Fascinating stories that are full of courage that weve never heard about. This evening he will share from his new book escape from paris, a true story of love and resistance in wartime france which is based on official american french and german documents, history, personal memoir and as well as personal interviews. It is a thrilling wartime adventure story of american aviators rescued by fighters taken to not the and hidden under the noses of gestapo. Please join me welcoming stephen harding. No pressure there. I would like to personally thank you all for coming, i really appreciate it when people show up, and hope not to bore you. I want to give you some quick background on my stuff, people wonder how you military history. I was born and raised in Southern California long time ago and my father and all my uncles fought in world war ii in the pacific. So i grew up hearing their stories of fighting the japanese in sealing the broad ocean and Everything Else. When i was 19 i am listed in the United States army in 1971 and in retrospect it was not the best decision i ever made because six months later i got run over by an Army Personnel carrier. As a result im a disabled veteran and i will tell you armored personnel carriers are very heavy and they dont give much. I spent over a year in Army Hospitals in germany and the United States and this was obvious the way before the internet, there wasnt a whole lot else to do but read or else they could not sit up. Whatever i was going to do i had to be able to hold over my head. Every couple of days a volunteer become from whatever library the hospital was attached to and being in a Military Hospital most of what they had an offer was military fiction or military history. So it reawaken my interest in military history. I eventually got out of the hospital but wearing several kinds of braces, the army decided i could no longer be in infantryman so for reasons i still dont understand the meaning of journalist. I spent the last year of my time in the army doing regular television. Journalism, i got out of the army and i immediately went back to school at the university of california in Santa Barbara which will tell you is absolutely the best place on the planet to go to college especially if you like to serve which i did rather indelibly in those days. I have 2 degrees in history from the university of california, i immediately went to work for the federal government and i initially was a historian for the bureau of Land Management which is interesting because i was doing historical studies at the Indian Tribes which i knew nothing about because i was not military historian, iran and museum on Treasure Island in the middle of symphysis go by which is a wonderful place to work, and not being a staff historian for the air force and army it was in the army i was working at the u. S. Army of u. S. Military history in d. C. But i heard the story that became the last battle, the story and the only time in world war ii when americans and germans joined forces and fought together and they did it to defend the castle in austria that was filled with ear training french vips were about to be murdered by the ss. Its also the only time in American Military history that u. S. Soldiers defended the castle. Its a great story going to be developed into a movie. Other books followed in bringing us up to escape from paris, when i finished the last book my agent as all agents he said what is your next book. And i said im not sure i want to write another book, how about the history of tsunamis or ocean and he said no, no youre a military historian. I said you have any suggestions and he said yes i have three ideas. Paris, world war ii and americans. I said that is a fascinating idea except there were not any americans that occupied france and he said im sure youll find some. So 18 months of Research Later i did indeed find out that there were americans in german occupied peers in world war ii. There were aviators who had been shot down over occupied france and had managed to come under the wing of the French Resistance. They were generally moved to larger cities largely paris because Young Americans who did not speak french would stand out like a sore thumb outside of a big city. Paris at that time, 3 Million People, lots of places to hide. So the story that i first found was on a particular day in 1943 and july 14, there was a bombing raid conducted the 94th bomb group which was based in sussex england. There was just one group, there were several groups involved, over 100 airplanes bombing different targets and around peers. For the 94th bomb group it was the old air drum which had turned into a german airfield. Even before the 94th group got there for b17s from the 94 bomb group were shot down in about 20 minutes. That is actually not true, three of them were shot down and ill tell you what happened to the fourth in a minute. I found that story and i thought i wanted to do a story about the air force but i also wanted to do a story about the French Resistance and i also wanted to write something that told the role of women in world war ii because its usually overlooked concept and it just so happened that i came together that this book rings all the threads together. So i found the story about the 94th bomb group and i thought i still dont have it yet. Guys getting shot down, what is not about. And i managed to find the one guy who became the focus of my story a guy named joe from Washington State he was a waist gunner and wanda b17. In joes aircraft b17 bombers in world war ii carried ten men and on his plane that day there were 11 people because in addition to the regular crewmen they had on board Jefferson Davis dixon, jeff dixon. Yes, he was from the south, jeff dixon was a fascinating guy and i thought about building the book around him although for residual here in a minute it did not work out. Jeff dixon had been in the u. S. Army in world