Downed Allied Airmen and Evasion of Capture

Downed Allied Airmen and Evasion of Capture PDF Author: Herman Bodson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786422165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
This volume deals specifically with escape and evasion in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, an operation in which the author himself was directly involved, and discusses the role which these lines of escape played in the lives of airmen who were forced to bail out over enemy territory. He describes the ever-present risks the often nameless patriots faced, such as the danger of exposure and the threat of traitorous infiltration. Specific lines are traced geographically and their main participants discussed. Special emphasis is placed on the role of women in this resistance operation. Throughout the book, the reader benefits not only from the author's own personal recollections but also from his later on-location research. The final chapter concludes with statistical information directly related to this little known aspect of World War II. Appendices include lists of the airmen helped by the resistance movement.

Downed Allied Airmen and Evasion of Capture

Downed Allied Airmen and Evasion of Capture PDF Author: Herman Bodson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786422165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
This volume deals specifically with escape and evasion in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, an operation in which the author himself was directly involved, and discusses the role which these lines of escape played in the lives of airmen who were forced to bail out over enemy territory. He describes the ever-present risks the often nameless patriots faced, such as the danger of exposure and the threat of traitorous infiltration. Specific lines are traced geographically and their main participants discussed. Special emphasis is placed on the role of women in this resistance operation. Throughout the book, the reader benefits not only from the author's own personal recollections but also from his later on-location research. The final chapter concludes with statistical information directly related to this little known aspect of World War II. Appendices include lists of the airmen helped by the resistance movement.

Silent Heroes

Silent Heroes PDF Author: Sherri Greene Ottis
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813147980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
In the early years of World War II, it was an amazing feat for an Allied airman shot down over occupied Europe to make it back to England. By 1943, however, pilots and crewmembers, supplied with "escape kits," knew they had a 50 percent chance of evading capture and returning home. An estimated 12,000 French civilians helped make this possible. More than 5,000 airmen, many of them American, successfully traveled along escape lines organized much like those of the U.S. Underground Railroad, using secret codes and stopping in safe houses. If caught, they risked internment in a POW camp. But the French, Belgian, and Dutch civilians who aided them risked torture and even death. Sherri Ottis writes candidly about the pilots and crewmen who walked out of occupied Europe, as well as the British intelligence agency in charge of Escape and Evasion. But her main focus is on the helpers, those patriots who have been all but ignored in English-language books and journals. To research their stories, Ottis hiked the Pyrenees and interviewed many of the survivors. She tells of the extreme difficulty they had in avoiding Nazi infiltration by double agents; of their creativity in hiding evaders in their homes, sometimes in the midst of unexpected searches; of their generosity in sharing their meager food supplies during wartime; and of their unflagging spirit and courage in the face of a war fought on a very personal level.

Aircraft Down!

Aircraft Down! PDF Author: Philip D. Caine
Publisher: Potomac Books Incorporated
ISBN: 9781574887549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book

Book Description
An authority on pilot evasion, escape, and survival recounts extraordinary adventures that took place in Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Albania, and Greece during World War II.

The Blister Club

The Blister Club PDF Author: Michael Lee Lanning
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780811739740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book

Book Description
Michael Lee Lanning tells the story of the courageous airmen who evaded capture and escaped to safety after being shot from the skies during World War II. Lanning covers the hows and whys of escape-and-evasion and aerial combat in the European theater, but also vividly captures the stories of the airmen who did the escaping and evading.

Cheating Hitler

Cheating Hitler PDF Author: Martin W Bowman
Publisher: Air World
ISBN: 1399073265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book

Book Description
For most, and particularly the injured and the wounded, being shot down over Occupied Europe during the Second World War meant that capture was immediate, that imprisonment was almost inevitable. For some, evasion was possible, but rarely for long. For a relative handful, however, their evasion saw them eventually reach home once again. In this fascinating insight into how some Allied aircrew achieved the almost impossible and evade capture, the renowned aviation historian Martin W. Bowman has drawn together a set of tales of just some of these individuals. They are stories that illustrate the bravery and resourcefulness that characterized their experiences. British, American, Canadian and other Allied testimonies all feature to provide an authentic sense of the times at hand and the reality of life as an evader during this tumultuous and incredibly dangerous time. The stories of some Allied airmen, faced with sudden leaps into that dangerous unknown and their subsequent attempts at evasion, are retold here, many for the first time. Those who successfully evaded and were ‘free to fight again’ were few. Some were forced to remain in hiding under the guiding hands of the likes of the French Resistance or the patriots of the Comète Line – a few of the many who risked their lives helping Allied airmen, either to escape or to remain hidden until liberation, on pain of imprisonment, torture and death by their Nazi oppressors. Despite the threat of such retaliation, it has been said that as many as 100,000 people may have assisted evaders on one or more occasions before the war in Europe was brought to an end. This series of intoxicating chapters of evasion and life under the constant threat of recapture by the Nazis goes one step further in the drama of the war fought in the skies over the Third Reich and the subjugated countries of France, Belgium and Holland, revealing the constant nagging, and very real, fear that was endured by evaders and rescuers alike.

Air Forces Escape & Evasion Society

Air Forces Escape & Evasion Society PDF Author: Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781563110344
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book

Book Description
A history of the brave American men who flew and were shot down in Europe during World War II, but were able to escape imprisonment due to the efforts of those who aided them. A source of information on the European underground resistance groups of World War II. The book contains rare photographs, maps, and war documents.

