Escape from Paris

by Stephen Harding

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Harding

  Cover design by Amanda Kain

  Cover images credits: planes © Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; city © Szilard Szasz Toth/Shutterstock; sky background © TraseRRR/Shutterstock; sky background © Ratana21/Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: October 2019

  Published by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Da Capo Press name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-0-306-92216-9 (hardcover), 978-0-306-92214-5 (ebook)

  E3-20190905-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1 A Guy Named Joe

  CHAPTER 2 Keepers of the Tomb

  CHAPTER 3 A Bad Day at Le Bourget

  CHAPTER 4 Men on the Run

  CHAPTER 5 Helpers, Guests, and Lovers

  CHAPTER 6 Home Run

  CHAPTER 7 A Homeward Flight and a Train to Hell

  CHAPTER 8 Liberation, Love, and Loss

  Epilogue

  Appendix: After the War

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Bibliography

  Notes

  As always, for Mari

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  Think not only of their passing, remember the glory of their spirit.

  —Inscription on the wall of the Normandy American Cemetery Chapel

  PROLOGUE

  FROM 22,000 FEET ABOVE THE ENGLISH CHANNEL, GERMAN-OCCUPIED France appeared remarkably serene on the morning of July 14, 1943. Out the left waist gun position of his B-17 Flying Fortress, Staff Sergeant Joe Cornwall could trace the coast of Normandy as far north as Dieppe, the thin white ribbon of breaking surf clearly discernable from the sun-dappled greens and browns of farm fields farther inland. Buffeted by the forty-below-zero winds that poured in through both of the bomber’s waist windows and cold despite his heavy, sheepskin-lined flying clothes, thick gloves, and leather helmet, the twenty-eight-year-old airman readjusted his oxygen mask and daydreamed briefly of how warm it must be on the sandy beaches four miles below.

  Gazing upward, Cornwall took in a less tranquil but equally stirring sight. Barely fifty feet off the Fortress’s left wing, two other B-17s droned along in formation, one slightly ahead and higher, the other somewhat lower, offset and in trail. And though he could not see them from his position, the gunner knew that two additional bombers were right where they were supposed to be—one directly forward of and slightly above his aircraft, and the other ahead and off to the right. Together, the five Fortresses—a sixth had turned back to England with mechanical problems—constituted the low squadron of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ 94th Bomb Group. Out fellow gunner Frank Santangelo’s right waist window, Cornwall could see the six B-17s of the unit’s lead squadron, highlighted by the bright morning sunlight. Farther up and directly to the right were the eight bombers that constituted the group’s high squadron; there should have been a ninth, but the lead machine had also been forced to return to base.

  Nor was the 94th alone in the sky that morning, because stacked upward and to the right of the group’s formation were the thirty-six other B-17s of the 95th, 96th, and 100th Bomb Groups. Together the fifty-five Fortresses comprised the 4th Bombardment Wing, and the four contrails that streamed from each machine looked, Joe thought, like long, slender skeins of wispy cotton candy—though his tinted goggles turned the white vapor trails an ethereal, golden yellow. Above and to either side of the bomber stream dozens of nimble Spitfire fighters of the Royal Air Force (RAF) spun their own interwoven webs of condensation as they ranged back and forth, their pilots alert for the first sign of German interceptors.

  The enemy fighters would almost certainly not descend until after low fuel reserves forced the Spits to turn for home, but the ragged blossoms of dirty black-gray smoke that had just begun to appear ahead of the ponderous Fortresses clearly indicated the Germans were aware of the aerial armada’s progress. While the antiaircraft fire was still relatively light and inaccurate—in their dry postmission reports the 94th’s intelligence officers classified such barrages as “meager”—every man in the bomber stream knew that would certainly change the nearer the formation got to its target. That objective—the commercial airport–turned–Luftwaffe base at Le Bourget, outside Paris—was heavily defended by flak batteries, and Cornwall briefly mused about how ironic it would be to get shot down during a raid on the place where Charles Lindbergh had received a hero’s welcome after his solo flight across the Atlantic sixteen years earlier. Even more ironic, the young gunner thought, would be to die bombing France on this particular day—the 154th anniversary of a key event in the now subjugated nation’s history: Bastille Day.

  SOME FORTY MILES TO THE SOUTHEAST OF THE AMERICAN BOMBER STREAM, Major Egon Mayer was just lifting his Focke-Wulf Fw 190 off from the Luftwaffe airfield at Beaumont-le-Roger. The twenty-six-year-old was one of Germany’s most successful fighter pilots, and as of that morning had sixty-eight confirmed aerial victories—the majority of them RAF Spitfires downed over France or the Channel. But the start of American daylight bombing raids in the fall of 1942 had brought about a gradual change in the nature of Mayer’s victims, from nimble fighters to what Luftwaffe pilots called Viermots, the four-engine B-17s and B-24 Liberators of the fledgling U.S. VIII Bomber Command.