war i and served in france and he had been in a photographic unit and after world war i he after a lot of Young Americans who had never been this france but they wanted to experience it. They stayed in france, took a discharge and they managed to become a millionaire by promoting boxing matches, horse races, bicycle races and in fact he owns a hippodrome in paris. He just happened to be in new york city when pearl harbor happened and he immediately turned his back on his entire business which at that point was taken over by the germans and reenlisted in the United States army specifically in the army air forces. They made him an officer and a moche enter Motion Picture photographer and sent him to europe with a bunch of people that youve heard of and that you havent heard of tissue Aerial Combat sequence for training purposes for documentary films, some of it ended up in the original film about that and some ended up in clark gables film which most people had never seen and if you google clark gable and b17 you can watch it online, is a brilliant documentary that he made and as a matter fact he flew on a gunner estimate of the missions. So i found this guy and i said he is an interesting guy. And then i tracked down his stepson who lives in olympia washington and he is now in his late 70s and the man name nick idolizes and truly loved his stepfather and when i contacted him my wife and i were in california and they said would you mind if i fly up if you have anything to show me and memorabilia i love to see it and he said i have a whole footlocker. For any researcher thats like i am there. So i flipped to olympia and i drove there and sure enough he had laid the stuff on the table in his garage and it was photographs and metals and parts in uniforms and logbooks and letters from friends and relatives but there was one thing that caught my eye and it was a simple black Leather Wallet and it was one that joe had carried on the day he died in 1978 i think it was. Its been a while since i wrote the book. I said do you mind if i look through this and he said sure, go right ahead. I opened it up and of course theres a drivers license, social security, a va health card, much like the one i carry and inside on a very hard to see inside pocket i saw crinkle paper. I pulled it out and opened it up and it was a letter in french written a couple of weeks after joe got out of occupied france and went back to europe or england. It was signed and that and i thought the story got interesting. So nate had never seen the letter, i showed it to him and he was now particular Interest Income i copied it as they did with his permission with all the other stuff and then i started digging into who this woman was. That took another five or six months because of course at that point i was assuming she was gone. She was not gone, she just turned 99 years old, she lives in a home near a small town which i want attempt to announce pretty speak german and my wife speaks french and german is not a language you want to use when youre integrating world war ii resistance fighters. So we went to france, we had research to doing paris and we were able to talk to her and we got a excellent bottle of champagne. So that all came together and how this book sort of jelled. I wont tell you all about it because i hope you will read the book, to me it is an interesting story, it combines military history, a love story in a memoir in ways that i wont express right now, it also involves concentration camps. It is a very involved book. It covers a lot of ground. The only one negative review that ive had so far was a gentleman who got a copy and said i dont know why you put a stupid love story in the great world war ii book. So i think the gentleman missed the point. So if joe and yvette are the two key personalities, im sure youre familiar with the huge multiacre campus just south of the river among other things museums and military barracks and hospital in wenzhou and several of his friends were taken to paris, he and one other guy were given over to a family, i apologize for the pronunciation. The father was george and the mother was denise and their daughter was yvette, usually in that kind of situation it would only be on the ground and occupied france for two weeks. Just as long as it took for the French Resistance to organize a way out. That way it was generally walking to the mountains with neutral spain. And train to get there from back to england. That was called homerun if you made it back to england. In joes case there were various difficulties involved, some involving gestapo, he ended up being in paris for several months living with them in their small apartment and he and yvette developed a very deep relationship and they went so far as to go to the local parish priest and get officially engaged in tending to be married after the war. When joes time came he went out in a completely different way. In the story continues from there. I will tell you that not long after he left the family was arrested. That is the latter part of the book. To me its a very affecting story. Which event when we talk to her did not really want to talk about. For obvious reasons. Fortunately in doing the research i found several documents a couple of books and several magazine articles that were written by other people had been arrested and deported to germany on exactly the same train that denise and her parents were and they describe the entire journey and i crossreference that with one or two things that event said i realized it was the same train, same journey so that was the way i was able to describe that she did not want to describe. In doing the history especially when people are still alive, you have to be really aware of the sensitivities, one of which was a very deep and important relationship that the very elderly woman had in her youth, she was 22. And she remembered all of her life. When i realize that john