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It's just before 6.30pm on Monday 5th June 1944, D-Day minus one. We're in the basement of a house in Bayeux, five miles from the Normandy coast. It belongs to Monsieur Guillaume Mercader.
29 years old, he was a professional cyclist before the war. He now runs a bicycle repair shop. With an eye on the clock, Mercado hooks up a makeshift aerial and turns on his illegal, Baker-like radio. It's a nightly ritual, one that could incur the wrath of the Gestapo. Every evening at the same time, Mercado tunes in to the French-language broadcast from BBC Radio Londres. BBC Londres.
For French civilians like Mercader, the foreign broadcast offers a rare glimpse at the latest round of war news, minus the pro-German spin imposed by France's collaborationist Vichy government. According to the latest reports from London, things aren't going well for the Third Reich, but as far as Mercader is concerned, that is by the by. It's the program's concluding item,
The so-called personal messages which interest him. Intoned with precision, these mysterious pronouncements sound like a stream of nonsense. Odd rhymes and sayings, random lines of poetry, but for the likes of Mercader, they contain cryptic clues, instructions from allied intelligence. This evening, the message personnel have him sitting bolt upright. "Il fait chaud à Suez," reads the announcer.
It is hot in Suez. Then a little while later, "Les dés sont jetés" – the dice are thrown. For days, Mercader and his comrades have been on high alert, waiting for word of the impending invasion. No one knows exactly where it will come, but thanks to the latest broadcast, they now know when. Tomorrow. In the meantime, Mercader has his orders: to blow up the railway line between Caen and Laval.
and prevent German reinforcements from reaching the Normandy beaches. There is much to be done before the Allied ships begin landing in the morning. Mikada kisses his wife goodbye, climbs onto his bike and pedals off into the dusk. His parting words to her: "It's going to be a long night." From the Noiser Network, this is D-Day. As a former pro cyclist and something of a sporting celebrity,
Guillaume Mercado has managed to wangle a special license from the Germans. It grants him permission to keep up his training, a free pass to roam the lanes of Normandy, clocking up thousands of kilometers, and all the while noting troop movements, defensive positions, and chatting with laborers working on the Atlantic wall. As a member of the Calvados Resistance Circuit,
Mercader meets weekly with a local engineer, Eugène Melin, who transmits his findings to London. Meanwhile, along the coast at Port-en-Bessin, a disgruntled farmer strides across his field, irked that a sizeable chunk of it has been commandeered by the Germans. They've built a whopping great gun emplacement on the clifftop, heavily camouflaged. The farmer understands its significance. It overlooks a broad stretch of the Normandy coastline.
also known as Omaha Beach. Furtively he paces it out, noting the size of the strong point, the distance to the observation post, the pillboxes. In a high security zone, writing such information down would draw attention. But the farmer has his nine-year-old son with him. The boy is blind, but blessed with an extraordinary memory. Fully briefed by his father, he will make his way to a contact in Bayeux.
who in turn will relay the information via a homemade wireless set kept in an old Campbell's soup tin. At Benneville, on the Caen Canal, information on the strength of the German garrison comes via a woman who works in the laundry. She has been counting shirts and taking note of the numbers on the collars. In the local café, there's a woman who speaks fluent German, not that she's ever let on, eavesdropping on loose-lipped Wehrmacht officers.
She puts together a detailed picture of what will become known as Pegasus Bridge, right down to the location of the self-destruct button. Back at Shafe in England, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, an incredibly detailed picture of the Normandy defenses is emerging. To evade electronic intercepts, some of the intel has come in via carrier pigeon. Britain's Special Operations Executive, or SOE, has been parachuting the birds into France in cages.
They thoughtfully included packets of seed and instructions on how to look after them. Oh, and how to insert a message in the small aluminium tubes attached to the bird's legs before releasing them to fly home across the channel. In the run-up to D-Day, it's not all about blowing up trains and ambushing staff cars, though there will be time for that too. The spadework right now is being done by ordinary people like these, everyday folk.
out there hiding in plain sight. Olivier Villavioca is professor of history at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachin. His books include The French Resistance and Normandy, The Landings to the Liberation of Paris.
Before D-Day, the French Resistance gave many, many pieces of intelligence to the British mainly, and to a certain extent to the Americans. General Donovan, who was leading the Office of Strategic Services , which is the ancestor of the CIA, considered that the French had given 80% of the information necessary to plan Overlord.
