The evening of May 10, 1941, seven months before Pearl Harbor, settled quietly over the Scottish lowlands near Eaglesham — farm fields, stone walls, the smell of turned earth. Then came the sound: a twin-engine aircraft low and fast, trailing flame from one engine. David McLean, a farmer, stepped outside and looked up. He watched a figure drop from the plane and a parachute blossom against the darkening sky.

McLean found the man in a Messerschmitt flight suit lying in his field, ankle broken from the landing. The stranger said his name was Hauptmann Alfred Horn, and that he had urgent business with the Duke of Hamilton.

He was lying about his name. The Duke of Hamilton had never agreed to meet him. And the business he carried — a self-authored peace proposal for the British government — had been authorized by no one in Berlin, although that would not stop generations of conspiracy fabulists.

His real name was Rudolf Hess. Deputy Führer of the Third Reich. Third in the Nazi hierarchy, behind only Hitler and Göring. And he had just flown more than 900 miles alone, in a modified Bf 110 stripped of armament and fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks, with no navigator, no return fuel, and no plan beyond landing in a Scottish field and changing the course of the war.

The mission nobody ordered

Hess had been Hitler’s closest companion since the early Munich days. He transcribed Mein Kampf as Hitler dictated it during their shared imprisonment at Landsberg after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. He was a true believer in the oldest sense — not an opportunist, not a technocrat, but a man who had built his identity entirely around Adolf Hitler.

By 1940, that position had eroded. Göring ran the Luftwaffe. Himmler ran the SS. Speer was rising. Hess found himself increasingly ceremonial — a title without a portfolio.

What he still had was an obsession: Britain and Germany should not be fighting each other. In his reading of geopolitics, both nations faced a common enemy in the Soviet Union. The war in the west was a tragic mistake. And he, Rudolf Hess, would fix it.

He had met the Duke of Hamilton briefly at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In Hess’s mind, this constituted a diplomatic back channel. He made four practice flights over Germany to test his navigation. On the fifth, he kept going.

He bailed out over Scotland at roughly 6,000 feet, age 46, in the dark. By any measure of airmanship, the flight alone was extraordinary. What he found when he landed was not.

Three capitals, three reactions

Churchill, informed of Hess’s identity, reportedly said it was one of those cases where imagination is baffled by the facts — and then went to watch a Marx Brothers film. His government imprisoned Hess as a prisoner of war and said little publicly.

Hitler, informed the next morning, was furious and then calculating. He immediately declared Hess mentally ill — a lone madman acting without authorization. This was both convenient and plausible. Inconveniently, it raised the question of how a madman had been Deputy Führer.

Stalin concluded it was a secret British-German plot against him. He held this view for years. Historians have argued it deepened his catastrophic resistance to his own intelligence warnings about Barbarossa — which came six weeks later.

Keep in mind what the calendar said: May 10, 1941. The United States was neutral. Pearl Harbor was seven months away. Britain had been fighting Germany essentially alone for nearly a year. The Blitz had just wound down, 43,000 British civilians dead. Whether the Allies would survive was a genuinely open question.

Into this moment stepped a man with a briefcase full of self-authored peace terms and a broken ankle.

One year over Paris

There is a detail about the date that stops you cold.

May 10, 1941 was the first anniversary — to the day — of Germany’s invasion of France and the Low Countries. Operation Fall Gelb had launched on May 10, 1940. In twelve weeks it broke the French army, drove the British into the sea at Dunkirk, and delivered Paris to the Third Reich.

Hess had been party to all of it. He signed documents. He attended the meetings. He was present for the armistice terms that put France under occupation — that planted the swastika on the Eiffel Tower and turned the City of Light into a German garrison town.

On the first anniversary of that conquest, while Paris was twelve months into occupation, while Vichy was deepening its collaboration, while French men and women navigated the daily arithmetic of survival under enemy administration — on that exact day, the man who helped build that occupation flew away from it in a modified fighter plane, toward a Scottish farm field.

Whether the date was deliberate or coincidental, no one has ever established. It doesn’t matter. The symmetry holds.

The long afterward

The British tried Hess at Nuremberg in 1945. He was convicted on two of four counts — crimes against peace and conspiracy — and acquitted on war crimes and crimes against humanity, because he had been outside German decision-making since the night he flew away. He was sentenced to life.

He served it. All of it. At Spandau Prison in West Berlin, the Nazi hierarchy died or gained release one by one until Hess was the last prisoner remaining. The Soviets vetoed every clemency petition. For the final two decades of his sentence, the entire apparatus of Spandau — guards, staff, protocols, expense — was maintained for one increasingly frail old man who spent his days gardening and reading.

On August 17, 1987, Hess was found in a garden summerhouse, dead. He was 93. An electrical cord was looped around his neck. The official ruling was suicide.

His family disputed this immediately. Hess suffered from severe arthritis that had largely robbed him of grip strength. How, they asked, had he managed to loop and tighten a cord with hands that could barely hold a pen?

No satisfactory answer has ever been given. Within weeks of his death, Spandau was demolished — rubble carted away in trucks — to prevent it becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.

Hess had been a prisoner for 46 years. He holds the distinction, if it can be called that, of having served the longest imprisonment of any figure from the Second World War.

Links:

British National Archives education service “Spotlight on …"
Will we ever know why?

A word from the author

Hess fascinates me for the same reason Eddie Grant does: both are men who decide, alone and without authorization, that they can personally change the outcome of a larger conflict through a single audacious act. The difference is that Eddie usually has better operational planning. In Treasure of Saint-Lazare, Eddie operates in the gray space between official sanction and personal judgment — the same space Hess stumbled into on May 10, 1941, with considerably less success. If that tension interests you, the novel is available on Amazon.

— John Pearce, Part-Time Parisian
Washington / Paris

The timing is no accident. This year marks the 400th anniversary of her birth — February 5, 1626, on the Place Royale, the square we now call the Place des Vosges. And the Musée Carnavalet, in the very building where she lived her last two decades, is making it count.

The Woman Behind the Letters

Sévigné was widowed at twenty-five when her husband was killed in a duel in 1651, and she never remarried. Instead, she poured her extraordinary intelligence, her biting wit, and her bottomless affection into a correspondence that would eventually fill thousands of pages. The occasion for most of it was heartbreak of a quieter kind: in 1669, her beloved daughter Françoise-Marguerite married the Comte de Grignan and departed for Provence.

They would spend the rest of their lives apart.

What followed was one of the most sustained acts of literary love in French history. Nearly 1,372 letters are catalogued, the vast majority of them addressed to her daughter. Sévigné wrote about everything: the gossip of the court at Versailles, the trials of Nicolas Fouquet (she attended in person, horrified), military campaigns, the plague, fashions, food, the price of candles, the misery of bad roads in Brittany, and the peculiar sadness of being separated from someone you love. She moved in the most refined literary circles of the capital — the salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet, the circle of Mademoiselle de Scudéry — and she had the journalist’s eye: she couldn’t help but record what she saw.

The cruel irony is that almost none of the original manuscripts survive. What we have are copies — transcriptions made by her family and their circle, circulated, edited, and eventually published long after her death. The autograph letters that do exist are precious rarities. The BnF holds some of them, and the careful restoration work being done on these documents is a reminder of just how fragile this kind of survival is.

Lettres Parisiennes at the Carnavalet

The Musée Carnavalet — Histoire de Paris is currently mounting what may be the most important Sévigné exhibition in a generation: Madame de Sévigné: Lettres parisiennes, running through August 23, 2026.

More than 200 works — paintings, drawings, objects, manuscripts — have been assembled from the museum’s own incomparable collections, from the BnF, and from the Louvre. The exhibition crosses her literary legacy with the social and urban history of Louis XIV’s Paris, treating her letters not merely as personal documents but as what they truly are: the essential chronicle of a civilization at its most elaborate and most fragile.

The exhibition is, naturally, in the right place. Sévigné lived in the Hôtel Carnavalet from 1677 until her death in 1696. Walking those rooms is, in a real sense, walking through hers.

I never miss the Carnavalet when I’m in Paris — the permanent collection is free, and it is one of the great museums of Europe by any standard, its rooms tracing the history of Paris from Roman Lutetia through the Revolution and into the modern city. The Sévigné exhibition carries a separate ticket: €15 full price, €13 reduced. For what’s on offer, that is a genuine bargain.

See the full program here.

Practical notes:

• Open Tuesday–Sunday, 10h–17h45 (ticket windows close at 17h15)

• Closed Mondays and some public holidays

• Address: 23, rue Madame de Sévigné, 75003 Paris (yes, they named the street after her)

• Guided visits every Saturday at 10h (book in advance)

• A special reading of selected letters by Dominique Blanc of the Comédie-Française is scheduled for Sunday, June 7 at 4pm — worth planning around if you can

Sévigné died in 1696, at her daughter’s château in Grignan, having gone south at last to be near her. She had spent twenty-five years writing toward that reunion. Her letters are why we know what Paris smelled like, what people feared and laughed about, how power actually moved through the rooms of the Grand Siècle.

That the BnF is still tending these documents, still working to preserve what remains — that feels exactly right.

Thanks for reading Part-Time Parisian

John Pearce
Washington / Paris

Links:

The BnF Instagram post on the restoration work: instagram.com/p/DXuLiQhAbqN
The Carnavalet exhibition page: carnavalet.paris.fr/expositions/madame-de-sevigne

The morning of April 28, 1945, is cold and grey on Lake Como. A black Alfa Romeo pulls up to the iron gate of a villa at Giulino di Mezzegra, a hamlet so small it barely registers on maps of the lake district. Two men climb out. One of them is Walter Audisio, a Communist partisan who calls himself Colonel Valerio. The other is Benito Mussolini, founder of Fascism, former dictator of Italy, once the most powerful man in Europe outside Adolf Hitler.

Mussolini is wearing a German greatcoat. He is shaking.

Audisio raises a submachine gun. It misfires. He grabs a pistol from his companion. At 4:10 in the afternoon, he fires five shots. Mussolini crumples against the gate. The man who for twenty years had ordered others shot is dead at sixty-one, in a borrowed coat, at a gate that isn’t his, in a village he has never visited before.

How does a man who once stood on balconies above a million cheering Romans end up here?

The story begins not with violence but with a vacuum. Italy in 1919 is a country that has won the war and lost the peace. Half a million Italians are dead. The promised territorial gains — Dalmatia, parts of the old Ottoman Empire — have not materialized. Veterans are angry. The economy is a wreck. The established parties have no answers.

Into this vacuum steps Benito Mussolini, a former socialist newspaper editor who has reinvented himself as a nationalist agitator. He is charismatic, physically imposing, and utterly without scruple. His Blackshirts beat strikers, burned union halls, and terrorized political opponents. Industrialists and landowners wrote the checks. The King looked away.

On October 28, 1922, Mussolini’s followers marched on Rome. Rather than order the army to disperse them, King Victor Emmanuel III handed Mussolini the government. He was thirty-nine years old. Within three years he had abolished opposition parties, gagged the press, and declared himself Il Duce — The Leader. Italy’s brief experiment in democracy was finished.

For a time, it worked. The trains ran, or so the story went. The economy stabilized. Mussolini appeared on the covers of Time and the Illustrated London News. Winston Churchill called him, in 1927, “the greatest living legislator.” The establishment across Europe saw him as a bulwark against Communism and decided not to look too hard at the price.

The price was Hitler.

In 1934, when the Austrian Nazis attempted a coup and assassinated Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, Mussolini moved Italian troops to the Brenner Pass and the putsch collapsed. He had blocked Hitler’s first move into Austria himself.

Two years later, everything had shifted. The two men signed the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria without consulting his partner. Mussolini swallowed the humiliation. In 1939, he signed the Pact of Steel — a full military alliance — even though he privately told his son-in-law, Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, that Italy was not ready for a major war and wouldn’t be for years. The signature went on the paper anyway.

On June 10, 1940, with France already falling, Mussolini declared war. Churchill called it a stab in the back of a man already down. Mussolini called it his chance to sit at the victors’ table. He was wrong about nearly everything that followed. His invasion of Greece without Hitler’s knowledge turned into a disaster requiring German rescue. His North African campaign collapsed. By the summer of 1943 the Allies had landed in Sicily and the Fascist Grand Council — men who had built their careers under Mussolini — voted him out of power. The King had him arrested.

Hitler flew him out of captivity in a glider raid on the Gran Sasso mountain and installed him as the puppet leader of the Italian Social Republic at Salò, on Lake Garda. Mussolini was now a prisoner of the man he had helped to power. He knew it. His diaries from this period read like a man settling accounts with himself, not planning a future.

Clara Petacci was thirty-three years old and had been Mussolini’s mistress for nearly a decade. She was the daughter of a Vatican physician, educated, dark-eyed, and wholly devoted to a man who gave her little reason to be. He had a wife. He had other women. He had told her often enough that she was an inconvenience. She stayed.

When the partisan column stopped Mussolini’s convoy at Dongo on April 27, Clara was traveling separately. She was not a fugitive; she could have walked away. She demanded to be taken to wherever they were taking him. The partisans obliged.

At the Villa Belmonte the next afternoon, when Audisio came for Mussolini, Clara threw herself between them. She grabbed the barrel of the gun. A partisan pulled her away. She was shot a few seconds after he was.

