covered by a golden dome which you can see everywhere in paris, it is connected to the cathedral that was built for the wounded veterans and also the hospital was built for. The americans who got out early enough in the morning in the hotel was open throughout world war ii and museums were open, the hospital for indoors was open but there was something in the northwest corner, there were german guards Walking Around plus all the people coming in and a lot of them germans as tourist to see his tomb it was incredibly popular german soldiers after hitler tied his picture taken looking down at it. Even to this day there are literally scratch marks because every german soldier wanted to have his or her picture taken. I did not know what we were getting into with this opportunity so several and so many people and a gentleman who runs the museum of the french army. He led us up there and they were up stairways built in the 18 century and they had not been repaired and they squeak and they crack and you finally get up and you end up in the attic of the cathedral and it looks like an inverted boat because the rest of the group and the broad walkway and walking along and you come to a little covered whole and the gentleman says this is amazing. He opens the door and theres a whole that look straight down and he said back in 18 century all of these disabled veterans were required to go to mass and somebody above would shove white doves down the hole to illustrate the divinity of the process. Which i thought was interesting so he walked down further and you walk out any area at the base of the golden dome which is between 80 and 90 feet off the ground its an incredible view of paris, off to one side the eiffel tower and you conceal kinds of things. In the wind blowing through their and its moving along and theres no guard rails and these american airmen would spend days up there because you cannot be seen from the ground especially for sitting down, they read and drink wine and imagine joe and evette got to know each other up there. It is a nice place to stand. That is something that we did in paris and then we caught a train after buying a big bunch of flowers and wonderful street market, we took a train to the city and events step grandson in law picked us up, he had been a chauffeur in new york for 15 years and is fluent in english, he drove us up to the horse farm where is that was living with her daughter and we spent the entire day with them. She was delightful. And the two of them got along like the house on fire. I was throwing questions into it. Especially when writing military history and not to get too much in the technique of it but especially World War Ii History in world war ii and the American Army and most of the armies anything that happened was documented almost immediately after action reports or technical reports all of those have been preserved. So while talking to a veteran of world war ii is wonderfully interesting as i talked to my father and my uncle, they have been spewed, if you can get the report in austria it is much more accurate and obviously i did talk to two gis that were 1t in the descriptions sound like theyre in different countries. Because you are focused way. And having the world war ii records is incredibly helpful when you write World War Ii History. The problem is now in a learn this is a journalist in iraq and other places a lot of those records are digital in their issue two units by cell phone or by encrypted tactical radio but theyre not preserved anywhere. And more portly for a historian and from writing up until ten years ago, soldiers always rode home and they got letters from home and they have those letters in a tell you where im at because you already know because you did the research and theyre talking about conditions where feelings and how their buddy got killed or Something Like that. You dont have people riding home these days, they text, the email, they skype but most of those are not preserved so the people were right the books about complex enabling the hubble much more difficult time trying to track down those little kernels of information that take you from being an account to a story. Anyone else questioning. What character structure as fascinating as you work through the history, did you have a favorite. Thats a hard call, when i was writing the book about the last american war a young i tell you and american guy from pennsylvania the last american killed in combat too, my wife and i visited his sisters who were in their late 80s and i got so into the story of tony and having been badly injured myself, this guy like a lot of participants of world war ii essentially died by himself in the arms of a buddy but nobody else, he put to death. And they still cannot read the last chapter myself without eating pretty emotionally involved in in this book i think joe is a fascinating guy and she is an amazing human being for her parents george and denise were also fascinating, george was a disabled veteran of world war i, had a connection there, he also had a limp and one of his eyes was bad and Everything Else i kind of connected with him. And knowing what ultimately happened to all of them i found all three of them very engaged. So the long answer is, i dont think i can really pick one at least not in this book. Were any of them alive when you did the interview. No all the immediate participants in the book one of the pilots in airplane that was shut down became a priest in florida and he only died five or six years ago i think. But the rest of them like a lot of people of that generation including my father were hard smitten, hard living guys and a lot of them have emotional issues after the work and they had a brain injury myself and when you can actually get treatment, i cannot imagine what it was like for these guys especially people who flew 25 missions over europe and some planes explode and all that kind of good stuff or infantrymen on the ground or combat nurses, these folks came home with serious issues and a lot of them as a result, joe did pretty well, he was his 70s when he died video parkinsons and a whole bunch of other things to its unusual to find veterans and more unusual to find veterans who can relate to you for the last battle book, i did find that the two gis who are a completely different firefight they are sadly gone now but i read that book eight or nine years ago and it is getting harder, those who directly participated in world war ii are getting very, very rare which is unfortunate. From your perspective how effective overall was a resistance encumbering these people and getting them out. The French Resistance speaking about the french its a dual answer. There were very efficient at bringing down and making. Humans and getting them out of europe and probably 70 or 80 success rate. The problem is especially the last 15 years, this is a side issue, the French Resistance in world war ii has been falling off because all those films that we see about the liberation of paris as we talked about earlier and a lot of people firing at the germans decided to be in resistance a day before. A lot of the people bear in mind i love france and love the french they tend to be fractious people so the French Resistance was not one monolithic thing, they were communist, socialist, anarchist, sicilians who lived in france for years, russians who lived in france for years and have their own resistance groups, all these groups occasionally found ways to work with each other but never one thing and unfortunately a lot more french people collaborated with the germans than the friends like to think. There been several excellent landmark books about that in the last ten years but that is true of every nation occupied by the nasis there were french troops who fought the russians for the germans but also norwegians in swedens who were allegedly neutral who joined the germans in their fight so how effective, in terms of the one abridges and ambushing the germans, that is the day came and went and up to that point she shot at a german, you can get everybody in your village executor. Is your next book going to be about the tsunami. [laughter] can you tell us about what you are working on now. I have a couple of ideas but weve all written things in writing is not my favorite thing to do. Its just what i do for living. I enjoy it while you do it but because im an editor of a magazine i read and write all day long, to come home and is not generally something i really like to get into so it has to be an idea that really captures me and as you mentioned earlier, i tend to find books about a small group of people who actions or lives and form a larger story and thats hard to do, this is an 18 month under month search until i found joe and her. I have a couple of ideas but i am kick back and relax mode right in the moment. Im sure ill come up with something. Will you sign some book. Yes i would love to. Thank you all for being here i really much appreciated. [applause] the House Rules Committee is meeting later today members are expected to talk about the establishment of the coronavirus select committee, watch the rules Committee Live starting at 5 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan2. You are watching a special edition of book tv airing out during the week while members of congress are in the district to do the pandemic tonight the digital world, first michael string discussing about how discuss is bright in the American Dream is not dead in Timothy Carney on his book alienated america looking at how the American Dream is less attainable. Later Nicholas Kristof and sheryl were done with the working class in rural america. Enjoy book tv now and over