[PDF] The Shelburne Escape Line eBook

Author : Reanne Hemingway-Douglass Hemingway-Douglass
Publisher : Pen and Sword
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 39,87 MB
Release : 2015-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1473837782

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Six decades after the end of World War II, new stories about the conflict continue to emerge. One of these is the subject of this book. Written by an American, RŽanne Hemingway-Douglass, and published in the UK by Pen & Sword, it has all the elements of a classic covert adventure tale. ??As the book explains, the Shelburne was one of the later escape lines that operated within Nazi-occupied Europe. It was established at the end of 1943 by two agents who worked for MI-9, the London-based military intelligence agency responsible for providing assistance to Allied servicemen stranded behind enemy lines. Working with the French Resistance, these agents arranged for groups of Allied airmen to be taken from "safe houses" in Paris to Brittany, where a Royal Navy motor gunboat picked them up from a secluded beach and delivered them back to England. Eight audacious evacuation operations were conducted between January and August, 1944, without the Shelburne Line ever being infiltrated by the Gestapo.??Aspects of the Shelburne story have been told previously in memoirs by several of the participants, including the late MP Airey Neave, who was an MI-9 operative. However, Hemingway-Douglass expands the story to include recollections of some of the local Breton people who were involved with the Line. The second half of the book comprises personal stories of airmen and other individuals who were affiliated with the Shelburne Line or were otherwise caught up in the war in France. ??A lifelong Francophile, Hemingway-Douglass took eight years to research and write the book. She describes it as a Òlabor of love that pays tribute to the heroism and courage of 'ordinary' people, while reinforcing the fact that war touches everybody.Ó

Author : Réanne Hemingway-Douglass
Publisher :
Page : 197 pages
File Size : 50,46 MB
Release : 2014-01-15
Category : Comet Line
ISBN : 9781934199053

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"The only Underground escape line that successfully evaded infiltration by the Gestapo was the Shelburne Line. Allied airmen, rescued after being shot down, were taken to Paris by Resistance members where - after intense interrogation - they received new names, identity cards, clothing, training, and special passes for the forbidden coastal zone in Brittany. They were hidden in "safe house" attics of loyal local farmers, waiting until a moonless night for evacuation to England via the Royal Navy's high-speed Motor Gun Boat 503"--Back cover.

Author : Reanne Hemingway-Douglass
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 32,31 MB
Release : 2014-01-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781934199039

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Accounts of the most successful rescue line by the French Resistance that was never infiltrated by the Nazis. Interviews of still-living aviators and their rescuers.

Author : Helen Fry
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 13,57 MB
Release : 2020-10-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0300255926

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A thrilling history of MI9—the WWII organization that engineered the escape of Allied forces from behind enemy lines When Allied fighters were trapped behind enemy lines, one branch of military intelligence helped them escape: MI9. The organization set up clandestine routes that zig-zagged across Nazi-occupied Europe, enabling soldiers and airmen to make their way home. Secret agents and resistance fighters risked their lives and those of their families to hide the men. Drawing on declassified files and eye-witness testimonies from across Europe and the United States, Helen Fry provides a significant reassessment of MI9’s wartime role. Central to its success were figures such as Airey Neave, Jimmy Langley, Sam Derry, and Mary Lindell—one of only a few women parachuted into enemy territory for MI9. This astonishing account combines escape and evasion tales with the previously untold stories behind the establishment of MI9—and reveals how the organization saved thousands of lives.

Author : Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society
Publisher : Turner Publishing Company
Page : 132 pages
File Size : 13,25 MB
Release : 1992
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781563110344

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

Author : Tim Spicer
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 50,18 MB
Release : 2021-09-07
Category :
ISBN : 9781999589134

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Between 1942 and 1944 a very small, very secret, very successful clandestine unit of the Royal Navy, operated between Dartmouth in Devon, and the Brittany Coast in France. It was a crossing of about 100 miles, every yard of it dangerous. The unit was called the 15th Motor Gunboat Flotilla- crewed by 125 officers and men, it became the most highly decorated Royal Naval unit of the Second World War. The 15th MGBF was an extraordinary group of men thrown together in the most secret of adventures. Very few were regular Royal Naval officers- instead the unit was made up of mostly Royal Naval Volunteer Officers and 'duration only' sailors. Their home was a converted paddle steamer and luxury yacht, but their work could not have been more serious. Their mission was to ferry agents of SIS and SOE to pinpoint landing sites on the Brittany coast in Occupied France. Once they had landed their agents, together with stores for the Resistance, they picked up evaders, escaped POWs who had had the good fortune to be collected by escape lines run by M19, as well as returning SIS and SOE agents. It is a story that is inextricably entwined with that of the many agents they were responsible for - Pierre Hentic, Yves Le Tac, Virginia Hall, Albert Hue, Jeannie Rousseau, Suzanne Warengham, Fran ois Mitterrand and Mathilde Carre, as well as many others. Without the Flotilla, such intelligence gathering networks as Jade Fitzroy and Alliance would never have developed, and SOE's VAR Line and MI9's Shelburne Escape Line would never have been realised. Drawing on a huge amount of research on both sides of the Channel, including private archives of many of the families involved, A Dangerous Enterprise brings the story of this most clandestine of operations brilliantly to life.