The following morning, a truck carried both bodies to Milan and hung them upside down from the roof of an Esso station in Piazzale Loreto. It was the same square where, the previous August, German troops had shot fifteen partisans and left their bodies in the street as a warning. The crowd that gathered at Loreto knew what they were seeing. Some threw stones. Some wept. A few straightened Clara’s skirt, a gesture of modesty toward the woman who had asked for nothing except not to be separated from the man she loved.

Mussolini and the French

The French had their own complicated account with Mussolini. When France fell in June 1940, he presented Hitler with a list of demands: Nice, Savoy, Corsica, Tunisia, parts of Algeria. These were territories he had coveted for years, places he described as naturally and historically Italian. Hitler refused to give them — he needed France cooperative and compliant, not humiliated by a rival. Mussolini was furious. He got almost nothing for entering a war he couldn’t afford.

What he got instead was the French Riviera. From November 1942, Italian forces occupied the southeastern corner of France — Nice, Menton, Cannes, the coast as far as the Var river. Italian officers walked the Promenade des Anglais. They requisitioned the hotels. And in one of the war’s quiet ironies, the Italian zone became a refuge. When the Germans demanded that Jewish residents be handed over for deportation, Italian officers — sometimes on their own initiative, sometimes following quiet orders from Rome — refused. Thousands of Jewish refugees were still alive in the Italian zone when Italy surrendered in September 1943 and the Germans moved in to do the work themselves.

Mussolini did not order that protection. He did not prevent it, either. His regime was brutal in its own right. But the Italian occupation of the Côte d’Azur produced, almost by accident, one of the stranger acts of decency in the history of occupied France.

Mussolini died two days before Hitler. The Axis did not end with a surrender ceremony or a signed document on a grand occasion. It ended at a gate in a village on a lake, and in a petrol station parking lot in Milan, with a crowd throwing stones at hanging bodies.

The Italian republic that came after had to be built on top of that image — and on top of the fact that millions of Italians had cheered from the crowds, right up until it stopped being safe to do so. That accounting has never been entirely finished.

What stays with me is Clara Petacci, grabbing the barrel of the gun. She knew what was happening. She had every reason to step aside. She chose not to. History doesn’t record what she said in that moment. It doesn’t need to.

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A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

The spring of 1945 is the season Eddie Grant was made for — the moment when the old order cracks apart and the men who built it scramble for the exits. In Treasure of Saint-Lazare, Eddie moves through a Paris still sorting out who collaborated and who resisted, and finding that the line between the two is rarely where anyone expected it to be. The chaos Mussolini died in, and the quiet courage Clara Petacci showed at that gate, belong to the same moral universe Eddie navigates — one where the grand ideologies have failed and what’s left is what individual people choose to do in the moment.

Treasure of Saint-Lazare is available in Kindle, paperback, hard cover, and audio editions on Amazon. Paris Reckoning, the next installment in the Eddie Grant saga, is on its way.

— John Pearce

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There is one day a year when Paris smells different.

Not of bread, not of rain on cobblestones, not of diesel and perfume in the Métro. On May 1st, the city smells of muguet — lily of the valley — carried in small bouquets by nearly everyone you pass on the street. It is one of those days that reminds you, sharply, that you are not in America.

May 1, 1941

Ten months into the German Occupation, Marshal Pétain signed a decree making May 1st France’s first official labor holiday. The date was not chosen for sentiment. The international workers’ movement had claimed May 1st since 1890 — a day of marches, fists, grievance, and organizing. Pétain wanted it for something else.

He rebranded it La Fête du Travail et de la Concorde Nationale. The Labor Day of National Harmony. The marches were banned. The unions were broken. The holiday that had belonged to the workers was now a Vichy production — a managed ceremony in place of a real one.

And yet on the street corners of Paris, the muguet vendors were still there.

The little white bells had been appearing on May 1st since 1561, when the young King Charles IX, visiting the Drôme region, received a sprig as a token of good luck and decided to make the gesture a tradition. Nearly four centuries of habit could not be legislated away — not by Pétain, not by the Germans, not by anyone. While the politics of the holiday were being rewritten overhead, the smallest possible act of ordinary French life continued at street level.

That gap — between what a regime declares and what a people actually do — is one of the places where Occupation history gets genuinely interesting.

Where the Date Comes From

The root of May 1st as a workers’ day runs not to Paris but to Chicago. On May 1, 1886, tens of thousands of American workers walked off the job demanding an eight-hour workday. What followed at Haymarket Square — a bomb, deaths, a trial many considered rigged, executions — became the organizing wound of the international labor movement. Three years later, in Paris, the Second Socialist International declared May 1st the international workers’ day. France observed it for the first time in 1890.

It remained a demonstration day, not a holiday, for half a century — until Pétain turned it into one for his own purposes. After the Liberation, the Fourth Republic kept the holiday and stripped out the Vichy frame. By 1947 it was fully codified as a paid day off, and the legal protections around it are unlike any other day in the French calendar.

France has eleven public holidays, but May 1st is the only one that is obligatoirement chômée — a mandatory day off with no reduction in pay. Other holidays can be worked by employer decision. May 1st cannot. Workers required to come in at hospitals, emergency services, or public transit receive their salary doubled, by law. No negotiations. It is the one day France takes entirely off the table.

The Flowers

The muguet tradition Charles IX set in motion runs deeper than any politics. In the Belle Époque, Paris fashion houses gave sprigs to their seamstresses on May 1st. Christian Dior made lily of the valley a personal emblem — muguet appears throughout his work, and his Diorissimo remains one of the great floral perfumes. By the mid-twentieth century the flower had wound itself around the labor movement too: workers marched with sprigs in their lapels, and the delicate white bells became as much a symbol of the Fête du Travail as the clenched fist.

The scale is extraordinary. Around 60 million individual sprigs change hands in France on May 1st — an official market of roughly €24 million, which quadruples when you count the street vendors. About 85% of France’s lily of the valley is grown near Nantes.

French law does something unusual to accommodate those vendors. On May 1st alone, anyone can sell bouquets on the street without a license or taxes — provided they stay at least 40 meters from the nearest florist, sell only lily of the valley, and work without a fixed table or structure. The vendors come from everywhere: neighborhood associations, union locals, newcomers trying to make a little cash on the one day the law makes space for them. There is something quietly fitting about that, on a holiday rooted in the labor movement.

One practical note: muguet is beautiful, fragrant, and entirely poisonous. Keep it away from children and cats.

What It Adds Up To

The irony of the holiday’s Vichy origins is not something French textbooks dwell on. But it matters. The marches that happen today — the CGT, the CFDT, and Force Ouvrière moving from République to Nation, with turnout that measures the temperature of the country — run on a tradition that a collaborationist government first legitimized as a state holiday, and that a liberated France then reclaimed for its own purposes.

May 1st in France is two things at once, and their combination is very French: a grievance made into a holiday, and a royal gesture made into a democratic custom. The law says you must rest. The custom says you must bring flowers. The marchers say the fight isn’t over.

If you are in Paris on May 1st — and with it falling on a Friday this year, making a three-day weekend — step outside early, before the marches begin. Find a vendor on a corner. Buy a few sprigs. Smell them. Give one to someone.

Bonne fête.

Thanks for reading Part-Time Parisian.

John Pearce
Washington / Paris

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Rommel ordered his first assault on Tobruk on April 13, 1941. He expected it to fall within days.

It would not fall for 241.

In the spring of that year, he was a man who had stopped believing anything was impossible. He had driven across France in six weeks. He had arrived in North Africa in February with a handful of German units and, inside of two months, had reversed the entire trajectory of the Western Desert war — pushing the British back across Libya, all the way to the Egyptian border, in a campaign that left his own high command struggling to keep up with him.

By mid-April he had nearly everything he wanted. Nearly.

Behind his lines, on the Libyan coast, sat a port he needed badly. His supply lines ran more than a thousand miles back to Tripoli, and every mile of that road was a vulnerability. A functioning port this far forward would change his logistics entirely.

The garrison holding Tobruk was built around the 9th Australian Division, reinforced by Free French, Polish, and British units — roughly 35,000 men in all. They were dug in behind a ring of concrete fortifications the Italians had built before the war, and their commander, General Leslie Morshead, made clear from the start that defense meant attack. When the Afrika Korps probed, the Australians counterattacked. When German armor found a gap, infantry closed it. Morshead had no intention of presiding over another Dunkirk — if they had to fight their way out, they would fight their way out.

Rommel threw his best units at the perimeter through April and into May — coordinated armor and infantry assaults, air raids, artillery that never really stopped. The defenders held. By summer the siege had settled into something grimmer than battle: heat that cracked lips and split skin, flies that swarmed every meal, dust that found its way into everything. Water was rationed. Mail was irregular. The harbor was bombed almost daily.

Axis radio, broadcasting in English, began calling them the Rats of Tobruk — burrowing in tunnels and dugouts, too beaten to fight in the open. The garrison adopted the name within the week. They wore it like a medal.

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What kept them alive, beyond their own stubbornness, was the Royal Navy. Because Rommel controlled every land approach, the only way to supply Tobruk was by sea — at night, under air and submarine attack, destroyers and smaller vessels threading into the harbor after dark to unload ammunition, food, water, and medical supplies before dawn. The sailors called it the Spud Run. The men on shore called it the Tobruk Ferry Service. It ran for eight months.

The siege was finally lifted in December 1941 during Operation Crusader — one of the first clear Allied ground victories of the war, and proof, if anyone still needed it, that Rommel’s momentum was not a law of nature.

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The Free French at Tobruk

They tend to get lost in the larger narrative, but the soldiers of the 1st Free French Brigade were part of the Tobruk garrison from the beginning of the siege. Among them were units of the Foreign Legion — men who, after the fall of France, had refused the armistice and followed de Gaulle into an army that existed almost entirely on faith and British logistics.

Tobruk was one of the first places those men actually fought — proof, in the logic de Gaulle was always trying to demonstrate, that Free France was a force and not merely a symbol. The Rats, as it happened, came in more than one language.

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While Rommel Hammered Tobruk, Greece Was Coming Apart

The German invasion had begun on April 6, driving through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria with the speed that had by now become the Wehrmacht’s signature. The Greek army had been fighting Italy since October 1940 — five months of mountain warfare in Albania that had, improbably, pushed the Italians back. It was one of the few early bright spots of the war. The Germans ended it in days.

The British and Commonwealth forces Churchill had sent to help were overmatched from the start. By mid-April the question was no longer whether Greece could be held but how many men could be gotten out.

On April 18, the Greek prime minister, Alexandros Koryzis, shot himself. He had held the office for only three months, appointed in January after his predecessor died of a heart attack. He had done what he could. The Germans were in Thessaloniki; the line was broken; the government was preparing to flee to Crete. Whatever he believed his duty required of him, he concluded he had failed it. He was 56.

His name does not appear in most popular histories of the war. But his death marks the moment, more precisely than any military date, when Greece understood what was coming.

The British evacuation — Operation Demon — began April 24. By early May, roughly 50,000 Allied troops had been lifted off beaches in the dark, in small boats, under air attack. Thousands more were left behind. The occupation that followed was among the harshest in Western Europe: organized famine, mass reprisals, deportations. When the Germans finally withdrew in 1944, credible estimates put the civilian death toll from starvation alone as high as 300,000.

And then the civil war started.

The Guns of Navarone

If you know the Greece of this period at all, you may know it through Alistair MacLean’s *The Guns of Navarone* — the 1957 novel, or the 1961 film with Gregory Peck and David Niven, the one with the cliff climb and the guns hidden in the rock and the impossible mission threading through a German-occupied Aegean island. MacLean served in the Royal Navy during the war; the book is fiction, based on the Leros campaign of two years later, but it is fiction that understands something true about occupation — that resistance is most often improvised, terrified, and conducted by people with no good options.

The real stories are harder and stranger than the novel. The Greek resistance was fragmented and eventually turned on itself, communist and royalist factions fighting each other even as they fought the Germans. Britain backed one side, then stepped back; the United States stepped in under the Truman Doctrine. The civil war ran until 1949. It is not too much to say that the war Greece fought between 1940 and 1949 was, in some form, a single continuous catastrophe — nine years without a year of genuine peace.

For readers whose image of wartime France includes the ambiguities of occupation — collaboration, resistance, survival, and the compromises in between — Greece offers an equally layered story, less familiar and no less worth knowing.

The Tobruk Ferry Service

Rommel controlled every road between Tobruk and the Egyptian border. That meant the garrison could not be supplied overland — not a truck, not a crate of ammunition, not a liter of water. Everything had to come by sea.

The Royal Navy improvised a nightly run: destroyers, sloops, and small vessels slipping into the harbor after dark, unloading under blackout conditions, and out again before dawn. Sailors called it the Spud Run. The men ashore called it the Tobruk Ferry Service. It operated under constant threat from German aircraft and Italian submarines, and it sustained more than 35,000 defenders through eight months of siege — food, water, ammunition, replacement troops, and the wounded going out. It was one of the war’s more remarkable logistical achievements, conducted almost entirely in darkness, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves.

A Word from the Author

The soldiers of the French Foreign Legion who held Tobruk — men who had crossed the Mediterranean rather than accept an armistice they considered a betrayal — are the direct ancestors of the world Eddie Grant moves through in the Eddie Grant Saga. That refusal, that particular French stubbornness in the face of catastrophe, runs through Treasure of Saint-Lazare and into *Paris Reckoning*, which publishes in weeks. If you haven’t started the series, the door is open.

Thanks for reading Part-Time Parisian.

John Pearce
Washington / Paris

North Atlantic. Water temperature: 35 degrees.