But despite the value of such intelligence, Allied planners had been reluctant to grant the French resistance an official role on D-Day. At the very beginning, the resistance was really, really weak. They had no means of fight, no weapons, no means of transmission.
and so on. In 1944, that was not the case. The French resistance, I think that it gathered around, I don't know, 200,000 people. But the repression led by the Germans and the Vichy police was very harsh. That was the first problem. And the second main problem
problem was that the Allies did not believe in the French resistance. The French resistance was keen to fight on and for D-Day to help the Allies to liberate France, but it was not really associated with the Allied plans. To some extent, the Allies are right to be wary, because there is no singular French resistance.
Rather, what we have is a bunch of disparate groups with different methods, aims and agendas. There would be Unifier, a brave patriot called Jean Moulin, has already been betrayed, tortured and executed. Sian Rees is a historian and biographer. Her books include Lucie Aubrac, the French resistance heroine who defied the Gestapo.
It's much more helpful, really, even as late as May 1944, to think of it as multiple resistances. These multiple groups, some of which were not even aware of each other. The biggest resistance group, the communists, seem more interested in revolution than liberation. Meanwhile, the ORA, Organisation des Résistances de l'Armée, are united by something else, their hatred of France's self-appointed leader.
General Charles de Gaulle, now living in exile in Algeria. De Gaulle is a difficult man at the best of times, and he hasn't exactly endeared himself to the Allies either. US President Roosevelt has warned General Eisenhower not to trust him as far as he can throw him. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who's been bending over backwards to accommodate the Free French leader, has grown exasperated with him.
Churchill's SOE have been working behind enemy lines, coordinating resistance activities on the continent. But de Gaulle doesn't seem to appreciate their help. Sir Anthony Beaver: "SOE was there helping the resistance and we were parachuting in arms to them and all the rest of it. But de Gaulle didn't like the resistance from the point of view that they were dealing with the British. As far as he was concerned, the British were almost as bad as the Germans. He wanted at one stage to arrest SOE officers.
So, I mean, there was this terrible sort of tension. I mean, when the main French force, which was later going to cross over the channel, the French 2nd Armoured Division, arrived in England, what was the very first thing they should do? But they held a solemn mass in honour of Joan of Arc, whom the British had burnt at the stake.
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And with Bluehost Cloud, your sites can handle surges in traffic no matter how big. Plus, you automatically get daily backups and world-class security. Get started now at Bluehost.com. Personality clashes aside, General DeGaulle presents practical problems as well. For a start, his own intelligence outfit is as leaky as a sieve. Giving them secret information about the D-Day plans would be highly risky.
The French had a useless, old-fashioned code for communications, which the Germans could break straight away. And the British knew this, and this is why they could not give the French any information about the forthcoming invasion.
And de Gaulle was absolutely furious, but they could not trust French communications for keeping things secret. It wasn't because they felt that, you know, the free French had been infiltrated by Vichy or anything like that. That wasn't the problem. The problem was simply the codes. When it comes to D-Day, General de Gaulle is very much out of the loop.
They didn't tell de Gaulle until the last moment and then he was flown to Britain. And he, of course, exploded with anger. So at the last moment, you have de Gaulle suddenly forbidding the French liaison officers from taking part in the invasion. And I mean, you know, at one moment Churchill lost his temper and wanted to have de Gaulle flown back in chains to Algiers because he regarded this as treason and a betrayal, in fact, of the Allied cause.
But with Dider approaching, there has at least been a mending of the fences, an entente cordiale. After all, as Churchill put it in a letter to President Roosevelt, it is very difficult to cut the French out of the liberation of France. Relations have improved in part thanks to the appointment of some palatable figures. In February 1944, the late Jean Moulin's former colleague, Georges Bidot, is made head of the Committee of National Liberation.
The various French resistance groups meanwhile are placed under the command of General Marie-Pierre Koenig and the Force Française de l'Intérieur or FFI.
Koenig was a very, very useful person for the Allies to find because he represented de Gaulle, he was loyal to de Gaulle, but he was much, much easier to deal with, both from above and from below. He was a very important part of bringing the disparate elements, the Allies, the Gaullists, the resistance on the ground, all together and pulling in one direction. As part of the FFI, the French Resistance becomes an official army.
Its leaders are granted officer ranks. Résistants are issued special armbands. In theory, this affords them combatant status, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, though it is doubtful that the Germans will recognize such distinctions. In any case, there will be no such official cover for the SOE agents. For the past four years, they have been following Churchill's orders to set Europe ablaze.