Author : Airey Neave
Publisher : Pen and Sword
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 20,7 MB
Release : 2010-04-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 147381796X

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The author of Flames of Calais details life in the top-secret department of Britain’s War Office during World War II in this military memoir. Airey Neave, who in the last two years of the war was the chief organizer at M.I.9, gives his inside story of the underground escape lines in occupied North-West Europe, which returned over 4,000 Allied servicemen to Britain during the Second World War. He describes how the escape lines began in the first dark days of German occupation and how, until the end of the war, thousands of ordinary men and women made their own contribution to the Allied victory by hiding and feeding men and guiding them to safety. Neave was the first British POW to make a “home run” from Colditz Castle. On his return, he joined M.I.9 adopting the code name “Saturday.” He also served with the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal. Tragically Airey Neave’s life was cut short by the IRA who assassinated him in 1979 when he was one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest political allies. Praise for Saturday at M.I.9 “There isn’t a page in the book which isn’t exciting in incident, wise in judgment, and absorbing through its human involvement.” —The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

Author : Peter Eisner
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 20,84 MB
Release : 2005-05-31
Category : History
ISBN : 0060096640

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Compared to Casablanca by the Washington Post, this a page–turning story of a group of resistance workers who secreted downed Allied fighter pilots through France and into safety in Spain during World War II. As war raged against Hitler's Germany, an increasing number of Allied fliers were shot down on missions against Nazi targets in occupied Europe. Many fliers parachuted safely behind enemy lines only to find themselves stranded and hunted down by the Gestapo. The Freedom Line traces the thrilling and true story of Robert Grimes, a 20–year–old American B–17 pilot whose plane was shot down over Belgium on Oct. 20, 1943. Wounded, disoriented, and scared, he was rescued by operatives of the Comet Line, a group of tenacious young women and men from Belgium, France, and Spain who joined forces to rescue the Allied aircrews and take them to safety. And on Christmas Eve 1943, he and a group of fellow Americans faced unexpected sudden danger and tragedy on the border between France and Spain. The road to safety was a treacherous journey by train, by bicycle, and on foot that stretched hundreds of miles across occupied France to the Pyrenees Mountains at the Spanish border. Armed with guile and spirit, the selfless civilian fighters of the Comet Line had risked their lives to create this underground railroad, and by this time in the war, they had saved hundreds of Americans, British, Australians, and other Allied airmen. Based on interviews with the survivors and in–depth archival research, The Freedom Line is the story of a group of friends who chose to act on their own out of a deep respect for liberty and human dignity. Theirs was a courage that presumed to take on a fearfully powerful foe with few defences.

Author : Susan Tate Ankeny
Publisher : Diversion Books
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 33,42 MB
Release : 2020-09-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1635767148

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This enthralling WWII biography combines a downed B-17 bombardier’s unfinished memoir with letters from the French girl who saved his life. Susan Tate Ankeny’s father was a World War II veteran bombardier who had bailed from a burning B-17 over Nazi-occupied France in 1944. After he died, she found his unfinished memoir, stacks of envelopes, black-and-white photographs, mission reports, dog tags, and the fake identity cards he used in his escape. Ankeny spent more than a decade tracking down letter writers, their loved ones, and anyone who had played a role in her father's story, culminating in a trip to France where she retraced his path with the same people who had guided him more than sixty years ago. While piecing together her father’s wartime experience, Ankeny discovered a remarkable hero. Godelieve Van Laere was just a teenaged girl when she saved the fallen Lieutenant Dean Tate, risking her life and forging a friendship that would last into a new century. The result is a fascinating and dramatic World War II tale enhanced by personal interviews with participants. It traces the transformation of a small-town American boy into a bombardier, the thrill and chaos of aerial warfare, and the horror of bailing from a flaming aircraft over enemy territory. It distinguishes the actions of a little-known French resistance network for Allied airmen known as Shelburne. And it shines a light on the courage and cunning of a young woman who risked her life to save another.