The USS Niblack was already stopped, pulling survivors from the sea. A Dutch merchant ship, the Svenor, had gone down — another casualty of the U-boat war strangling Britain’s Atlantic lifeline. The rescue was nearly complete when the sonar operator picked up something below the surface. A contact. Moving. Closing.

Commander Edward Durgin didn’t radio Washington. There was no time, and in any case, Washington would have had nothing useful to say. He ordered three depth charges rolled off the stern.

The explosions thundered through the black water. The contact disappeared. No confirmed kill — the U-boat likely ran — but the message was delivered in the only language that mattered at that depth.

Eight months before Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy had fired on a German vessel. There was no press conference. No declaration. The Roosevelt administration said nothing, because saying something would have forced a conversation the country wasn’t ready to have.

Franklin Roosevelt understood something that drove his isolationist critics mad: timing is everything.

By the spring of 1941, he had already made his move. The Lend-Lease Act, signed just weeks earlier on March 11, had committed American industrial production to Britain’s survival — weapons, ships, food, fuel, all of it flowing across an ocean that German submarines were working around the clock to close. Roosevelt called America “the arsenal of democracy.” Germany understood what that meant, even if the American public preferred not to think about the implications.

What the public also didn’t know — couldn’t know — was that the US Navy was already quietly escorting those convoys partway across the Atlantic. American destroyers like Niblack weren’t simply on patrol. They were in the fight. Officially, they were neutral. Practically, they were picking sides one depth charge at a time.

Hitler, for his part, was playing a careful game of his own. His standing orders to U-boat commanders were explicit: do not provoke the Americans. He was fighting a two-front war and didn’t want a third. So when Niblack’s depth charges went into the water, both governments had powerful reasons to keep quiet about it. The incident vanished into the official silence that surrounds events nobody is prepared to explain.

The silence suited Roosevelt’s strategy perfectly.

To understand why, you have to understand the wall he was navigating around. The America First Committee had 800,000 members. Charles Lindbergh — still a genuine American hero to millions — was filling auditoriums arguing that Britain’s war was not America’s war, and that “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration” were conspiring to drag the country into a conflict it had no business fighting. Father Coughlin, the “radio priest,” commanded an audience of millions with a weekly broadcast that blended populist grievance with thinly veiled sympathy for European fascism. As recently as February 1939, Fritz Kuhn’s German-American Bund had filled Madison Square Garden — swastika banners, portraits of George Washington alongside Adolf Hitler, twenty thousand people on their feet.

Kuhn was in prison by 1941, convicted on embezzlement charges. The Bund was fading. But the isolationist instinct it fed was very much alive, and Roosevelt knew that a president who appeared to be maneuvering America into war against public will was a president who would lose the argument — and possibly the next election.

So he moved carefully. Lend-Lease. Quiet convoy escorts. Rules of engagement that gave commanders like Durgin room to act. Each step was small enough that no single one forced a national reckoning. Taken together, they moved the country inches closer to the inevitable, one sonar contact at a time.

Across the Atlantic, the British were watching all of it with barely concealed anxiety. Churchill had staked Britain’s survival on the bet that America would eventually come in. He cultivated Roosevelt with the devotion of a man who knew he had no other option. Even the more cautious voices in the British establishment — men like Lord Halifax, Churchill’s former rival for Prime Minister, now serving as Ambassador in Washington — had come to understand that American hesitation was not neutrality. It was a clock running down.

The convoys Niblack was protecting were not an abstraction.

They were the oxygen keeping Britain alive — and, though Paris didn’t know it yet, keeping alive the possibility that France might one day be France again. By April 1941, Vichy had settled into collaboration, French North Africa was under Nazi-friendly control, and the Resistance was still finding its feet. The Atlantic lifeline was the thread that connected all of it: if the convoys failed, if Britain fell, the question of whether America ever entered the war became irrelevant. There would be nothing left to enter on the side of.

Commander Durgin’s depth charges went down for all of it. He just didn’t have the luxury of thinking about any of that. He had survivors in the water and a contact on his sonar.

He did his job.

The Niblack incident asks a question that keeps returning, in different forms, in different eras.

At what point does a nation committed to staying out of a war become a nation that is already in one? Roosevelt’s answer was: slowly, carefully, and without making a speech about it. He was buying time — for American industry to retool, for public opinion to shift, for events to do the work that arguments couldn’t.

Eight months later, the Japanese answered the question for him.

But on April 10, 1941, in 35-degree water north of Iceland, the first answer came from a destroyer captain who didn’t wait for orders that weren’t coming.

The depth charges sank into the dark.

The clock had already started.

The Man Who Didn’t Wait

Commander Edward Durgin faced a decision that no rulebook had anticipated. His orders didn’t authorize offensive action. But survivors were in the water, a contact was closing, and he had weapons. Durgin acted on training, instinct, and the oldest logic in naval warfare: you don’t wait to be hit first when you don’t have to. He was never formally reprimanded. He was also never publicly celebrated. Some decisions are too inconvenient to punish, and too sensitive to praise.

Brought to you by the Eddie Grant Saga

The gap between official policy and what actually happens in the field — that’s territory Eddie Grant knows well. He just usually operates a few fathoms deeper than Commander Durgin.

Eddie Grant navigates that same shadow world in Treasure of Saint-Lazare — available on Amazon.

Top-rated historical mystery of its year — Readers’ Favorite. See the entire series.

— John Pearce | Part-Time Parisian

On April 3rd of this year, an American F-15E Strike Eagle — one of the most sophisticated combat aircraft ever built — was shot down over Iran by a weapon one soldier could carry on his shoulder. President Trump later said the Iranians “got lucky” with a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile that was “sucked right into the engine.” Lucky, perhaps. But the threat was hardly a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention.

Man-portable air defense systems — MANPADS in the acronym the defense world favors — have been the scourge of both military and civilian aviation for more than sixty years, and were so prominent at one time that I wrote an entire novel featuring them. The attempted use of a shoulder-fired missile to shoot down an Airbus at DeGaulle airport was the central set piece of my novel Last Stop: Paris, the second in my Eddie Grant Saga. Kirkus called it “part thriller, part mystery, and all rollicking ride.”

The plot revolved around a man who had been an Iraqi spy in Kuwait, and whose son Eddie Grant killed, traded a load of gold for several pallets of Russian Strela manpads at the Bulgarian port, Burgas. Later, at DeGaulle airport, he fails to hit the airbus but does shoot down a military helicopter gunship.

The story seems to have struck a chord, as Last Stop: Paris remains a steady seller.

The United States and the Soviet Union developed shoulder-mounted missiles in parallel during the early Cold War, deploying their first systems in the 1960s: the American Redeye and the Soviet Strela-2. The concept was straightforward. Give an infantryman the ability to threaten enemy aircraft without requiring a radar installation, a vehicle, or a crew of specialists. Point, fire, walk away.

Both superpowers then did what superpowers do: they manufactured them by the hundreds of thousands and exported them promiscuously. The Arms Control Association estimates that more than one million MANPADS have been produced since their introduction, and that at least 102 countries have held them in their arsenals. The Soviet contribution to this flood was particularly consequential. Decades of Cold War overproduction and aggressive arms exports scattered these weapons across the developing world, and their effects are still being felt.

Manpads are widely credited with forcing the Soviet Union's forces out of Afghanistan in 1988.

The technology evolved in generations. Early systems were simple infrared seekers that could only chase an aircraft’s hot exhaust from behind — hence “tail-chase weapons.” Later generations added all-aspect targeting, better countermeasure resistance, and eventually the imaging infrared guidance now found in Russia’s fourth-generation Verba system, which Iran was reportedly negotiating to purchase from Russia as recently as last year, in a reported $589 million deal.

The proliferation problem became dramatically visible in 2011, when the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya unleashed one of the largest single arms-looting events of the modern era. Thousands of MANPADS, many of them poorly secured even before the chaos, vanished into the black market and began surfacing across North Africa and the Middle East. The Small Arms Survey subsequently tracked illicit MANPADS in 32 countries on five continents.

The civilian aviation threat has always been the nightmare scenario. More than fifty attacks on civilian aircraft have been recorded, mostly in Africa and Asia, and the 1994 shootdown of the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi — widely considered the trigger for the Rwandan genocide — stands as the grimmest illustration of what these weapons can do when aimed at the wrong target.

Colin Powell said in 2003 that there was “no threat more serious to aviation” than shoulder-fired missiles. Two decades of international effort — export controls, stockpile destruction programs, diplomatic agreements — have made a dent without solving the problem. The F-15E going down over the Zagros Mountains last week is a reminder that a weapon one person can carry remains capable of changing the course of events.

Wikipedia has a detailed page on manpads.

John Pearce
Washington, DC

On a hillside above Pearl Harbor, a young man watched battleships move in the morning light. He wasn’t a general. He wasn’t a naval commander. He was, officially, a minor consular official who had arrived in Honolulu the first week of April 1941 — eight months before the bombs fell.

His name was Takeo Yoshikawa. And by the time he was finished, he knew the harbor better than most of the men stationed inside it.

Pearl Harbor wasn’t a surprise in the way we usually mean. It was studied.

The Professional

Yoshikawa was a trained naval intelligence officer who had washed out of flight school due to illness — a detour that redirected him toward something he was quietly extraordinary at: watching. When Japan’s Naval General Staff needed eyes inside Pearl Harbor, they gave him a new identity — “Tadashi Morimura,” vice consul — and a posting to the Japanese consulate in Honolulu.

He brought no gadgets. He ran no agents. He didn’t break into anything.

He rented cars and drove to hilltop viewpoints. He took tourist boat rides past the naval station. He found a teahouse on Alewa Heights with a clear sightline to the anchorage, became a regular, and let the geishas pour his sake while he counted warships. He is reported to have swum off Ford Island to gauge the water depth — critical intelligence, as it turned out, for modifying Japanese torpedoes to run shallow in the harbor’s confined waters.

His reports went to Tokyo through the consulate’s normal cable channels — encoded in a standard diplomatic cipher, routed through legitimate communications. Hidden in plain sight, in every sense.

By November 1941, his dispatches were shaping the final attack plan. The spacing of the battleships. The pattern of air patrols. The day of the week when the fleet was most predictably in port (Sunday, as it happened).

After December 7th, Yoshikawa was interned with the rest of the consulate staff and eventually repatriated to Japan. He was never prosecuted. For decades, he kept his identity secret. He died in 1993, his role largely unknown outside intelligence circles.

The Amateur — and the Uglier Story

Yoshikawa was not the only spy Japan had positioned in Hawaii.

Bernard Kühn was German, not Japanese. He and his family had settled in Honolulu in 1936, years before Yoshikawa arrived — and his path there was one of the stranger episodes of prewar espionage.

Kühn’s teenage daughter Ruth had become the mistress of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. When Goebbels discovered that Ruth was half-Jewish, he faced a dilemma that was equal parts political and personal. His solution was characteristically ruthless: arrange for the Kühn family to be useful. He offered Bernard Kühn to Japanese intelligence as a paid asset and shipped the family to Hawaii.

One transaction: he protected himself from a political scandal, disposed of a liability, and delivered an intelligence asset to an ally. Goebbels, whatever else he was, understood leverage.

Kühn’s mission was to observe ship movements and, if war came, use a system of light signals from his beachfront home to communicate with Japanese submarines offshore. The system — flashes visible from the water at pre-arranged times — was exactly as amateurish as it sounds. Tokyo reviewed his proposal and largely set it aside. They had Yoshikawa.

Kühn was arrested on December 8th, 1941 — one of the first enemy agents taken into custody after the attack. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to fifty years. He was deported to Germany in 1946.

What Yoshikawa Got Right That Fictional Spies Get Wrong

No dead drops. No car chases. No seduction over cocktails.

Yoshikawa’s most powerful tool was patience — and the willingness to be boring. A man who drinks tea on a hillside and watches ships is invisible. A man who breaks into an admiral’s office is not.

Intelligence professionals still cite his case as a model of open-source collection: the most dangerous information is often the kind anyone could gather, if they were willing to sit still long enough to gather it.

The Paris Connection

The Kühn story has a long shadow that stretches back to Europe — specifically to the same apparatus that was reshaping Paris in those years.

Goebbels wasn’t just a propagandist. He was running a shadow operation that placed personal loyalty, blackmail, and political survival ahead of any formal intelligence structure. The machinery that sent the Kühn family to Hawaii was the same machinery dictating what Parisians read in their newspapers, heard on their radios, and saw on their cinema screens. The same transactional ruthlessness. The same contempt for the people being moved around the board.

Paris under occupation was managed by men who thought in exactly those terms: everyone is either useful or expendable. Ruth Kühn’s story is a footnote to history, but it’s a reminder of what that logic cost ordinary people — even those, like her, who were caught inside the apparatus itself.

Why It Still Matters

Pearl Harbor is remembered as a military catastrophe. It’s less often remembered as an intelligence triumph — for Japan.

Yoshikawa proved that open-source observation, requiring no technology more sophisticated than a rented car and a head for detail, could shape the outcome of a battle that changed the course of the war. The United States had counterintelligence assets in Hawaii. The warning signs were there. What failed wasn’t collection — it was analysis. The dots existed. No one connected them.

The “Crow’s Nest” Teahouse

The Shuncho-ro Teahouse (now known as the Natsunoya Tea House) remains one of the most significant sites in the history of WWII espionage. Perched on the hills of Alewa Heights, it offered Yoshikawa a “God’s-eye view” of the Pacific Fleet.

