Northeast France, August 1944

So how would the telephone work? you just pick up the telephone in your house and call up the Allies? I have heard of radio operators like Noor Inyat Khan, but, never telephones. If you could somehow use a telephone to relay messages, why would you have to go through all the trouble of using a radio, whose signal can be traced? Thank you for the information about the Airplanes. So about how long do you think it would take to get by car from an address within a few blocks of the Eiffel tower, say, to a viable pickup point.

 

yes, i think so. The germans in retreat would not have been destroying every phone exchange and line as they went, although if they still controlled the paris exchanges then it might be harder, but certainly not impossible with manual exchanges.

How long by car? - piece of string.... anything could happen. roadblocks, retreating troops, advancing troops, air attack, resistance attack, communist resistance attack......

cars would be hard to use IMO - maybe the metro would be better - I think it was mostly still running during the day, then bicycles once out as far as possible. Civilian car use would be suspicious to say the least. Again for success, resistance help would be fairly indispensible if you needed a car, fuel, papers etc.

with curfews etc you would probably only have a few hours at most so say max 50 miles, 25 more likely, but that could be from a metro station already near the outskirts

 

So then I take it the curfews were enforced all over France and not just in Paris? Another thing. In order for his message to be take seriously, it would have to be in the correct code, I imagine. I know so little about radio contact procedures

 

So long as he could convince the person at the other end of who he was, then the codes might not be so important. obviously a code would be nice for security, but in the absence of one you might have to take a chance. The hollywood fallback IIRC is to use things like baseball anecdotes and scores etc. that the germans wouldn't 'get', but i doubt if this would have ever been used for real.

curfews;

German occupation of France during World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and telephone use in holland (can't see would be much different);
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-...tions/csi-studies/studies/spring98/Dutch.html

 

So then does this sound reasonable? The person in question has a resistance contact with a radio, and gets in contact with someone of importance. He is given a landing site to go to where he can get picked up, with his information, and the plane lands, and he gets taken to the headquarters of the third army, or some such place. All in one night. Is this ridiculous, or does it seem at least marginally possible?

 

sounds plausible - all you need is a suitable landing site, enough resistance to make it work, a good pilot and a diversion (or terrible weather that only he will fly in), transport to the plane, and someone adequately senior in the US organisation who will see him before it's too late.

Piece of cake

pretty sure very similar happened, although no luck finding a story yet.

 

Found it

Robert Taylor - Google Books

and some extra bits
Loire Rendezvous by Philip West
They Landed by Moonlight by Robert Taylor. - Cranston Fine Arts Aviation, Military and Naval Art
http://www.secondworldwar.org.uk/arkell.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._161_Squadron_RAF
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...rriculum-Churchills-school-secret-agents.html
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Westland_Lysander

 

Great Thread! Followed it very curios. Isn´t there a chance that the OSS has some of those extremely amazing stories? Nothing for bad nerves.

 

very good point Ulrich (the OSS did eventually start flying their own missions, around the time of the liberation of Paris) good book below;

Apollo’s Warriors

covers ww2-vietnam

 

The Soe (British and French secret agents with the RAF) would land Lysander aircraft in the Loire Valley , but no longer in August 1944. They also flew important Americans home (for instance Mahurin). Sea evacuations were also stopped and new airmen that were saved by French civilians were headed to Freteval (Loire Valley) were 152 airmen hid until they were liberated by the Amercian on August 13th -14th . Those who got there fro mParis mostly got there by train. I know a lady who is still alive and who personnaly escorted dozens. I don't think the Seine would be a good idea, it was both bombed out like hell by the allies and severly controlled by the Germans, there wa sno way to escape and traffic was too irrigular due to bombed bridges and sunk ships.

 

This could be of interest Merk;

French to honour WWII night ops hero - Brighton News

 

Merk,

I don't know if you received enough information yet but the Library of Congress hosts a series of situation maps created by the Twelfth Army Group's Engineer Section. These displays were created daily from 6 June 1944 through July 26 1945 and are based on 1:50,000 scale maps. The link for these maps is here: World War II Military Situation Maps - About This Collection - (American Memory from the Library of Congress)

The images are JPEG2000 format so you'll need a viewer to download and view them offline. Fortunately, the LoC offers links to several commercial viewers at this link:
How to View (American Memory from the Library of Congress)

Hope this helps

John

 

Spartan, I'm afraid your link is dead.