They've coordinated with local partisan movements throughout German-occupied Europe. In France, that work is undertaken by Section F. But before they're dropped behind enemy lines, new recruits are given some pretty intense training at elite commando camps. Unassuming French-speaking Brits are transformed into undercover agents. Guerrilla warriors, schooled in wireless operations, demolition techniques, weapons skills and hand-to-hand combat.
Claire Mollie is an award-winning biographer. Her books include The Spy Who Loved, The Women Who Flew for Hitler and Agent Zoe. They are trained in the use of guns and explosives and in silent killing, which is killing just with a rope, a knife or their bare hands. Unusually, despite such bloodthirsty tactics, SOE is an equal opportunities employer. A significant number of their recruits are female.
The interviews were the same for the women and for the men. For example, for F-section, their chief interviewer was a man called Selwyn Jepson. He was looking for the same thing essentially in women as he was for men, which was language skills, knowledge of the country. But he wasn't looking for a sense of heroism or self-aggrandizement. That was seen as quite dangerous. They were looking for patriotism and courage.
And actually, Selwyn Jepson thought that the women were better suited for the work. He said it was the women had a special kind of cool and lonely courage. But I think that was what SOE required. I don't think that's necessarily female specific, but I do think it was incredibly courageous work. Given the risks involved, no one can be conscripted into SOE, male or female. You have to volunteer. Harry Valander lied about his age when he joined the army at just 16.
Within a couple of years, he was volunteering for a transfer. We saw one notice came up on the board. Wireless operators required. A knowledge of a foreign language would be an advantage. May entail parachuting. I said, I know two French nursery rhymes, they'll do. Within a month, Harry finds himself called for an interview in Oxford.
There, there were about 400 men, there was a lot of people there and we were just told a little bit about what was required of us. At the end of every sort of lecture they said if you don't want to go any further you can leave, you can go home, you'll get a pass for the weekend and then go back to uni. At the end of the day we were questioned again and
If you wanted to carry on, you just said so. Transferred to a camp near Peterborough, eventually Harry is sent to Fairfield Aerodrome in Gloucestershire, where he waits for his ride across the Channel. It was probably about nine in the evening when we left Fairford. It was a four-hour trip because the plane was going out into the Atlantic and coming in over the Bay of Biscay. In this plane, they opened up the centre of this bomber.
and there was this enormous great hole. You could have stood a coach in there, a couple of coaches. It looked that big. It was so wide. And we dropped at 300 feet. That's very low, but it still arrived close together, of course. Whether parachuted in like Harry Volander or transferred via small Lysander aircraft, the RAF's so-called spy taxis, almost 500 SOE agents are landed behind enemy lines in France.
They will play a crucial role, transmitting messages, acting as circuit leaders, arming locals from dropped weapons canisters, drilling them on tactics, explosives, the ins and outs of assembling a Sten gun.
They are the lifeblood connecting these groups. And they're really working from 1943 forward on build-up for D-Day. What they want to do, they want to ensure that the French Resistance Army is coordinated. And so SOE was coordinating between these different groups. For the American Office of Strategic Services, OSS, a direct link to the resistance is invaluable.
After all, a stick of dynamite placed on a railway track is far more effective than trying to bomb it from 10,000 feet. By June 1944, the resistance have chalked up 808 locomotives against the combined Air Force's 307. It's a high-stakes game. The French paramilitary police force, the Mélisse, has emerged as their new bête noire.
Their specific objective was to counter the resistance, which also gives you an idea of just how much the resistance had grown and had become powerful by that time. The other thing that the milice were tasked with was rounding up the Jews, organizing the deportations. The official narrative in post-war France was that these were just a few bad apples. When the documentation was scrutinized 30 years later, it turned out that this was not really the case.
Captured resistance operatives can expect to receive rough treatment, but then so too can ordinary French civilians. Hitler has issued an order: for every so-called terrorist attack, at least 100 French hostages must be executed in retaliation. Around 30,000 die as a result of such collective punishment. All the same, the ranks of the resistance have been growing. The introduction of a compulsory work order in 1943
The Service de Travail Obligatoire or STO has been quite the recruiting sergeant.
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You'll find hundreds of immersive true stories. There's a world of podcasts waiting for you. Take your pick. Listen at Noisa.com or wherever you get your podcasts. In the mountains and forests of France, Republican veterans of the Spanish Civil War have been holed up, waiting to continue the struggle against fascism. They are now joined by bands of young men dodging the work order. Living rough in the wilderness, they form themselves into ad hoc paramilitary groups.