The Japanese consulate often held parties there, providing the perfect cover for Yoshikawa to bring a telescope to the second-floor windows. While U.S. Navy officers were often present in the same building, enjoying the hospitality, Yoshikawa was busy documenting the arrival of the USS Arizona and the USS Pennsylvania. It is a chilling reminder that in 1941, Hawaii was a place where “the front line” was a dinner table with a view.

That lesson has driven intelligence reform ever since, from the Church Committee hearings to the 9/11 Commission report. We had the information. We didn’t know what we had.

Kühn’s story is different and smaller: an amateur inserted by personal leverage, whose signal scheme was too crude to be useful. But his path to Hawaii — routed through Goebbels’s bedroom politics and Nazi racial calculus — is a reminder that wartime espionage didn’t recruit only from patriotism. It recruited from fear, ambition, and the wreckage of people’s private lives.

Yoshikawa never carried a weapon. He didn’t need one — his intelligence was the weapon. Eddie Grant understands that calculus better than most.

Brought to you by my Eddie Grant novels

The Eddie Grant Saga follows a wealthy former Special Forces commander who volunteers for CIA missions when the agency needs someone who can operate outside official channels — and who knows that the most dangerous operatives are the ones nobody sees coming. The series begins with Treasure of Saint-Lazare, recognized as a top historical mystery by Readers’ Favorite.

If this landed for you — subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know a fellow history reader who’d enjoy it, a share goes a long way.

Further reading

Warfare History Network: Takeo Yoshikawa and the Spies Behind the Pearl Harbor Attack

Takeo Yoshikawa, Wikipedia

The Kühn Family (Wikipedia)

On the morning of March 30, 1942, a train pulled into Auschwitz carrying 1,112 men.

They had left France three days earlier, from the Compiègne transit camp north of Paris. Most had been arrested in the city the previous year — pulled from apartments, workplaces, and the streets of the Marais and Belleville — and held at Drancy and Compiègne while administrators processed their files and scheduled their departure.

At Auschwitz they were assigned registration numbers: 27533 through 28644. Their names ceased to matter to the Reich.

No selection took place that day. The gas chambers were not yet operating at the scale they would reach by summer. These men were marched into the camp and put to work.

By August 1942, 1,008 of the 1,112 were dead. Not gassed — worked, starved, and beaten to death across five months. A death rate of 91.6 percent.

Twenty-three survived the war.

Ten Weeks

The Wannsee Conference had taken place on January 20, 1942 — a ninety-minute meeting in a lakeside villa outside Berlin where fifteen senior Nazi officials coordinated the logistics of what they called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. It was Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, who presented the plan. Not one of the fifteen men in the room objected. The bureaucratic language was deliberate: this was an administrative problem to be managed, not a crime to be hidden.

Ten weeks later, Convoy 1 left Compiègne.

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The speed is worth pausing over. In less than three months, the decisions made in a Berlin suburb had been transmitted to occupied France, processed through the Vichy government’s administrative apparatus, and translated into a sealed train carrying over a thousand men eastward. No friction. No hesitation. The machine worked exactly as designed.

The Timeline

• January 20, 1942: Wannsee Conference

• March 27, 1942: Convoy 1 departs Compiègne

• March 30, 1942: Convoy 1 arrives Auschwitz

• 1,112 men aboard

• 1,008 dead within five months

• 23 survivors at liberation

A French Story

This is where the history becomes uncomfortable — and it should.

The men on Convoy 1 had not been arrested by Germans. They had been arrested by French police, in Paris, during roundups in 1941, then processed through French transit camps administered largely by French officials under Vichy authority. René Bousquet, Secretary General of the Vichy police, had negotiated directly with the SS over deportation logistics. France was not simply occupied; in this domain, it was a willing administrative partner.

It is important to understand what Convoy 1 was not.

It was not the Vel d’Hiv.

The Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup — the event most associated with France and the Holocaust — did not occur until July 16–17, 1942, four months after Convoy 1 departed. That operation, in which French police arrested 13,152 people including 4,115 children and confined them in a Paris sports arena without food, water, or sanitation, became the defining image of French complicity.

But Convoy 1 reveals something the Vel d’Hiv can obscure: the machine was already running. Quietly. Efficiently. Before the world was paying attention. Before most people in France — Jews included — fully understood what “resettlement in the East” meant.

By the time the Vel d’Hiv roundup shocked even some Vichy officials with its scale, dozens more convoys had already departed or were being organized. In total, approximately 75,000 Jews were deported from France. Fewer than three percent survived.

The Streets Are Still There

In 1995, President Jacques Chirac became the first French head of state to formally acknowledge France’s responsibility for the deportations. Not the Germans, not the occupation — France. It had taken fifty-three years.

The men of Convoy 1 were gone before most of France understood what was happening. Before the yellow star decree. Before the Vel d’Hiv. Before resistance networks had organized to hide Jewish families in farmhouses and convents across the countryside.

They were gone in the ten weeks between a meeting in a Berlin villa and a train platform in Compiègne.

The streets they were taken from still exist. The Marais, where many of them lived, is today one of Paris’s most visited neighborhoods — galleries, restaurants, tourists with cameras. A few plaques mark the buildings where families were taken.

Most visitors walk past them without stopping.

A word from the author

Eddie Grant moves through those same streets in my Paris thrillers — past the old transit points, through arrondissements that carry the occupation in their stones even when the city would prefer to forget. The collaboration, the cowardice, the occasional quiet courage: they are the unacknowledged history beneath the Paris I write about.

Treasure of Saint-Lazare is available now. Paris Reckoning is coming soon.

Further Reading

Vélodrome d’Hiver Roundup — Wikipedia

France and the Holocaust — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Holocaust Encyclopedia - France

Vel d’Hiv Roundup

Standing between the Allies and that clock was a line of French concrete.

The Mareth Line had been built in the 1930s by French engineers who feared an Italian thrust from Libya. Blockhouses, anti-tank ditches, minefields, and a steep-sided wadi called the Zigzaou — twenty-two miles of fortification, anchored on the Mediterranean coast and running inland to the Matmata Hills. The French never used it. The Italians, whom it was designed to stop, ended up garrisoning it. History has a dark sense of humor.

By March 1943 the line was held by General Giovanni Messe’s Italian First Army, stiffened by German armor and artillery. And behind its construction — behind the doctrine, the tactical thinking, the months of fighting retreat across 1,400 miles of desert — stood the ghost of a man who was no longer there.

Erwin Rommel had built the Afrika Korps into one of the most feared fighting forces of the war. He had humiliated the British at Tobruk, driven them back to the gates of Cairo, turned the Western Desert into his personal theater. But by early 1943 the theater was dark. Ultra intercepts gave the Allies his every move. American industrial output was swamping his supply lines. At Medenine on March 6, he threw his armor at a British defensive line that was waiting for him — 400 anti-tank guns, pre-sighted and pre-registered — and lost 52 tanks in a single afternoon without gaining a yard.

Rommel leaves Africa

Three days later, sick, exhausted, and recalled by Hitler, he flew out of Tunisia. He would never return to Africa.

Command passed to Messe, an able officer handed an impossible brief. The Afrika Korps was depleted, undersupplied, and leaderless at the top. But the Mareth Line was still formidable, and Messe intended to use it. The army Rommel had forged would fight his battle without him.

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Montgomery’s plan was characteristically methodical: Operation Pugilist, a frontal assault on the night of March 20. Two infantry battalions of the 50th Northumbrian Division would punch through the line near Zarat, cross the Wadi Zigzaou, and open a gap for armor to pour through. Simultaneously, the New Zealand Corps under Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg would execute a wide flanking sweep south and west through the Matmata Hills — a march the French had considered impassable in the 1930s, before British long-range desert patrols found a navigable track they named Wilder’s Gap.

The frontal assault went wrong from the first hour. Rain turned the wadi bottom to mud. Tanks bogged or were torn apart by German 88s before they crossed. Infantry who made it over the Zigzaou found themselves isolated, cut off from armor and anti-tank support. By March 22, Messe’s counterattack had recaptured most of the ground, taken 200 British prisoners, and destroyed 35 tanks. The bridgehead was collapsing.

Montgomery pulled back and pivoted. This is the moment his critics rarely acknowledge — the willingness to kill a failing plan before it became a catastrophe. He stripped forces from the stalled coastal attack and threw them behind Freyberg’s New Zealanders. The flanking hook, already moving through the hills, became the main effort.

Mareth was the first domino

The New Zealanders had been in this desert for three years. They were arguably the finest infantry formation in the Eighth Army — patient, resourceful, and by 1943 savagely experienced in the specific violence of desert warfare. Reinforced with British armor, additional artillery, and Free French units under the formidable General Leclerc, Freyberg’s corps pushed through the Tebaga Gap on March 26. The Western Desert Air Force flew over 700 sorties a day above them, hammering Axis defensive positions without pause.

Messe shifted his armored reserves — including the 21st Panzer Division — west to meet the threat, and for a moment the line held. The Germans were good, even then. But the weight was too great. On March 28, British patrols crossed the Wadi Zigzaou and found the Mareth positions abandoned. The Axis had slipped north toward the Wadi Akarit, the last natural defensive line before the open plain that ran up to Tunis.

They held Wadi Akarit for a week. Then that line broke too. In May, cornered in the ruins of their Tunisian bridgehead, 275,000 German and Italian soldiers — the survivors of three years of desert fighting — laid down their arms. It was the largest Axis surrender of the war in the African theater.

The road to Sicily was open. Operation Husky launched July 10. Within six weeks, the Allies held the island. Within months, Italy was invaded, Mussolini fell, and the road that would lead — eventually, bloodily — to the beaches of Normandy was running.

Fact to Fiction

Among those who never saw any of it was a young Afrika Korps soldier captured weeks earlier, during the disaster at Kasserine Pass in February. By the time Montgomery’s men crossed the Wadi Zigzaou, he was a prisoner of war hired out to work on a dairy farm in the Catskills, headed toward a life he could not yet imagine. That story is coming in my novel in progress Washington Square.

A word from the author

The men who fought across North Africa — and the ones who didn’t make it home the way they expected — inhabit the same moral landscape Eddie Grant navigates today: where loyalty is complicated, history leaves long shadows, and the past has a way of finding you wherever you land.

That’s the world of the Eddie Grant Saga, my Paris thriller series featuring Eddie Grant — a wealthy former Special Forces commander living in Paris who takes on secret missions for the CIA as a volunteer, for no pay. If you enjoy history where the stakes are personal, start with Treasure of Saint-Lazare, chosen as top historical mystery of its year by Readers’ Favorite.

The Mareth Line Today

If you've been to the Normandy invasion beaches and seen the ruins of the extensive fortifications Rommel built, the Mareth Line will look familiar, except that the sand-colored desert background is much different from the green meadows of the Norman coastline. This is an infantry bunker.

It is March 1940. The guns are mostly quiet, but the silence is doing a lot of work.

Europe is seven months into a war that doesn’t quite feel like one yet. The Germans have not moved west. The French are behind the Maginot Line. The British are in France but not fighting. Journalists have started calling it the Phony War — drôle de guerre in French — and the phrase has stuck, though no one on either side finds it very funny.

In Washington, Franklin Roosevelt is watching. His country won't be in the war for another 21 months, but he is not indifferent, and in March 1940 he sends his Undersecretary of State on a mission to Europe that will tell him, and the world, exactly how close things really are.

Sumner Welles arrived in Berlin in the first days of March, the latest stop on a diplomatic tour of the European capitals that Roosevelt had quietly set in motion. The mission’s stated purpose was to explore whether any basis for peace negotiations existed. Its real purpose was intelligence: Roosevelt wanted to understand the minds of the men running this war before the United States was forced to take sides.

Hitler received Welles on March 2nd. The meeting lasted two hours and produced almost nothing — which was itself informative. Hitler was not interested in peace. He was interested in knowing how seriously America intended to interfere. He was suspicious of Welles, suspicious of Roosevelt, and privately alarmed that the United States might be moving toward active opposition to German ambitions. He performed confidence, but the performance had an edge.

Welles went on to Rome, Paris, and London. In Rome, Mussolini was warm and expansive. In Paris, the government was distracted. In London, there was quiet resolve. He returned to Washington with a clear picture: there would be no negotiated peace. The war would continue, and it would get worse.

Russia defeats Finland in the Winter War

It got worse almost immediately. On March 12th, Finland signed a peace treaty with the Soviet Union, ending the Winter War. The Finns had fought with extraordinary courage against overwhelming odds for three and a half months, and the world had watched in admiration — and done nothing. Britain and France had debated intervention and delayed too long. Now Finland was gone, and the embarrassment of the Western Allies was complete.

Sixteen days later, Hitler and Mussolini met at the Brenner Pass, the high Alpine crossing between Austria and Italy. It was their first meeting in nearly a year. Hitler came with momentum and a plan. He told Mussolini that the attack in the West was coming, and coming soon. Mussolini, who had kept Italy nominally neutral while watching Germany’s early successes with envy and calculation, moved noticeably closer to the Axis that day. The two men parted in agreement — though Mussolini would not formally enter the war until June, the direction of travel was now clear.

The fall of Finland did more than expose Allied hesitation on the international stage. In France, it detonated a political crisis.

Édouard Daladier had been Prime Minister since April 1938. He was a tough, stocky man from Provence — they called him le taureau du Vaucluse, the bull of the Vaucluse — who had signed the Munich Agreement with Chamberlain and spent the months since trying to live it down. The Finnish disaster gave his enemies in the Chamber of Deputies the ammunition they needed.

