Dimensions
161 x 239 x 44mm
In the summer of 1940, the French army was one of the largest and best in the world, confident of victory. In the space of a few nightmarish weeks that all changed as the French and their British allies were crushed and eight million people fled their homes. Richard Vinen's new book describes the consequences of that defeat. It does so not by looking at political leaders but rather at those who were caught up in daily horrors of war. It describes the fate of a French prisoner of war who was punished because he wrote a love letter to a German woman and it describes the 'false policemen' who proliferated in occupied Paris as desperate men on the run sought to feed themselves by blackmailing those who were even more vulnerable than themselves. It asks why some gentile French people chose to risk imprisonment by wearing yellow stars and why a, very Gaullist, Parisian girl was excited by the hostility of respectable French people when she pinned a German imperial eagle to her dress.