kerry that letter for 50 some odd years and he had been happily married after the war for reason i will not go into he was not able to marry event her. She was reading her copy of the book and she got all the way through the book and she was in the last chapter and i was watching a movie on the flight and i turned over and she was sobbing. So i figured, okay i mustve told the story and understandable way. So really without getting into too many things this book i suffer from a very rare not that rare but a lot of writers have it its called Research Rapture. [laughter] it means you are so into finding things out that is very difficult to put that aside and start writing. It happened on this book too. There was a lot to be found out, my wife with her french was incredibly helpful and i hired an American Woman who is living in france for the last 30 years he used to be an Associated Press journalist and very good friends of ours who did a lot of the Archival Research because even though i have Research Rapture i hate archives. And especially any archive that you have to put in an order in the morning and wait eight hours until he comes up in generally you get it right before you supposed to turn back and so i do tend to hire people to do that for me but also i do a lot on my own and having worked at the military history for a while as a staff historian im pretty good with army records, im pretty good with air force records but a lot of this was nonmilitary documentation, letters between people one of the ways i flushed out the romance between joe and yvette was because several other american aviators and british aviators who had been hidden there briefly at the same time describe the relationship and letters to other people. They thought it was such an amazing thing. So that is how you flush out or thats how i flush out the story when some of the principles are no longer with us or not necessarily dont want to be not forthcoming about it. I sent a copy to yvette and her daughter who is also named denise after her mother and unfortunately none of them read english so i think theyre having somebody painstakingly read it to them and i think they will find it surprising in a lot of ways because eva and joe sort of lost touch and this will fill in a lot for her. I also sent a copy to the stepson and his wife has told me that he is fascinated by it and it makes him sad in a good way because that is the part that he never knew about joke cornwalls wartime experience other than he got shot down. Ultimately that is how this book came together and apparently there is a chance it may be a movie although my experience so far there is called development hell where they will auction your book, write a script and look for actors and for some reason it takes years to do that so im hoping that this one will go a little bit more quickly because i think its a great story and obviously have a certain prejudice involved in that but i just really enjoy it and to me being able to write honestly and concisely and yet an entertaining way about people most of whom ive never met and was not a life and doing whatever they were doing and can be very satisfying if you do it right and i hope that theyve done it right. At this point i would like to open it up for questions. I spoke a little less than i might have because when i do radio tv interviews they always tell the story i would say dont tell the complete story because we want people to read the book but i would be happy to answer any questions you might have on this for my other books were life in general. I can make the assumption that you know the canon of World War Ii History pretty well. In your perspective, how does the story and your telling of it give a different angle or add or what is already in existence. One thing i did not know his other out a lot of things with the French Resistance priest several books about aviators shot down and being held by the resistance not only in france but belgium netherlands, italy and i had not realized that the european Resistance Movement between 1942 for the british part between 1939 in 1945 and for the u. S. Roughly 1942 in 1945 because 1942 is when they started operating over occupied europe. In the allied Resistance Movement or those that were working on behalf of the allies helped 6000 aviators evade capture by the germans and return to ally territory. If you think about that, given example between 1944 and 1945 just talking about the u. S. Eighth air force which was the primary american Aviation Unit operating out of britain this was farmers, fighter planes, transports, between 1942 in 194,518,000 aircraft went down in some of those are accidents, those that were shot down or went down for reasons we still do not know. If you think about the b17 as i said earlier a ten man crew for airplanes, that is a lot of people, most that will not make it back either is because they are dead and i cant tell you to much without giving too much away the 11 people only three got out. Which is about what happened. In the film that we see these days from memphis to whatever when you see the planes cascading out of control a b17 will only fly up to a certain point with a certain amount of damage and then it becomes a hunk of metal and it will fall no matter what and we saw this a few weeks ago with the b17 carrying two of the passengers crashed in connecticut and killed seven people. I had written on the plane 20 years ago and i sat in the plexiglas because is by far the best view you will ever get flying but i do remember thinking if we lose an engine or two engines, i dont want to be sitting here and unfortunately the people that were killed several weeks ago most were in the front of the airplane. And in combat, the people who generally tend to get out of b17 and be 24s were going down with the people on the aircraft, the waste covers, the radioman, the people in the front office were trying to keep the plane