On March 20th, Daladier lost a vote of confidence. He resigned the same day.

Paul Reynaud, who replaced him, was sharper, more aggressive, more convinced that France needed to fight this war rather than wait it out. He had opposed Munich. He had been warning about German intentions for years. He came to power with genuine determination — and he came too late. Reynaud would be Prime Minister for exactly 73 days before the French army collapsed and the government fled Paris.

But in March 1940, none of that was visible. Reynaud’s appointment felt like the beginning of something — France getting serious, France stepping up. It was the last political reset before the catastrophe, though no one knew it yet.

A World on the Edge

What March 1940 reveals, in hindsight, is the peculiar texture of a world on the edge. Everyone — Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier, Reynaud, Roosevelt, Welles — was acting on incomplete information, watching each other for signals, trying to calculate what came next. The Phony War had created a strange suspended moment, a political deep breath before the exhale.

Two months later, Germany invaded France and the Low Countries. Six weeks after that, France surrendered. The world Welles had toured in March consisted of cautious Europeans, probing Americans, and two dictators making deals on mountaintops. It would be unrecognizable by summer.

If you want to understand how catastrophes happen, study the months just before them. March 1940 is a masterclass in how clearly people can see danger coming and how thoroughly they can fail to act on it.

Three Days at the Brenner Pass

March 18, 1940 — Brenner Pass, Austria-Italy border, elevation 4,495 feet

The meeting was set for a train. Hitler’s private rail car was waiting at the Brenner station when Mussolini arrived.

They had not seen each other since the previous October. In the intervening months, Germany had conquered Poland while Italy watched from the sidelines. Mussolini had been telling his people — and himself — that Italy needed more time before it could enter the war. More steel, more fuel, more guns. Hitler had accepted this, barely.

At Brenner, Hitler changed the terms of the conversation. He laid out his plans for the western offensive in broad strokes: France and Britain would be struck, and struck hard. The defeat of France, he suggested, was a matter of weeks, not years. If Italy wanted to share in the victory, it needed to be present for the fight.

Mussolini listened. He did not commit to a date. But he left Brenner a different man than the one who had arrived. He was more convinced, more eager, more willing to believe that Hitler’s confidence was earned rather than performed.

Italy entered the war on June 10, 1940, eleven weeks later, four days before German troops marched into Paris.

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

John Pearce
Washington, DC

British Pathé Newsreel - Welles arrives in Europe for talks

It was not a law. It was not even a formal decree. It was simply a threat, delivered with the casual confidence of a government that had already decided the rules no longer applied equally to everyone. Jews who showed up at the polls risked being hauled away by the SA — the Nazi paramilitary street fighters, the Brownshirts — who were by then operating in open coordination with the state.

This was not the beginning of the end for German Jews. It was barely the beginning of the beginning.

38 Days of Hitler

Hitler had been appointed Chancellor just 38 days earlier, on January 30, 1933. The restorationist politicians who manoeuvred him into the job — men who dreamed of turning the clock back to the Kaiser, not forward into something darker — believed they could control him. They were catastrophically wrong.

Within weeks, the new government was moving on multiple fronts simultaneously. On February 27, the Reichstag — Germany’s parliament building — burned. The Nazis blamed Communist arsonists. The next day, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending the civil liberties guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution. Free speech, freedom of the press, the right to assembly — gone, overnight, by emergency order.

On March 5, the Nazis held Reichstag elections. Despite controlling the machinery of government and unleashing the SA against political opponents, they won only 43.9 percent of the vote. It wasn’t enough. So they arrested Communist deputies, barred them from taking their seats, and on March 23 passed the Enabling Act — which gave Hitler the power to govern by decree, without parliament. Germany’s democracy had lasted fourteen years.

The March 9 warning to Jewish voters came in the middle of all this, almost as an afterthought. It was, as the transition goes, the culmination of a series of anti-Jewish measures that had begun immediately after Hitler was appointed — and it would not be the last.

In the 1920s, most Jews were integrated into society. They served in the military and were active in business. Conditions began to worsen immediately after Hitler took power.

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The new Nazi government didn't give much thought to the legality of the blizzard of new measures it put into force, but it did pass, by means of subterfuge and the cooperation of a supine parliament, the Enabling Act of 1933, which allowed the government to create laws without a vote of parliament and effectively ended the Weimar constitution.

Hermann Göring, (usually anglicized to Goering) better known later as head of the Luftwaffe, was president of the Reichstag and made the change to the body's voting rules that made possible the Enabling Act. He remained president of the Reichstag through the war and was the most powerful of Hitler's aides until his promises that the Allied air forces could never bomb German cities proved to be hollow. His bombastic promise, “If as much as a single enemy aircraft flies over German soil, my name is Meier!” came back to haunt him.

As Göring's star set, he turned more to his avocations, especially art collection. He is a key behind-the-scenes character in my novel Treasure of Saint-Lazare. The 2025 Russell Crowe movie “Nuremberg” explores the interplay between Göring (Crowe) and the psychiatrist (played by Remi Malek) who examined him during his war crimes trial.

11 Days Later Dachau Opens

The steps came faster after March. On March 20, the Nazis opened Dachau, the first concentration camp, initially for political prisoners. On April 1, a one-day national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses was organised by the government — Brownshirts stood at shop entrances with signs telling Germans not to buy from Jews. A week later, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service removed Jews from government employment. Jewish lawyers were disbarred. Jewish doctors were removed from state hospitals.

In May, students and Nazi activists held book burnings across Germany, incinerating works by Jewish authors, leftists, and anyone else deemed un-German. By July, the Nazi party was the only legal political party in the country.

The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 codified what had been happening on the street into formal legal doctrine. Jews were stripped of German citizenship entirely. Marriage between Jews and non-Germans was forbidden. Jews could not employ German women under 45 as domestic workers. They could not display the German flag. They were, in the language of the state, no longer German.

Kristallnacht — the Night of Broken Glass — came on November 9-10, 1938. In two nights of coordinated violence, more than 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 1,400 synagogues burned, and around 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps. Ninety-one Jews were killed outright. The German government then fined the Jewish community one billion Reichsmarks for the damage done to them.

Many Missed Off-Ramps

The road from March 9, 1933 to the Final Solution was not straight, and it was not inevitable. At many points, different choices could have been made — by German politicians, by ordinary citizens, by foreign governments who watched and did little.

But the direction was set early, in those first chaotic weeks of 1933, when the new government learned that it could threaten Jewish voters and face no consequences. That it could strip rights and face no consequences. That it could burn books, shutter businesses, and rewrite citizenship law — and the world would look away.

The Allied side could have been more helpful, to say the least. In May 1939, the MS St. Louis sailed from Hamburg carrying 937 Jewish refugees, most of them German, all of them desperate. Cuba refused entry to all but a few. The United States turned the ship away from Florida ports — close enough that passengers could see the lights of Miami. Canada also said no. The St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where its passengers were parcelled out among Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

When the Germans swept through Western Europe the following year, many of them were caught again. Historians estimate that roughly a quarter of the St. Louis passengers were ultimately murdered in the Holocaust.

The first transport of Jews to Auschwitz arrived in 1942. By the time the camp was liberated in January 1945, an estimated 1.1 million people had been murdered there. Most of them were Jewish.

It had taken twelve years. It had started with a warning not to vote.

On March 5, 1946, in the gym of a small Missouri college, Winston Churchill stood before 1,500 people and announced that the world had split in two.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he declared, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

With that single phrase, Churchill named the Cold War before most people realized it had begun. World War II had ended only recently, the alliance with the Soviet Union was still officially in place, and Churchill had been summarily dismissed as Prime Minister in an election that followed V-E day by only two months.

The setting was improbable. Westminster College in Fulton, population 7,000, seemed an unlikely venue for a speech of global importance. But President Harry Truman had personally invited Churchill and promised to introduce him. Truman’s handwritten note on the invitation read: “This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. If you come, I will introduce you.”

Churchill, who’d been voted out as British Prime Minister in July 1945 — just two months after winning the war in Europe — accepted eagerly. He spent the winter of 1945-46 in the United States, ostensibly on vacation but in reality preparing what would become one of the most consequential speeches of the 20th century.

On the train ride from Washington to Fulton on March 4, Churchill edited and finalized his 50-page manuscript while Truman looked on. The speech’s official title was “The Sinews of Peace,” but nobody remembers that. History knows it as the Iron Curtain speech.

Churchill's Clear Vision

Less than a year after Allied victory in Europe, Soviet troops occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany. Communist parties were gaining power in France and Italy. Stalin had installed puppet governments throughout Eastern Europe.

Less then a month before Churchill's appearance in Fulton, Stalin gave a speech declaring war between communism and capitalism inevitable. Two weeks later, American diplomat George Kennan sent his famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, warning that the Soviet Union viewed the West with perpetual hostility.

Churchill saw it clearly. The wartime alliance was dead. A new ideological, political, and potentially existential conflict was beginning.

No Punches Pulled

The speech pulled no punches. Behind the Iron Curtain, he said, lay “all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.” All were now under Soviet control, “subject not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

The Cold War shaped the Paris at the heart of my Eddie Grant thriller series — a city caught between East and West, where espionage, betrayal, and loyalty played out against a backdrop of cafés, cobblestones, and carefully coded messages. If you enjoy stories where history intersects with suspense, start with The Treasure of Saint-Lazare.

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Churchill warned of “Communist fifth columns” operating throughout Western Europe. He drew explicit parallels to the 1930s, when Western appeasement of Hitler had made World War II inevitable. “There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action,” he said of that conflict.

The solution? A “special relationship” between the United States and Britain, backed by military strength. “There is nothing they admire so much as strength,” Churchill said of the Soviets, “and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for military weakness.”

In other words, he believed the Soviet Union should be treated after the war as Germany should have been treated before the war, in the days of appeasement.

The Reaction

Stalin’s response was swift and brutal. In an interview with Pravda on March 13, he compared Churchill to Hitler and accused him of racism and warmongering. The Soviet press unleashed a propaganda barrage. Russian historians would later date the beginning of the Cold War to this speech.

In the West, reaction was mixed. Many American officials welcomed Churchill’s clarity — they’d already concluded the Soviets were bent on expansion. But others thought Churchill was needlessly provocative, still too attached to British imperial interests, and dragging America into conflicts that weren’t its concern.

Public opinion was divided. Much of the Western public still regarded the Soviet Union as a wartime ally. The shift from “Uncle Joe” Stalin as friend to Stalin as enemy hadn’t fully registered yet.

But Churchill’s phrase — “iron curtain” — immediately entered the vocabulary. It gave people a way to understand what was happening. Europe wasn’t just divided politically. A barrier had descended. Information didn’t cross it. People didn’t cross it. Two worlds, increasingly hostile, facing each other across an invisible but very real line.

The evidence of Stalin's internal brutality was out in public but in the West there was a reluctance to believe it of “Uncle Joe,” and there was an active pro-Communist movement in both Europe and the United States. It was not until Khrushchev pulled back the curtain in his 1956 speech that the full extent of Stalin's outrages became common talk. Suddenly, all the show trials that had been covered as justice for traitors began to take on a different gloss. It took more than 30 years for the Berlin Wall to come down and the Soviet Union to dissolve and for the newly named leader, an ex-KGB agent named Putin, to begin work toward his goal of reconstituting the Russian
Empire.

The Paris Connection

For Parisians in 1946, Churchill’s warning resonated differently than it did in America or Britain. Paris had just emerged from four years of German occupation. The war was recent, brutal, and personal. Now Churchill was saying another conflict loomed — one that could last decades.

France found itself in an awkward position. Officially aligned with the West, it nonetheless had Europe’s largest Communist Party. The French Communist Party had earned legitimacy through its role in the Resistance. Now it was being painted as a Soviet fifth column. De Gaulle, leading France’s provisional government at the time, resigned three weeks after Churchill’s speech — frustrated with exactly the kind of political maneuvering Churchill had warned about.

The tension would define French politics for decades. Communist influence in government. Soviet sympathies among intellectuals. American military presence. The pull between independence and alliance. All of it traceable back to the moment Churchill identified: the Iron Curtain had descended, and France was on the western side of it.

The Legacy

Churchill’s speech became a blueprint. The “special relationship” he called for materialized in NATO. The military strength he advocated shaped Western policy through five decades of Cold War. The Iron Curtain he named became a physical reality — barbed wire, minefields, guard towers, and ultimately the Berlin Wall.

The metaphor lasted until 1989, when the real Iron Curtain began to fall. East Germans crossed into West Berlin. The Wall came down. The Soviet empire collapsed. The Cold War ended.

But on this day in 1946, none of that was imaginable. Churchill stood in a Missouri gymnasium and told an audience of 1,500 people — and through radio, millions more — that the world had split in two.

He was right. The world would spend the next 45 years proving it, and now is forced to learn it again, in Ukraine.

In September 1945, one month after Japan’s surrender, President Harry Truman signed an executive order dissolving the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS—the organization that had created, trained, funded, and directed the Jedburgh program—ceased to exist.

The men who had parachuted into France came home to a country that didn’t know they existed, to an organization that no longer did, and to a government that had classified everything they’d done for the next fifty years.

They went back to their lives. Most of them told their families almost nothing.

What they couldn’t know—what none of them could have predicted—was that the world they were returning to would need everything they had learned in those ninety days in occupied France. And that some of them would spend the next four decades putting it to use.

