Bonjour Tout le Monde

It’s been raining here. Every day. Horizontally, darkly, and amidst huge gusts of icy wind. Miserable pedestrians with hair plastered to their heads pass by with grimaces, hunched into the buffering wind.  Broken umbrellas with their skirts overhead and tangled, spindly legs litter London sidewalks.  Flooding threatens half the country.  And then a double decker bus drives by, soaking me with frigid gutter water. On its side an advertisement reads:  We Are In
Drought, Take Care With Water Usage.

Oh, lovely, quirky England.

My time since I last wrote you has actually been spent learning valuable new skills – mainly learning how to drive on the left, running through the gears with my left hand (occasionally in the right order!), on narrow, medieval roads and endless roundabouts avoiding pedestrians jumping indiscriminately off curbs into the roadway and all in the torrential rain. Skills I’m sure I’ll need in San Diego…um…never.

The people have been, without exception, among the kindest, politest, and most welcoming I have ever met in my life.

In York, the Escape Line Memorial Society (ELMS) gathered members of the French, Dutch, and Belgian Resistance, as well as some English WW2 veterans who escaped from German-occupied Europe along with family members together for a touching remembrance ceremony at an outdoor museum called Eden Camp. A former POW camp housing German and Italians, each barrack now houses an exhibit centered on a war theme. One building traces the escape lines used by Allied evaders and escapers at a high and tragic cost to their abettors. Many helpers were young women who put their lives, and their families’ lives on the line to help Allied airmen and soldiers get back to England. Vast numbers, sometimes in ratios as high as four-to-one over the men they rescued, were taken by the Gestapo, tortured, thrown in concentration camps, or simply shot.

We owe much to those who often remain unnamed and unrecognized by history, but who displayed the highest levels of courage without any training, support or comradeship. Some of those brave civilians took my B-24 gunner friend Bob Sweatt into their safe houses along a route through Brittany (including Maison d’Alphonse, which was burned after its discovery as part of the network.  The young, married woman who lived here and helped the Allied airman barely escaped with her life and her baby and not much else)

Saturday I drove to Nottingham and met up with Charley, my Afrika Korps friend, who had arrived the day before from Germany and spent the afternoon with his dear friends in the Sherwood Rangers tank regiment. After interviewing a WW2 Sherwood Ranger quickly upon my arrival, I had less than five minutes to smooth my hair and change into a skirt before we dashed off to the annual regimental dinner.

The evening passed in a whirlwind, with Charley’s former North African adversaries welcoming him heartily and warmly. It was an incredible honor for me to sit among the six WW2 veterans who could still make it there. All too quickly, and sadly, it was over and we headed back to the hotel.

This morning we interviewed two Sherwood Rangers involved in D-Day and the fight through Normandy, Holland and Germany. In the afternoon we visited with a gunner from a secret British naval flotilla involved in clandestine operations in both France and Norway.

It goes so fast, and there’s simply no way to compress years of combat experience into two hours of an interview. Sometimes when time constraints cause us to break off just when we’re getting to the riveting parts, it’s actually physically painful to turn the camera off and pack up the gear.  If you know of anyone willing to fund the effort to record the incredible stories of these heroes so that they can really be given the time required instead of always rushing, please be sure to pass their vital contact information along, would you?

Tomorrow: Charley and I drive to Hethel to view the remains of Bob Sweatt’s 389th Bomb Group base of operations in north east England