  The change in prey had also necessitated a change in tactics for the German pilots tasked with intercepting the heavy bombers. The American formations could throw out a deadly stream of defensive fire in all directions, and the attacks that worked so well against fighters—a relatively slow, overtaking approach from the side or rear that allowed a concentration of hits on the enemy’s control surfaces and cockpit—were vastly more dangerous and notably less successful when attempted against a Viermot bristling with machine guns. Mayer himself had helped develop a new way to engage the American heavies—a high-speed, head-on attack that took advantage of the relatively weak nose armament of early model B-17s and B-24s and concentrated the attacker’s fire on the bomber’s cockpit. The tactic demanded a high degree of skill and considerable courage on the part of the attacker; with the fighter and its target closing at a combined speed of nearly 500 mph, even the slightest miscalculation on the Luftwaffe pilot’s part could spell disaster for him as well as his quarry. But when executed correc
tly the head-on attack could be devastatingly effective, as Mayer proved the first time the new technique was used in combat. During a U.S. raid on the German submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire, France, on November 23, 1942, he shot down two Fortresses and a Liberator in less than thirty minutes.

  By the summer of 1943 Mayer was not only among the Luftwaffe’s highest-scoring fighter pilots, he was the commander of one of the service’s most renowned units—Jagdgeschwader (Fighter Wing) 2. Bearing the honorific title “Richthofen” after Germany’s leading World War I ace, JG 2 was the first line of defense against the Allies’ increasingly vigorous strategic-bombardment campaign. The unit’s three groups of heavily armed and highly lethal Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Fw 190 fighters—some 120 aircraft in all—were in action almost every day, rising from airfields across western France to engage the bomber streams. And Mayer, a pilot arguably as skilled and certainly as determined as the man for whom JG 2 was named, flew as many missions as his administrative duties allowed.

  On this Bastille Day, as always, Mayer was leading from the front, the other aircraft of his headquarters flight already in tight formation on either wing as he raised his fighter’s nose and clawed for altitude. He and his comrades would have to be thousands of feet above and several miles ahead of the American bombers for the head-on tactic to work as planned. And Mayer was determined that it would, for he intended to mark France’s special day in his own ironic fashion—with the funeral pyres of burning Viermots littering the idyllic countryside of Basse-Normandie.

  WHILE EGON MAYER AND HIS COMRADES WERE BENT ON DESTRUCTION THAT Bastille Day, a family in the heart of Paris was prepared to risk everything to aid those Allied aviators whose aircraft might fall victim to the German fighters. In an irony Mayer himself might well have appreciated, the downed airmen would find refuge on the grounds of a national monument that is home to what is arguably the most revered tomb in the French capital.

  Set on some thirty acres just south of the River Seine in Paris’s fashionable 7th arrondissement, the seventeenth-century Hôtel des Invalides was built by order of King Louis XIV as a hospital and retirement home for military veterans. Over the decades the sprawling complex’s former Chapelle royale became the final resting place for scores of France’s most honored military and political leaders, their compact tombs and memorial stones dotting the narrow-walled corridors radiating outward from the former church’s rotunda. And it is there that Napoléon Bonaparte—general, emperor, and the sanctuary’s most famous occupant—passes eternity in a massive granite and marble sarcophagus set beneath a lofty golden dome.

  While Invalides and Napoléon’s Tomb have long been among Paris’s most famed and often-visited landmarks, in that difficult and dangerous summer of 1943 the complex was also home to the Morin family—Georges and his wife, Denise, both forty-five, and their twenty-two-year-old daughter, Yvette. The family occupied a small, two-bedroom apartment on the grounds because both parents worked within the complex.

  Georges was a senior official in l’Office nationale des mutilés et réformés (National Office for the Wounded and Discharged), an Invalides-based government organization tasked with, among other things, caring for men who, like himself, had been left disabled by their service in World War I. His time in the trenches had left Georges with a false eye, a permanent limp, and an intense hatred for all things German. The latter was an emotion shared by Denise, a slight woman whose stature and outward calm belied the intensity of her love for Georges and her devotion to Invalides, where she oversaw the safety and maintenance of the statuary and other works of art scattered among the complex’s many buildings and across its open spaces. And though Yvette worked outside Invalides as a secretary, she aided her parents when she could. That assistance was made easier by the fact that the severe housing shortage in Paris caused by an influx of refugees and by the presence of thousands of occupying German troops ensured that she returned home each evening to the cramped family home in time for dinner.

  Except, that is, on the nights when the petite, vivacious, and striking young Frenchwoman joined other twenty-something Parisians to socialize in impromptu gatherings organized by the “Zazou” movement—like-minded young people who sought to express their individuality and distaste for the strict traditionalism of France’s collaborationist Vichy regime through a devotion to “swing” music, frenetic dance competitions, and often flamboyant clothes. Yvette’s brilliant green eyes, engaging smile, and the mass of brunette hair she wore in an avant-garde style ensured that she was always a welcome participant.

