Resistance

  • One week to go!

    One week to go!

    It’s very disappointing World Book Day couldn’t be arranged to coincide with the publication of my new book. It’s NEXT Thursday everybody! Filled with real life heroes: courageous UK, US, and Canadian airmen; amazing men and women of the Resistance and evasion lines; and SOE saboteurs. And, an horrific traitor. Pretty much worse than anyone…

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  • An exceptional agent and his mysterious death

    Just over a week after the end of the war in Europe a car driven by a German soldier who had worked at Flossenbürg concentration camp was involved in an accident. In the other vehicle was a Welsh-born officer named Major Jacques de Guélis. A highly-decorated war hero, de Guélis had served behind the lines…

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  • The American airmen who flew bombing missions from Britain are once again in my thoughts, as I’ve been researching the courage of many of them for my new book ‘The Nazi Ghost Train’. People like John ‘Bud’ Brown and Ted Kleinman, shot down in February 1944, and forced to embark on a seven-month ordeal which…

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  • Here is the UK cover of ‘The Nazi Ghost Train‘ which comes out next year. I love it! Thank you, Mirror Books. It’s an amazing true story of an act of resistance which saved the lives of hundreds of resisters, airmen and SOE agents. More about the book here.

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  • We have lost a WW2 legend: the wonderful Comet Line courier Andrée Dumon. She was 102. She survived Ravensbrück & Mauthausen. She was funny, kind and exceptionally brave. A regular at evasion line memorial events and still known by her wartime codename ‘Nadine’, Andrée was a lovely person, with time for everyone and a sparkling…

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  • During the liberation of Chartres a Life magazine photographer spotted Simone Segouin and snapped a photograph, turning the 19-year-old into an icon of the French Resistance and the Liberation. Photographer Robert Capa and reporter Jack Belden had driven into the embattled city in August 1944 with soldiers from General George S. Patton’s Third Army. Intrigued…

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  • This week Prague marks the 82nd anniversary of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the massacres which followed. I took these photos on a visit to the site a couple of years ago. On May 27, 1942, Heydrich’s car joined this road turning sharply to follow the main route towards the city centre. But the…

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  • Defying Hitler

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  • In the summer of 1978 two former members of a B-17 crew met to discuss their escape from death in a raid on Kassel in Germany in 1943. Sitting on a porch in Tarrytown, New York, co-pilot Bohn Fawkes turned to his navigator Elmer “Benny” Bendiner and said: “You remember that we were hit with…

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  • Major new review of Defying Hitler in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, describing it as a “detailed new history of the people dedicated to stopping a fascist madman” which “sums it all up with an inventive weaving of key players and the steps they took to resist a monster.” Perry Munyon writes: “Drawing from the vast Nazi…

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