The Dissolution

The OSS was killed not by failure but by politics.

J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI had fought Donovan’s organization since its creation, viewing it as a rival for intelligence authority. The State Department wanted no part of a permanent covert operations arm. Military traditionalists had never trusted the OSS’s unconventional methods. And Truman himself was suspicious of what he called a potential “American Gestapo.”

So the OSS was disbanded. Its research and analysis functions went to the State Department. Its intelligence operations were absorbed into a temporary organization called the Strategic Services Unit, which limped along for eighteen months before being reorganized into the Central Intelligence Group, which became the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.

The Jedburgh program had no official successor. The teams scattered. Some stayed in the military, some went to law school, some went home to farms. The war was over. The world was supposed to be at peace.

It wasn’t.

The Men Who Stayed

A handful of Jedburgh veterans understood immediately that the Cold War would require exactly the skills they had spent the war developing. They stayed—and they built what came next.

William Colby had commanded Jedburgh Team BRUCE, parachuting into France in August 1944 and operating with the Maquis until Allied forces linked up with his position. A year later he led Operation RYPE into Norway, blowing railway lines to keep German forces from reinforcing the homeland defense. He came home, went to Columbia Law School, spent three weeks practicing law, and decided it wasn’t for him.

An OSS friend called with a job offer. Colby joined the new CIA.

Over the next thirty years he ran covert operations in Italy, served as chief of station in Saigon, oversaw the controversial Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and eventually became Director of Central Intelligence under Nixon and Ford. He was confirmed as DCI in 1973—the same year the Jedburgh files were still officially classified.

Colby became famous, or infamous depending on your perspective, for his cooperation with congressional investigations into CIA abuses. He testified openly. He declassified operations that his predecessors had kept buried. He believed the agency served the public and owed the public accountability.

His Jedburgh colleagues, at reunions in later years, would sometimes start counting in double-digit numbers if a speaker made claims that seemed to lack credibility: *”46, 47, 48, 49, 50, bullshit.”* It was a Milton Hall tradition, carried forward fifty years.

Colby died in a canoeing accident in Maryland in 1996. He was 76.

Aaron Bank had a different mission in mind. He’d been assigned by Donovan himself to Operation IRON CROSS—a plan to parachute a team disguised as SS officers into the German heartland, link up with anti-Nazi Wehrmacht soldiers recruited from POW camps, and capture or kill Adolf Hitler. The operation was canceled days before execution when intelligence showed Hitler had remained in Berlin rather than retreating to the Alpine redoubt as expected. Hitler killed himself on April 30, 1945.

Bank spent the final weeks of the war in Indochina, where he worked alongside Ho Chi Minh—at that point fighting the Japanese rather than anyone else—and reported to the OSS that Ho commanded overwhelming popular support and would win any free election. His recommendation that Ho be allowed to form a coalition government was ignored. American policy backed the French instead. Bank watched the seeds of Vietnam being planted and could do nothing about it.

Back home, Bank had one consuming ambition: to build a permanent American unconventional warfare capability so that the next time the country needed Jedburgh-style teams, they wouldn’t have to improvise one from scratch in eighteen months.

It took him until 1952. On June 19th of that year, Bank activated the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with eight soldiers, a warrant officer, and himself as commanding officer. The structure, training, doctrine, and mission of the Green Berets flowed directly from what he had learned as a Jedburgh in France: small teams, indigenous forces, unconventional warfare, foreign language capability, cultural immersion.

Bank died in 2004 at the age of 101. The Green Berets he founded are still active today.

John Singlaub had been twenty-two years old when he jumped into France as part of Jedburgh Team JAMES in August 1944, armed and directed Maquis groups in the Massif Central, then pivoted to the Pacific theater and parachuted onto the Chinese island of Hainan just before Japan’s formal surrender to rescue hundreds of Dutch and Australian prisoners of war.

He never really stopped.

Korea, CIA operations against the Chinese Communists, Vietnam—where he commanded MACV-SOG, the military’s most classified special operations unit, running cross-border missions into Laos and Cambodia that technically didn’t exist. He was eventually relieved of his last command in 1977 after publicly criticizing President Carter’s plan to withdraw troops from South Korea. He retired, started several controversial organizations, and lived to be 100 years old.

The U.S. Army Special Operations Command named an award after him: the MG John K. Singlaub/Jedburgh Award, given to exceptional members of the special operations community. A Jedburgh name, attached to a Jedburgh tradition, carried forward to the present day.

Singlaub died in January 2022.

The Doctrine That Survived

The OSS was dissolved. The Jedburgh program was classified. The men went home.

But the ideas refused to die.

Aaron Bank’s 10th Special Forces Group was the direct institutional heir. The first Special Forces A-teams—twelve men, experts in weapons, communications, medicine, and demolitions, designed to infiltrate enemy territory and organize indigenous resistance—were Milton Hall translated into permanent doctrine. The mission statement Bank wrote in 1952 could have been lifted verbatim from the Jedburgh operational orders of 1944.

The lineage runs forward without interruption. The Green Berets. Delta Force. The CIA’s Special Activities Division. MACV-SOG in Vietnam. The teams that went into Afghanistan in 2001 within weeks of 9/11, linking up with Northern Alliance fighters and directing air strikes from horseback. The unconventional warfare operations that have been a constant feature of American military strategy for eighty years.

All of it traces back to Milton Hall. To three men and a radio and a drop into darkness.

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What Was Lost

It would be tidy to end there. The legacy preserved, the doctrine vindicated, the sacrifice honored.

But the Jedburgh story has a shadow that follows it.

The men who organized the Maquis, armed them, pointed them at the Germans, and then left—they left behind a France still sorting out what had happened in those four years of occupation. The Resistance was not the unified force of legend. It was fractured, political, sometimes brutal. Collaborators were executed in the streets after Liberation. Some of the executions were justice. Some were score-settling dressed as justice. The Jedburgh teams had helped arm and organize the force that conducted both.

In Indochina, Bank and others watched the French reassert colonial control over a country where the population had just spent four years fighting occupiers. The tools the Jedburghs had perfected for liberating France would be turned, in the decades ahead, against populations the United States would sometimes support and sometimes abandon—with consequences that are still unfolding.

The men who built the Green Berets, the CIA’s covert operations capability, MACV-SOG—they were not naive. They had parachuted into occupied France at twenty-two and twenty-three years old and learned things about war and human nature that took other men a lifetime to understand. Most of them spent the rest of their careers trying to apply those lessons wisely.

How well they succeeded is a question history is still answering.

The Last Reunion

In the 1990s, Bill Colby attended a gathering at CIA headquarters where the curator of the agency’s historical collection addressed a room full of surviving Jedburghs—French, British, and American, old men by then, half a century removed from the fields of the Massif Central and the roads of Normandy.

Colby warned the curator quietly before he began: if you hear any of the Americans start counting in double-digit numbers, pay attention.

The curator gave his address. No one counted.

The Jedburghs had been real heroes, the curator said. They had done something that mattered. They had operated in a way that changed warfare permanently.

The old men in the room knew this was true. They also knew something the curator didn’t: that the most important thing about what they had done wasn’t the missions, or the doctrine, or the famous alumni who came after. It was simpler than that.

You take three men. You give them a radio. You drop them into darkness. And you trust them to figure it out.

Everything else followed from that.

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*Thank you for following the Secret Heroes series on the Jedburghs. If you have a topic you’d like to see covered in future episodes, let me know in the comments.*

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By the Numbers

The final accounting of what the Jedburgh program produced:

The program: 93 three-man teams deployed into France; 8 additional teams into the Netherlands

Personnel: 83 Americans, 90 British, 103 French, 5 Belgian, 5 Dutch

Operations (D-Day to Liberation of Paris): 164 rail lines destroyed; 1,820 vehicle ambushes conducted or coordinated; 1,000+ telephone and telegraph line cuts; 130,000+ resistance fighters armed and organized

Cost: Classified for 50 years. The human cost was never fully tabulated — some teams were captured and executed, others lost to combat, illness, or accidents. The records remain incomplete.

Alumni who shaped the postwar world: William Colby (CIA Director, 1973–76); Aaron Bank (founder, U.S. Army Special Forces, 1952); John Singlaub (commander, MACV-SOG, Vietnam; founding CIA member)

Their institutional descendants: U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets); U.S. Army Rangers (lineage); CIA Special Activities Division; MACV-SOG; Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)

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Secret Heroes is brought to you by my Paris thriller series featuring Eddie Grant, a former Special Forces officer living in Paris. The world the Jedburghs built — clandestine operations, Resistance networks, the moral weight of wartime choices — is the same world Eddie navigates, just 80 years later. Start with Treasure of Saint-Lazare.

In the summer of 1944, a young Scottish officer crouched in the darkness near Figeac in south-central France, watching the column of German armor stretch to the horizon. Fifteen thousand men. Two hundred tanks and half-tracks. The full might of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, moving north to crush the fragile Allied beachhead at Normandy.

His name was Tommy Macpherson. He was 23 years old, wearing a tartan kilt, and commanding a resistance force of roughly two dozen farmers with rifles.

He decided to attack.

What Jedburghs Actually Did

Last week we left our three-man teams at the moment their boots hit French soil—uniformed soldiers in enemy territory, criminal under German law, with sixty pounds of weapons and radios and no backup within a hundred miles.

Now we talk about what they did next.

The official mission was simple: link up with the Maquis, train them, arm them, coordinate their activities with Allied command. The reality was improvised chaos conducted at speed, usually under fire, always with inadequate resources.

The Jedburghs had three primary tools: sabotage, ambush, and radio. The first two created immediate disruption. The third turned scattered attacks into coordinated strategy.

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A Jedburgh team would identify a target—a railway bridge, a power pylon, a telephone relay station—calculate the explosive charge, and blow it. Then move. Then do it again. Then radio London with the results, receive new intelligence and orders, and sleep a few hours before starting over.

The BBC would broadcast coded messages confirming the missions — cryptic phrases that meant nothing to a German listening post and everything to a Maquis leader crouched over a radio in a farmhouse cellar.

At peak operations in July 1944, Jedburgh teams were conducting dozens of simultaneous sabotage operations across France. The Wehrmacht was bleeding not from a single wound but from a thousand cuts.

Team Quinine: The Kilted Killer

Tommy Macpherson had already escaped German captivity twice by the time he was assigned to Jedburgh Team Quinine. The first escape was from an Italian POW camp after being captured trying to assassinate Erwin Rommel. The second involved walking hundreds of miles through occupied Europe to reach Sweden. He’d been home from that adventure for exactly three weeks when SOE knocked on his door.

By January 1944 he was at Milton Hall, training. By March he was promoted to Major. His team: French Lieutenant Michel de Bourbon—nephew to the pretender to the French throne—and British radio operator Sergeant Arthur Brown, both twenty years old.

On the night of June 8, 1944—48 hours after D-Day—a Halifax bomber dropped them into the Massif Central from 7,000 feet.

Under his jump smock, Macpherson wore full Cameron Highlander battle dress. Kilt included.

”Just as I arrived,” he recalled later,” I heard an excited young Frenchman saying to his boss, ‘Chef, chef, there’s a French officer and he’s brought his wife!’”

The Maquis had never seen a man in a skirt before.

Macpherson’s logic was deliberate. “As a British officer parachuted into a resistance situation,” he explained, “your only authority was your own personality, which I had tried to reinforce with my kilt and a degree of flamboyance.” He needed the Maquis to believe he was someone worth following. The kilt announced: I am different. I am confident. Follow me.

It worked. Within 24 hours he had them blowing up railway bridges.

The Das Reich Problem

On June 10—two days after landing—Macpherson received intelligence that changed everything.

The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich was moving north.

Das Reich was one of the most feared formations in the German military. It had spent two years on the Eastern Front, where it had learned to treat civilian resistance as a problem to be solved with mass murder. Now it was driving north from Toulouse toward Normandy, and whoever was in its path—Allied soldier or French farmer—was going to suffer.

The Allies desperately needed time. The Normandy beachhead was still fragile. Every hour Das Reich spent in southern France was an hour the invasion force used to reinforce, resupply, and dig in.

That was Tommy Macpherson’s problem now.

He had perhaps 30 Maquis fighters—most of them untrained, some of them armed with weapons that dated to the First World War. Das Reich had 15,000 men and 200 armored vehicles. Direct engagement would be suicide. He had already seen other Resistance groups try frontal attacks on the column: the results were brief, bloody, and pointless. The Germans barely slowed down.

Macpherson chose a different approach.

Through the night, he and his men worked the road ahead of the column along the Figeac-Tulle road: mines buried in the tarmac, grenades hung from tree branches on hair triggers, the surrounding trees felled just enough that they’d come down at the right moment. It was not a battlefield. It was a trap.

At the first ambush, a tank hit the mine and slewed across the road. The column stopped. German engineers moved up to clear the blockage. That’s when Macpherson’s men opened fire, then melted into the forest before the armored response arrived.

They repeated this every few miles, all the way north. Hit, withdraw, reposition, hit again. Never stand and fight. Never give the Germans a target they could destroy. Because stopping wasn’t an option. Every hour Das Reich spent clearing another roadblock was an hour the beachhead survived.

By the time Das Reich reached Normandy, it was 17 days behind schedule.

Military historians have argued about what those 17 days were worth. The conservative view is that it cost the Germans a critical window when the Allied defenses were still being established. The aggressive view is that it may have saved the entire invasion. Either way, Macpherson and a handful of farmers with old rifles bought that time.