  Georges, Denise, and Yvette Morin jokingly referred to themselves as the “caretakers” of Invalides, but it was an apt description—both in terms of the labor they undertook and as an expression of the dedication they brought to their varied tasks. As essential as they knew their work to be, however, caring for the famous complex was not their most important responsibility that summer.

  By all appearances the family was a typical working-class Parisian family trying to make the best of life under Nazi rule. But the Morins had a secret—one that if revealed to the wrong person would put them all before a German firing squad or aboard a train bound for the living hell of a concentration camp. They were all members of a resistance organization that specialized in helping downed Allied aviators and others evade capture and return to England. While similar networks existed throughout France, the “caretakers” of Invalides literally carried the keys to what was arguably one of the safest hiding places in the country—a sprawling complex within which those on the run could shelter while their escapes were being arranged. And in one of those great ironies of war, the evaders’ security was enhanced by the fact that they were literally hiding among the enemy. More than half of Invalides had been taken over by the hated “Boche” as administrative offices and barracks, and German troops guarded every public entrance to the complex around the clock. Once smuggled in through concealed passages known only to the Morins and a few of their fellow résistants, the evaders were among the safest people in Paris—the Germans never thought to search what they assumed was a completely secure facility.

  Invalides was a sanctuary that would soon prove particularly important to some of the B-17 crewmen who were about to encounter Egon Mayer and his fellow hunters on the way to Le Bourget that July 14. For the men of the inbound 94th Bomb Group were about to have a very bad day—one that would result in death for some, imprisonment for others, and harrowing escapes for a lucky few. In the monumental heart of a city full of implacable and relentless enemies—Gestapo agents and their French collaborationist allies determined to flush out the downed airmen and eliminate those who aided and protected them—young Americans on the run would find shelter, encouragement, and assistance on the difficult and dangerous road to freedom.

  And, inexplicably, in the occupied City of Light in that dark summer of 1943, one aviator would not only find safety, he would find an unexpected love.

  Chapter 1

  A GUY NAMED JOE

  JOE CORNWALL’S PRESENCE IN THE DANGEROUS SKIES ABOVE OCCUPIED France on Bastille Day 1943 was the direct result of a decision he’d made two and a half years earlier. On November 27, 1940—fourteen months after the outbreak of World War II and two months after the enactment of the Selective Training and Service Act launched the first peacetime draft in American history—the young man walked into a recruiting station in Tacoma, Washington, and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps.1

  Then a few months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday, Joe’s decision to join up was in large part a pragmatic one. He was in good health, unmarried, and certain to get drafted, and he was convinced that the United States would soon become an active participant in the war that had been convulsing Europe since September 1939. He hoped that by volunteering he would have some say in how he’d spend what promised to be at least a few years in uniform, and assumed that flying would be a better way to go to war than walking. He’d always been interested in aviation, but had neither the education n
or the desire to be a pilot, navigator, or bombardier. And while Joe was mechanically adept and good with machines, the possibility of spending years in oil-stained coveralls tinkering with balky aircraft engines in some drafty hangar struck him as both boring and decidedly less than heroic. The recruiter suggested that Joe might do well as an aerial gunner—a job title that hinted at a high-flying and adventurous way to do one’s patriotic duty, but still promised a good meal and a warm bed at the end of the day instead of cold rations and a soggy blanket in a remote foxhole surrounded by Germans. It seemed a logical choice, and Joe happily signed on the dotted line.

  But while enlisting in the Air Corps was an act both patriotic and practical, it was also something much more personal and necessary for Joe Cornwall. It was a means of escape.

  JOSEPH ELLISON CORNWALL WAS BORN JULY 5, 1915, IN ELLENSBURG, Washington, a growing community in the Kittitas Valley just east of the rugged Cascade Range. The third child and second son of Frank and Grace Cornwall, Joe came into the world a few weeks earlier than expected, though without any complications. His safe arrival undoubtedly pleased his parents, but it did little to bridge the ever-widening gaps in their five-year marriage.

  Just nineteen at the time of Joe’s birth, Grace Elizabeth Cornwall had not had an easy life. A native of East Kittitas, a small farming community some six miles southeast of Ellensburg, Grace and her younger brother, Alexander, had been raised by their mother, Mary Jane Campbell. Her husband, Marion S. Campbell, had only been an occasional presence in the family home, and by the time Grace celebrated her tenth birthday her father was little more than a hazy memory. As a single mother trying to run a farm and make a living in what was still very much a male-dominated society, the redoubtable Mary Jane—known since childhood as Mollie—took to signing all important papers as “M.S. Campbell.” This small subterfuge was undoubtedly meant to persuade people that her absent husband, Marion, was still part of the family.2