Forgotten Casualties

Forgotten Casualties PDF Author: Kevin T Hall
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 1531502881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book

Book Description
Sheds new light on the mistreatment of downed airmen during World War II and the overall relationship between the air war and state-sponsored violence. Throughout the vast expanse of the Pacific, the remoteness of Southeast Asia, and the rural and urban communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, more than 120,000 American airmen were shot down over enemy territory during World War II, thousands of whom were mistreated and executed. The perpetrators were not just solely fanatical soldiers or Nazi zealots but also ordinary civilians triggered by the death and devastation inflicted by the war. In Forgotten Casualties, author Kevin T Hall examines Axis violence inflicted on downed Allied airmen during this global war. Compared with all other armed conflicts, World War II exhibited the most widespread and ruthless violence committed against airmen. Flyers were deemed guilty because of their association with the Allied air forces, and their fate remained in the hands of their often-hostile captors. Axis citizens angered by the devastation inflicted by the war, along with the regimes’ consent and often encouragement of citizens to take matters into their own hands, resulted in thousands of Allied flyers’ being mistreated and executed by enraged civilians. Written to help advance the relatively limited discourse on the mistreatment against flyers in World War II, Forgotten Casualties is the first book to analyze the Axis violence committed against Allied airmen in a comparative, international perspective. Effectively comparing and contrasting the treatment of POWs in Germany with that of their counterparts in Japan, Hall’s thorough analysis of rarely seen primary and secondary sources sheds new light on the largely overlooked complex relationship among the air war, propaganda, the role of civilians, and state-sponsored terror during the radicalized conflict. Sources include postwar trial testimonies, Missing Air Crew Reports (MACR), Escape and Evasion reports, perpetrators’ explanations and rationalizations for their actions, extensive judicial sources, transcripts of court proceedings, autopsy reports, appeals for clemency, and justifications for verdicts. Drawing heavily on airmen’s personal accounts and the testimonies of both witnesses and perpetrators from the postwar crimes trials, Forgotten Casualties offers a new narrative of this largely overlooked aspect of Axis violence.

Silent Heroes

Silent Heroes PDF Author: Sherri Greene Ottis
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813188385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book

Book Description
In the early years of World War II, it was an amazing feat for an Allied airman shot down over occupied Europe to make it back to England. By 1943, however, pilots and crewmembers, supplied with "escape kits," knew they had a 50 percent chance of evading capture and returning home. An estimated 12,000 French civilians helped make this possible. More than 5,000 airmen, many of them American, successfully traveled along escape lines organized much like those of the U.S. Underground Railroad, using secret codes and stopping in safe houses. If caught, they risked internment in a POW camp. But the French, Belgian, and Dutch civilians who aided them risked torture and even death. Sherri Ottis writes candidly about the pilots and crewmen who walked out of occupied Europe, as well as the British intelligence agency in charge of Escape and Evasion. But her main focus is on the helpers, those patriots who have been all but ignored in English-language books and journals. To research their stories, Ottis hiked the Pyrenees and interviewed many of the survivors. She tells of the extreme difficulty they had in avoiding Nazi infiltration by double agents; of their creativity in hiding evaders in their homes, sometimes in the midst of unexpected searches; of their generosity in sharing their meager food supplies during wartime; and of their unflagging spirit and courage in the face of a war fought on a very personal level.

The Blister Club

The Blister Club PDF Author: Michael Lee Lanning
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0811769720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book

Book Description
During World War II, some 10,000 American bombers and fighters were shot down over Europe. Of the crews aboard, 26,000 men were killed, while 30,000 survived being shot down only to be captured and made prisoners of war. Against the longest of odds, nearly 3,000 airmen made it to the ground alive, evaded capture, and escaped to safety. These men proudly called themselves the Blister Club. Drawing on tens of thousands of pages of mostly untapped documents in the National Archives, Michael Lee Lanning tells the story of these courageous airmen. They had received escape-and-evasion (E & E) training, and some were lucky enough to land with their E-&-E kits—but all bets were off once they hit the ground. They landed after an air catastrophe. The geography was usually unfamiliar. Civilians might or might not be trustworthy. German soldiers and Gestapo agents hunted down airmen as well as civilians who dared help them. If an airman abandoned his uniform for civilian garb, he forfeited Geneva Convention protections. Most faced the daunting task of escaping on foot across hundreds of miles. The fortunate connected with one of the established escape routes to Spain or Switzerland or across the English Channel, or they hooked up with the underground resistance or friendly civilians. Upon return to friendly lines, these men were often able to provide valuable intelligence about enemy troop dispositions and civilian morale. Many volunteered to fly again even though regulations prohibited it. The Blister Club is history with a punch. With a historian’s eye, Lanning covers the hows and whys of escape-and-evasion and aerial combat in the European theater, but the book also vividly captures the stories of the airmen who did the escaping and evading, including that of a young pilot named Chuck Yeager, who, during his own escape, aided the French Resistance and helped another downed airman to safety—and then begged to fly again, eventually securing Eisenhower’s approval to return to the air, where he achieved ace status. Stories of escape are popular, especially those set during World War II, as are stories of the war in the air. Combining both of these, The Blister Club should find an enthusiastic audience.

Against the Odds

Against the Odds PDF Author: Murray Adams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780642265975
Category : Escapes
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book

Book Description
Escapes and Evasions by Allied Airmen, World War II. A collection of personal accounts from some of the 700 Allied airmen who escaped captivity, or evaded capture in enemy territory during the Second World War. Some are simple tales of unaided walking through the enemy's lines during the confusion of battle, while others are narratives of well planned and clever deceptions that led to freedom