The Great Bluff

But Macpherson wasn’t finished.

Three months later, in September 1944, he was still operating in France when intelligence reached him through another Jedburgh commander: a German general named Botho Henning Elster was moving a column of 23,000 troops north—the remnants of the forces that had occupied southern France, now trying to reach the German lines before they were cut off. Elster had already tried to negotiate surrender with the Americans, but the Americans suspected he was stalling.

Would Macpherson try?

He drove toward the German column in a captured Red Cross vehicle—unarmed, with a German doctor and a French officer—through miles of German-held territory and occasional machine gun fire. When he reached the schoolhouse where Elster was waiting, Macpherson walked in wearing full Highland uniform, bonnet included, and told the general he had twenty minutes to decide.

Surrender now, he said, or face the full weight of artillery and RAF bombing.

In reality, Macpherson had almost nothing. A few French irregulars who would have been slaughtered by any organized German response.

Elster surrendered.

Twenty-three thousand German soldiers laid down their arms to a young man in a kilt who hadn’t yet reached his 24th birthday.

When the Allied press corps arrived to cover the surrender, Macpherson—following standing orders—said nothing and let the American lieutenant who was present take credit. Most histories attribute the surrender entirely to US forces. It took decades for the real story to emerge.

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The Pattern

Macpherson’s story is extraordinary but not unique. Across France in the summer of 1944, Jedburgh teams were operating the same template: small teams, improvised tactics, enormous results.

Team Frederick coordinated resistance operations that destroyed fuel depots the Wehrmacht desperately needed for its Panzers. Team Chloroform shut down rail lines in Brittany so thoroughly that German troops couldn’t be repositioned before Patton’s breakthrough. Team Hamish organized the Auvergne Maquis into a force capable of holding its own territory, tying down German units that should have been at Normandy.

In the 90 days between D-Day and the Liberation of Paris, Jedburgh teams participated in operations that:

Destroyed 164 rail lines, forcing the Germans to use road transport that was slower, more fuel-intensive, and more vulnerable to Allied air attack. Conducted or coordinated 1,820 vehicle ambushes. Cut telephone and telegraph lines over 1,000 times. Armed and organized resistance forces totaling over 130,000 fighters—a force larger than many national armies.

And they did it with three men, a radio, and whatever the local Maquis could provide.

The Price

It is tempting to make this entirely heroic. It wasn’t.

The Jedburgh missions produced some of the most remarkable individual achievements of the war. They also produced atrocities that neither side has fully reckoned with.

Das Reich’s rage at being harassed and delayed expressed itself at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, where SS troops locked 642 men, women, and children in a church and burned it. The village was erased from the map. It remains a ruin today, preserved exactly as Das Reich left it—a French war memorial and a reminder of what guerrilla warfare costs the people caught between two armies.

The Jedburgh teams knew this was possible. They had been trained to accept it as the price of strategic delay. Whether that calculation was correct is a moral question that has never been definitively answered.

What is certain: the men who made it—Tommy Macpherson, Team Quinine, and the 93 other Jedburgh teams—have largely been forgotten. Their medals are in display cases. Their names appear occasionally in footnotes. The operations that shaped the Liberation of France remain officially secret for fifty years.

Why It Matters

Macpherson died in 2014, at 94, as Britain’s most decorated surviving veteran. Three Military Crosses, three Croix de Guerre, a Légion d’honneur, a papal knighthood. When asked whether he considered himself a hero, he said simply that he had been doing his job.

“Just doing my job” is what modest men say when they’ve done something they can’t fully explain. The kilt was flamboyance. The midnight road-minding was craft. The bluff with Elster was audacity. But underneath all of it was something harder to name: the willingness to stand in the dark next to a road where 15,000 SS soldiers were sleeping, and decide that this was a fight worth having with whatever you had.

Three men and a radio. That was the Jedburgh template.

Next week: The reckoning. How Jedburgh operations ended, what happened to the survivors, and why the program shaped every special operations doctrine that followed.

A word from the sponsor

Further reading about the Jedburghs:

- Behind Enemy Lines by Tommy Macpherson and Richard Bath — his memoir, published when he was 91

- Das Reich: The March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Through France by Max Hastings

- Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America’s First Shadow War by Colin Beavan

If you’ve heard music in the Paris métro, you might have been listening to the next Zaz.

Since 1997, the RATP (the direct operator of the métro and of other city transit services) has run an official audition program for metro musicians. Not buskers, but actual selected performers with branded backdrops and career development support. Only 300 make the cut each year from hundreds of applicants.

The alumni list reads like a French pop chart: Zaz, Keziah Jones, Irma, Claudio Capéo. They started in the corridors at Bastille or République, got noticed, and graduated to Lollapalooza and Solidays.

Where to find them:

- Bastille — jazz combos and pop-soul artists

- République — soul and folk singers

- Châtelet — opera singers

- Gare de Lyon — rock bands

Next time you’re rushing through a station and hear something good, stop. You might be watching someone’s career launch.

The RATP knows what they’re doing — they’ve been scouting talent in tunnels for almost 30 years.

(Source: RATP blog)

Here's a fun connection! RATP Dev (their international subsidiary) operates transit systems all over the world, including parts of DC’s bus system. They’re in something like 15 countries now.

It’s one of those “wait, what?” moments when you realize the same organization running the métro at Bastille has also run buses in Washington DC, London, and a dozen other cities. Very different vibe from the romantic Paris brand.

The métro's vetted musicians are just a tiny part of the music that's available in Paris. Every June, there's Music Day (Fête de la Musique), when musical groups ranging from small and unofficial to large and official (I saw a terrific concert by the Navy's orchestra one year at the École Militaire).

At any time, look in l’Officiel des Spectacles (Shows and Outings in Paris • The Official Guide to Shows) for concerts. It's French, but beginners can figure it out.

Thanks for reading Part-Time Parisian.

Secret Heroes is brought to you by my Paris thriller series, where you'll find unexpected corners of the city. If you enjoy this kind of storytelling—where historical truth gets mixed with modern suspense—start with Treasure of Saint-Lazare. Or see the entire Eddie Grant series here.

The current chapter of Secret Heroes discusses the Jedburgh Teams, three-man, international squads of saboteurs who dropped into Europe in the months before D-Day and helped organize the Resistance. If the Jedburgh story resonates with you, start reading with the first post.

And watch for my forthcoming novel about Artie Grant, father of Eddie, the protagonist of my current novel series. He was a man who didn’t parachute into occupied Paris because he was already there when the Germans arrived, building networks that would last four years of occupation.

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The official story said Jedburghs were just liaison teams. Small groups sent to coordinate with the French Resistance before D-Day.

That was the cover story.

The truth? They were three-man wrecking crews designed to turn occupied France into hell for the Wehrmacht. And Winston Churchill himself ordered their existence classified. The ban wasn't lifted for almost half a century.

Why the Secrecy?

The Jedburghs violated every rule of conventional warfare. They operated behind enemy lines without formal military support. They armed civilian resistance fighters—a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. They coordinated acts that, if discovered, would have justified Nazi reprisals against French civilians.

But unlike SOE agents who worked under civilian cover, Jedburghs deliberately wore military uniforms. This wasn’t symbolic—it was strategic. The uniform was supposed to protect them under the Geneva Conventions if they were captured. In practice, Hitler’s Commando Order meant, uniformed or not, capture often meant execution. But the Allies insisted on uniforms anyway, treating these men as soldiers, not expendable spies.

Churchill knew what history would say about arming civilians and coordinating guerrilla warfare. So he buried it.

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The Selection Process

You couldn’t simply volunteer for Jedburgh. They came for you.

British MI6, American OSS, and French BCRA intelligence agencies compiled lists of candidates. The criteria were specific and brutal:

- Fluent French (not just conversational—fluent enough to pass as a native under interrogation)

- Combat experience (proven under fire, preferably in unconventional warfare)

- Parachute qualified (or willing to become so immediately)

- Psychological stability (they needed men who could kill a sentry silently, then have breakfast with villagers)

- Ability to operate independently (no reinforcements, no extraction, no second chances)

The washout rate during training approached 40%. Not because men couldn’t handle the physical demands—because they couldn’t handle the moral ones.

The Training

Milton Hall, a requisitioned estate in Cambridgeshire, became Jedburgh headquarters. From January to June 1944, nearly 300 men trained there for missions most wouldn’t survive.

The curriculum:

Weapons: Every firearm the Allies or Axis used, plus improvised weapons. Jedburghs had to maintain, repair, and teach others to use:

- Sten guns (notoriously unreliable)

- German MP40s (captured weapons were common)

- American M1 carbines

- British Lee-Enfield rifles

- Plastic explosives (C2, the predecessor to C4)

- Gammon grenades

- Mortars, machine guns, bazookas

Sabotage: Railway destruction, bridge demolition, communications disruption, vehicle ambushes. They learned to calculate explosive charges by eyeballing a target. Too little, and the bridge still stood. Too much, and you wasted supplies you couldn’t replace.

Silent killing: Knives, garrotes, bare hands. They practiced on dummies, then live animals, then—according to some accounts—condemned prisoners of war. (This is disputed and is obviously something that would be kept highly secret, but it's worth remembering that this war was the defining existential experience of the 20th Century.)

Tradecraft: Dead drops, codes, safe house protocols, interrogation resistance. They memorized cover stories in such detail they could recite them under torture.

Leadership: How to organize civilians who’d never fired a weapon into effective guerrilla units. How to inspire farmers to blow up trains. How to discipline a resistance fighter without destroying morale.

The Three-Man Team Structure

Every Jedburgh team had three roles:

The Commander: Usually British or American. Made tactical decisions, coordinated with Allied command via radio, and took responsibility when things went sideways.

The Executive Officer: The second-in-command. Often from a different nation than the commander (deliberate cross-training). Took over if the commander was killed or captured.

The Radio Operator: Usually French. The only team member guaranteed to speak native-level French. Handled all communications with London, maintained the radio equipment, and often served as primary liaison with local resistance leaders.

This structure was brilliant. If one man was captured, the other two could continue. If two were killed, the survivor could still complete the mission or at least report intelligence.

Teams deployed with:

- Uniforms: British teams wore the camouflaged Denison smock (the same distinctive jump smock worn by British Airborne) with a black Royal Armoured Corps beret instead of the airborne maroon. American teams wore standard U.S. paratrooper uniforms. All wore the special “SF” (Special Force) wing insignia on the right shoulder.

- Three radios (one main, two backups)

- Enough weapons to arm a dozen resistance fighters

- Gold coins (universally accepted currency)

- Suicide pills (cyanide capsules, though most threw them away)

- Silk maps (hidden in clothing)

- Escape compasses (disguised as buttons)

- Forged identity papers

- Civilian clothes (for backup)

Weight per man: 60-80 pounds, not counting the parachute.

The Jump

Jedburghs deployed at night from modified B-24 Liberators. The aircraft flew low—500 to 800 feet—to avoid German radar. At that altitude, parachutes barely had time to open. They were a special design, made of dark fabric. There was no reserve chute.

The BBC broadcast coded messages to alert resistance groups: ”The tomatoes are ripe” or ”The moon is full.” Maquis fighters would light signal fires in predetermined patterns, visible only from directly overhead.

Then three men jumped into darkness, carrying enough equipment to start a war.

Most teams landed in German-occupied territory with no friendly forces within a hundred miles. The moment their boots hit French soil, they were criminals subject to execution.

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Behind the Lines as the Front Advanced

As Allied armies pushed inland from Normandy, Jedburgh teams found themselves in an unusual position. They had begun the summer isolated behind enemy lines; by late August, advancing Allied forces were overtaking regions where they had been operating for months.

Some teams emerged from forests and safe houses to greet regular troops in uniform—no longer theoretical soldiers behind the lines, but recognized members of the Allied war effort. Others continued to operate in regions where German units were retreating chaotically, creating unpredictable and dangerous conditions.

In certain cases, Jedburghs helped smooth the transition from underground resistance to provisional local authority. They could vouch for Resistance leaders to arriving Allied commanders and help prevent unnecessary clashes or confusion.

Their multinational structure—American, British, Free French—proved especially valuable in these moments. They were not outsiders parachuting in at the last minute; they were already known quantities to the fighters on the ground.

The Jedburgh operations remained classified for nearly four decades after the war, with information beginning to be declassified only in the 1980s along with other OSS records.

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Next week: The missions themselves. What Jedburghs actually did in the 90 days between their deployment and the Liberation of Paris.

Why This Matters

The Jedburgh program created the template for modern special operations. The Green Berets, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, British SAS—they all trace their lineage back to Milton Hall.

Small teams. Deep behind enemy lines. Training local forces. Fighting asymmetrically.

Sound familiar? It should. We’re still doing it today.

Secret Heroes is brought to you by my Paris thriller series, where some of these tactics show up in unexpected ways. If you enjoy this kind of storytelling—where historical truth gets mixed with modern suspense—start with Treasure of Saint-Lazare. Or see the entire Eddie Grant series here.

And if the Jedburgh story resonates with you, you'll want to watch for my forthcoming novel about Artie Grant—a man who didn't parachute into occupied Paris because he was already there when the Germans arrived, building networks that would last four years of occupation.