You've got what is known as the Maquis, the ex-Spanish Republicans who came across the border after the Spanish Civil War, were an extremely important part of the resistance in the south. But a large number of the resistors who were living out up in the mountains with rifles over their shoulders were young men who were escaping the compulsory work service. The obligatory work order also sees a shift in SOE priorities, with male civilians in France co-opted by the government.
It's time for female operatives to come to the fore. If there are able-bodied men in France, they are required to work in German factories. Either back in Germany, they're deported,
or in factories like, I don't know, Peugeot, Renault, that had taken over to produce German aircraft for the war effort. So all the men are being used in that way. So really, if any man is moving around France, he is immediately very suspect. So the women are sent out to be the couriers and they are taking arms and ammunition, of course. They're also taking wireless sets. They're taking messages. So 39 women were sent into France and 13 of those did not return. Despite the risks, by the spring of 1944,
SOE are in contact with 137 active resistance groups throughout France. Of all sizes and persuasions, there are around 100,000 armed resistance ready to rise up when needed. Meanwhile, as D-Day approaches, the most effective intelligence network in Normandy, the Brotherhood of Notre Dame, is able to add hundreds of photographs to the intel already being amassed by the Allies. Yet still,
Almost no one knows for sure where the invasion will take place, not even General de Gaulle. To keep the Germans on the hop, resistance operatives must act on trust, blindly, without knowing how they fit into the overall game plan. All too often, they are the sacrificial pawns.
You had SOE operations with the French resistance all over France, partly also to prevent the Germans from knowing exactly where the invasion was coming. If everything had been concentrated in Normandy, they would have known Normandy was going to be the place. So it had to be everywhere. And this was also one of the problems, because it meant that the French resistance was rising in revolt almost all over France. And many, of course, were killed as a result.
In fact, Normandy, despite its preferred shoreline, is at a disadvantage when it comes to resistance fighting. Its rolling fields and winding lanes offer little cover for hit-and-run guerrilla raids, in contrast with the Maquis activity that can be launched from the wilds of the interior. Fortunately, Brittany, Normandy's neighbour to the west, does have more rugged terrain. There are 30,000 Maquisards massing there, ready and willing for action.
Their time will come. In the early hours of D-Day, before the beach landings begin, a French paratroop outfit, the Deuxième Régiment des Chasseurs, will be parachuted in to marshal them. The first French soldiers to set foot on home soil since 1940. And so, all that remains is to rouse the French resistance to action. As the ships and troops assemble in the Channel ports, it's all down to the BBC
Across France, and especially the coastal areas, it is the voice from across the water, BBC Radio Londres, which will give them their cue. Thanks to those mysterious message personnel. I mean, they sound like complete gobbledygook. So they might say the cat is blue or the lions are leaping or Mabel's had a child or whatever it is. And the Germans knew they meant something but didn't got a clue what they meant, of course, because they were a pre-agreed term for different local groups.
On the 1st of June, Radio Londres broadcasts the phrase "L'heure du combat viendra" – "The hour of battle will come". Then from the 1st to the 3rd of June comes a repeated line, the opening of a Paul Verlaine poem: "Les sanglots longs des violins de l'automne" – "The long sobs of autumn violins" – indicating the invasion is imminent. More than a hundred different cryptic alerts are broadcast.
including the one Guillaume Mercado in his Bayeux basement responds to on the eve of D-Day. That same night at 9:15 there comes a follow-up: "Bless mon cœur, d'une langueur monotone, wound my heart with a monotonous languor." This is the call to action. By the time D-Day comes around, SOE wireless operator Henri Diacono has been in France for four months, an impressive feat.
since the life expectancy of SOE operatives is typically measured in weeks. As all these circuits in France, we had a message, our message was "Germaine Pirouette". When we heard that message, it meant the landing will occur in the forthcoming fortnight. And after that, when it was repeated a second time, it meant the landing is for tomorrow morning.
At that time we had about two groups of 300 men who were ready for action. First is "plan violet" – the destruction of communications. Then "plan bleu" – disrupting power grids. "Plan vert" means sabotage of railway lines and trains. With the German military machine forced onto the roads, "plan tortue" – planned tortoise will come into effect, attacking or blocking the traffic.
