Eleven Days In August

Product Description

'I had thought that for me there could never again be any elation in war. But I had reckoned without the liberation of Paris
- I had reckoned without remembering that I might be a part of that richly historic day. We were in Paris on the first day
- one of the great days of all time.' (Ernie Pyle US war correspondent) The liberation of Paris was a momentous point in twentieth-century history yet it is now largely forgotten outside France. Eleven Days in August is a pulsating hour-by-hour reconstruction of these tumultuous events that shaped the final phase of the war & the future of France told with the pace of a thriller. While examining the conflicting national & international interests that played out in the bloody street fighting it tells of how in eleven dramatic days people lived fought & died in the most beautiful city in the world. Based largely on unpublished archive material including secret conversations coded messages diaries & eyewitness accounts Eleven Days in August shows how these August days were experienced in very different ways by ordinary Parisians Resistance fighters French collaborators rank-&-file German soldiers Allied & French spies the Allied & German High Commands. Above all it shows that while the liberation of Paris may be attributed to the audacity of the Resistance the weakness of the Germans & the strength of the Allies the key to it all was the Parisians who by turn built street barricades & sunbathed on the banks of the Seine who fought the Germans & simply tried to survive until the Germans finally surrendered in a billiard room at the Prefecture of Police. One of the most iconic moments in the history of the twentieth century had come to a close & the face of Paris would never be the same again.