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Further reading:

- The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944 by Will Irwin

- CIA: Surprise, Kill, Vanish - The Legend of the Jedburghs

- History of the Jedburghs in Normandy - D-Day Overlord

- Review of Eisenhower's Guerrillas: The Jedburghs, the Maquis, & The Liberation of France, by Benjamin F. Jones, 2016

Three men.
Three different accents.
One radio.

Unlike many clandestine agents before them, they did not discard their identity entirely. Each man wore a uniform—British battledress, American field gear, or Free French insignia—chosen deliberately and worn with intent. If captured, they were determined not to vanish into the legal void reserved for spies and saboteurs. They were soldiers, operating behind enemy lines, and they wanted that fact to be unmistakable.

They were called Jedburghs, and their war would be fought in places where uniforms offered only limited protection.

Dropped Into the Dark

In the spring of 1944, as Allied armies assembled in southern England and the largest amphibious invasion in history took shape, another war was already being waged across occupied Europe.

In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, Resistance networks had survived years of brutal counterintelligence pressure. Some were strong, others badly compromised. Many had courage in abundance but lacked weapons, coordination, and reliable contact with Allied planners. The German security services, meanwhile, had become highly effective at infiltrating and dismantling clandestine organizations, often by tracing radio transmissions or turning captured agents.

The success of the coming invasion would depend in part on these underground networks—on their ability to sabotage rail lines, delay German reinforcements, gather intelligence, and create confusion far from the beaches of Normandy.

What they needed was not leadership imposed from outside, but connection.

Why the Jedburghs Existed

By late 1943, both Britain’s Special Operations Executive and America’s Office of Strategic Services understood that individual agents, however skilled, were no longer enough. The scale of what was coming demanded a new approach: something more durable than a single courier, more flexible than a formal military unit.

The solution was the Jedburgh team.

These were small, multinational groups—usually three men—trained together, dropped together, and embedded directly with local Resistance forces. They would not command operations in a conventional sense. Instead, they would coordinate, advise, supply, and communicate, acting as living links between clandestine fighters in occupied territory and Allied headquarters in London.

The project itself was an experiment in cooperation, bringing together British, American, and Free French personnel in a way that would have been unthinkable earlier in the war. Differences in doctrine, culture, and temperament were accepted as the price of effectiveness.

Soldiers, Not Spies

The decision for Jedburghs to wear uniforms was neither symbolic nor cosmetic. It was legal, moral, and practical.

Earlier agents operating under civilian cover—like the women already featured in Secret Heroes, plus the men and women to follow—had accepted the reality that capture often meant execution. The Jedburghs were different. They were trained as soldiers and inserted as soldiers, even though their missions placed them far behind enemy lines and deep within civilian populations.

Uniforms offered no guarantee of safety. German forces did not always respect distinctions between combatant and spy, especially in the bitter struggle against Resistance movements. But the uniform mattered all the same. It reflected how the Allies saw these men: not as expendable assets, but as part of the armed forces, operating under orders and prepared to accept the risks that came with that status.

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The Three-Man Team

Each Jedburgh team was deliberately small, designed for mobility and trust rather than firepower.

Typically, a team consisted of a commander—American or British—responsible for liaison with Allied command; an executive officer, often Free French, whose language skills and cultural fluency were essential; and a radio operator, whose ability to transmit accurately and sparingly could determine the survival of everyone around him.

The radio operator remained the most vulnerable member of the team. German direction-finding units roamed the countryside, and prolonged transmissions could be detected with alarming speed. A single careless signal could unravel not just the team, but entire Resistance networks that depended on them.

Training reflected these realities: parachuting, demolitions, weapons handling, radio discipline, and the less tangible skills of judgment, restraint, and patience. Jedburghs were taught not only how to fight, but when not to.

Living With the Resistance

Once on the ground, Jedburghs did not arrive as commanders issuing orders. They lived with the Resistance—sharing food, shelter, fear, and long periods of waiting.

They helped organize supply drops, trained fighters in sabotage and weapons use, coordinated timing with Allied plans, and transmitted intelligence back to London. Just as often, they acted as intermediaries, navigating tensions between rival Resistance groups and aligning local priorities with strategic necessity.

They learned quickly that authority meant little without trust, and that trust could not be forced. A successful mission depended as much on understanding village politics and personal loyalties as it did on explosives or radios.

Jedburgh zones in occupied France, 1944

Waiting for the Signal

By early June 1944, Jedburgh teams were in place across much of occupied France, already integrated into Resistance networks.

They knew the invasion was imminent. They did not know the date.

Until then, they waited—monitoring radios, moving cautiously, and preparing for the moment when silence would give way to action. When that moment came, their work would help determine whether German reinforcements arrived on time, or not at all.

Their role was never meant to be visible. If they succeeded, the credit would flow elsewhere. If they failed, the record might never reflect what had been lost.

Next week: What happened when the invasion finally began—and what it meant to be captured while wearing a uniform in a war that often ignored such distinctions.

For Further Information…

“‍Before Special Forces and CIA paramilitaries, there were the WWII Jedburghs.” Multi-national teams parachuted in to blow up bridges and generally confound the Germans, mainly after Normandy. From Spyscape.

Operation Jedburgh, which brought together agents from the SOE (Britain), OSS (American), and French intelligence agency, dropped groups of agents into the occupied countries in support of the Normandy invasion. From Wikipedia.

“Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Legend of the Jedburghs” CIA Stories.

Jedburghs and the French Resistance test the Nazi hold on France. Daily Chronicles of World War II.

Unknown Heroes: Behind Enemy Lines at D-Day. Youtube.

Alchetron, free social encyclopedia

Brought to you by …

TREASURE OF SAINT-LAZARE, a novel by John Pearce. “A man caught in the middle of a search for World War II war treasures and a murder plot finds himself re-examining his own past tragedies” (Kirkus)

Best historical mystery of its year (Readers’ Favorite)

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In the spring of 1944, Britain faced a quiet crisis.

Allied planners were preparing the Normandy landings, but intelligence from the region was collapsing. German counter-espionage had grown brutally efficient. Radio operators, who had a lifespan measured in weeks, disappeared. Couriers were captured. Entire resistance networks went silent.

By May, Britain’s Special Operations Executive made an extraordinary decision. If trained men could no longer survive behind enemy lines in Normandy, they would send someone the Germans would not look for at all.

Her name was Phyllis Latour. She went by Pippa.

At a very young 23 years old she volunteered, knowing that agents sent before her into the region had been captured. Her cover would not be that of a professional operative—or even an adult—but a desperately poor French girl, scarcely more than a child.

On the night of May 1, 1944, she stood in the open door of a British bomber and jumped into occupied France. She buried her parachute, her uniform, and her real identity. Then she became someone else entirely.

For the next four months, Pippa moved through Nazi-occupied Normandy on a battered bicycle, a basket of soap bars hanging from the handlebars. On paper, she was a harmless peasant girl selling household goods from farm to farm. In reality, every journey was a reconnaissance mission.

She passed through German checkpoints almost daily. She chatted with soldiers, giggled nervously, asked foolish questions about their uniforms and their homes in Germany. The act was deliberate. She played the role of a girl too naïve, too uneducated, too insignificant to be dangerous.

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While they dismissed her, she memorized everything: unit insignia, troop movements, fortification sites, supply routes, radio traffic patterns.

At night, she disappeared into the countryside. She assembled her wireless set in forests, barns, abandoned buildings—never transmitting from the same place twice. German mobile detection units could triangulate radio signals within minutes. Survival meant constant movement.

Her codes were written on silk: light, silent, and easy to conceal. After each transmission, she marked the code with a pinprick so she would never reuse it, then rolled the silk, used a knitting needle to push it into a flat shoelace, and used it to tie up her hair.

One afternoon, German soldiers stopped her at a checkpoint. There had been reports of partisan activity nearby. They searched her bicycle, her basket, her clothes, the soap bars. Nothing.

When one soldier pointed to her hair she didn’t hesitate. She untied the shoelace and handed it to him with an innocent smile.

Inside that ribbon was silk containing every code she'd used—enough to have her tortured and executed, but the soldier looked at it only briefly and handed it back.

For four months, Pippa lived this way. She slept outdoors, scavenged food, and never stayed anywhere long enough to feel safe. By D-Day, she had transmitted 135 coded messages to London—more than any other female SOE agent operating in France.

Those messages helped Allied planners understand what waited beyond the beaches: where German units were concentrated, which fortifications were active, how supplies moved inland. They guided bombing raids and reduced uncertainty at the most dangerous moment of the war.

On August 25, 1944, Paris was liberated. Latour’s mission was over.

She married Doyle, an engineer, to New Zealand, and raised four children. For more than half a century, she told them almost nothing about what she had done. Her wartime service remained unspoken, locked away with the same discipline that had kept her alive in Normandy.

In 2000, her eldest son discovered her story online while researching women of the SOE. When he asked her about it, she confirmed it quietly. Yes, she had been a spy. Yes, she had done those things. It was simply what needed to be done.

France formally honored her in 2014 with the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. She accepted it without ceremony.

Phyllis Latour-Doyle died on October 7, 2023, at the age of 102.

She outlived the regime that tried to destroy her by nearly eight decades. The free world inherited after D-Day exists, in part, because a young woman rode a bicycle through Nazi checkpoints, hid her secrets in her hair, and was never suspected at all.

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Sidebar: Why Phyllis Latour Mattered

By early 1944, the Germans had become exceptionally skilled at dismantling resistance networks in Normandy. Male operatives—often young, fit, and carrying suspicious equipment—stood out. Many were captured within weeks.

Pippa Latour’s value was not just bravery, but invisibility.

Her disguise exploited assumptions the occupiers rarely questioned: that a poor teenage girl was harmless, unintelligent, and beneath notice. It allowed her to move constantly, gather intelligence casually, and pass through checkpoints that would have been deadly for others.

Her reports helped reduce uncertainty in the final days before D-Day—when uncertainty cost lives.

Sometimes the most effective weapon in war is not force, but being overlooked.

Links

Her posthumous autobiography was well received.
The Last Secret Agent: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines

Her Wikipedia page contains many interesting links.

At the first level of the tour Eiffel, the wide iron gallery just above the swirl of visitors and the wind off the Seine, something remarkable has been quietly hiding in plain sight for more than a century. Encircling the iron structure are the names of seventy-two scientists—Foucault, Fresnel, Cauchy, Belgrand—picked in the late 1880s as emblems of French scientific progress. Their names, spelled out in gold, were meant to announce to the world that modernity had arrived.

There was only one problem: every one of those names belonged to a man.

That is about to change, in gold letters.

A new initiative led by the association Femmes & Sciences, in partnership with the City of Paris and the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, will add the names of 72 women scientists to the monument. Astronomers, mathematicians, chemists, physicians, engineers—women whose work shaped modern science but whose names were too often relegated to footnotes, if they appeared at all.

The project, called Hypatie, takes its name from Hypatia of Alexandria, the ancient mathematician and astronomer murdered in the fifth century and often described as the first known woman scientist. It is a pointed choice.

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The omission of women from the Tower’s original “scientific pantheon” was not malicious; it reflected who was allowed into laboratories, universities, and academies at the time. In the nineteenth century, women were largely excluded from universities, laboratories, academies, and recognition. Their absence on the Tower simply mirrored their erasure elsewhere.

What makes this moment powerful is that it does not erase the past—it answers it.

The proposed list reads like an alternative history of science. Some names are familiar: Marie Curie, whose discoveries reshaped physics and chemistry; Sophie Germain, who advanced number theory despite being barred from formal education; Irène Joliot-Curie, Nobel laureate in her own right. Others will be new even to well-read visitors: Jeanne Baret, who circumnavigated the globe disguised as a man to pursue botany; Alice Recoque, a pioneer of early computing; Anita Conti, France’s first oceanographer; Marthe Gautier, whose role in identifying trisomy 21 was long minimized.

Seen together, the list tells a different story of progress—one built not only in grand institutions, but in persistence, improvisation, and quiet brilliance.

Artist and project initiator Benjamin Rigaud describes Hypatie as an act of contemporary art as much as historical correction. The Tower has always been more than iron and rivets; it is a statement. Inscribing these names, he argues, makes equality visible at the literal heart of Paris. Isabelle Vauglin, president of Femmes & Sciences, puts it more bluntly: this is about restoring memory to women whose contributions were “effacées.”

Importantly, none of this is being done lightly. A scientific and heritage committee—bringing together historians, engineers, conservation experts, and leading scientists—has been tasked with ensuring that the additions respect the Tower’s protected status. Symbolism matters, but so does stewardship.

When these seventy-two new names take their place, the Eiffel Tower will still speak of progress, as it did in 1889. But it will finally be speaking in a fuller voice.

Next time you stand on the first floor and look around, remember: monuments don’t just preserve history. Sometimes, they correct it.

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Status of the project…

• On January 26, 2026, the City of Paris publicly revealed the full list of 72 women scientists proposed for the Tower.

• Before they can be physically engraved, this list has to be reviewed and validated by several scientific academies (in sciences, technologies, and medicine) and by the city’s heritage bodies.

• Once approved and the practical heritage work is arranged, the current plan aims for installation in 2027 — a symbolic year that echoes the Tower’s historic narrative and allows the careful conservation work needed on a world heritage-protected structure.

• The intention is for the women’s names to be engraved and painted in gold, using the same typography and style as the existing frieze of names that circles the Tower’s first floor.

• This ensures that the new names won’t feel like separate plaques or stickers, but rather a permanent and cohesive addition to the Tower’s architectural celebration of scientific achievement.

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Source: City of Paris website

Wikipedia (French) (English)