This exceptional, lavishly illustrated book invites the reader into intimate familiarity with Occupied France during World War II, through the eyes of a downed British bomber pilot who clandestinely made his way to Paris and became immersed in its political and moral complexity. In these pages we not only follow Lancaster pilot Neil Nimmo's fateful encounter with a Luftwaffe nightfighter over France, we also follow that Me-110 pilot's career and the most successful day of his short life, when he shot down five British bombers in twenty minutes. Helmut Bergmann accounted for 37 British airmen that fateful night, most of them killed, but Nimmo was able to parachute to the ground, whereupon he found a Nazi-occupied country of endless ambiguity. It is during Nimmo's undercover life in France that we see how World War II-in between the fierce combatants-transpired in gay Paree. Though full of German soldiers on the one hand, it was stacked with Maquis on the other. But for the average Parisian, life went on as normal, individualism trumping politics, and hardship met by either resignation or resolve. It was only toward the end, when the contest between German domination and the liberation promised by the Anglo-Americans appeared to sway in favour of the latter that France itself turned as bloody as the battlefront. And Nimmo was there as he saw the tide turn, and long-dormant passions began once again to rise. AUTHOR: Neil Nimmo is now deceased; however his son Stuart, a noted documentary and film producer-with over a hundred original photographs of the people and period-has produced a fascinating depiction of his father's glimpse into the untold civilian maelstrom of the war. ILLUSTRATIONS: 16 pages