The SOE had tasked their various groups, first of all, to attack the communications network. Forcing the Germans to use their radios meant that Fletchley Park could intercept their communications. Secondly, they wanted to blow up the railways in order to force the Germans to use tanks because tanks, it's much more difficult to get tanks all the way across the country. They have to use roads. Roads can be more easily blocked and destroyed.
And thirdly, they wanted the resistance, wherever they started operating, to absorb German power so that there were fewer troops and fewer armaments that could get to the Normandy beaches.
So when the message personnel built up suddenly for D-Day, all of these ops were confirmed over the BBC. So, OK, it's time to go. We have to put sand in the locomotive engines over here. We have to close this road and that could be by felling trees or bring down a pylon. And hundreds, more than that, thousands of minor operations all across the country through these networks did a fantastic job in slowing the German military reinforcements up north to Normandy.
One of those called to action is SOE agent Pearl Witherington, codenamed Pauline. Since her circuit leader, Maurice Southgate, was captured by the Gestapo a month earlier, Pearl has been running her own resistance network.
She said she heard on the 5th of June, the day before Issy Londra, letting them know that they had to then go into action. She said the messages came over to cut the lines and the roots and to make havoc. So of course, being obedient, that's what they did. And they went in and she ended up leading an army of the Maquis as well into battle.
I think there was certainly a degree of panic, chaos and confusion and a lot of that led to a lot of bloodshed but ultimately it was incredibly effective. In Burgundy, eastern France, all train traffic will be halted due to the actions of Chemin Fer, a resistance group formed by railway workers, blowing trains in tunnels and then diverting rolling stock onto deliberately exposed tracks.
making them sitting ducks from the roaring RAF Typhoons. Pearl Witherington's new wrestler network will inflict more than 800 interruptions on the train lines between Paris and Bordeaux. Elsewhere, at Saint-Marcel near Rennes, 3,000 fighters of the Breton resistance will gather at their weapons dump, ready to take on a local Wehrmacht regiment. On the eve of D-Day, at Montauban near Toulouse,
A young SOE operative named Anthony Brooks is tipped off about a consignment of 63-tonne Tiger tanks that have been shipped in, kept in railway sidings, disguised underneath the shells of French railway cars. This is the assembly point for the infamous Waffen-SS 2nd Panzer Division, known as Das Reich. They have been brought over from the Eastern Front, but for now they are being held back.
ready to storm whatever part of the Channel Coast the Allies eventually land on. Brooks learns from some local schoolchildren that the railway sidings are unguarded. In the company of a handful of local teenagers, he is able to siphon off the railway car's axle oil and replace it with an abrasive substance that his colleagues in London have parachuted in. The next day, as the invasion gets underway, Das Reich prepares for action.
But the train moves only a short distance before the wagons seize up. 92 Panzers are left stranded. The nearest alternative train cars, it turns out, are 100 kilometers away, forcing the tanks onto a cumbersome road journey amid a convoy of 1,200 vehicles. The tanks' steel tracks are not designed for lengthy road travel. The detour will shred them.
The local Maquis will harry the patched up SS division as it proceeds, slowing the Panzers' progress towards Normandy. Michel de Bourbon-Palme was co-opted by the American OSS. We went in to blow up a railway bridge. We went with the Maquis in a truck and stopped on one side
put other people on both sides of the bridge to tell us if anyone would be arriving. And then we went under the bridge and we were down there putting those explosives on different points. And the guy that was waiting rushed back and said that the Germans are arriving. And then we climbed out of the bridge and got into the truck and couldn't start the truck.
Anyhow, we got away from there and after a very short time, we only had five minutes to get out of there, we heard the bridge blow. We went back and see the bridge disappeared. They couldn't use it again. It was absolutely incredible. Das Reich should have reached Normandy in just three days, but it will take more than a fortnight to get there. They retaliate viciously, hanging 99 civilians in the village of Tull.
and wiping out the nearby village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Men are shot in the legs and then burned alive. Women and children herded into a church which is set on fire. Of a population of around 650, only six residents survived the massacre. Among the dead are 247 children. The shocking fact is that when it comes to D-Day, French civilians suffer more casualties than anyone else, and not just at the hands of the Germans.
Generally speaking, Normandy was a nightmare because many, many, many towns had been bombed. You can quote Caen, you can quote Le Havre, but you can quote Houtens, you can quote Saint-Lô, you can quote Valogne. You have, I don't know, I suppose around 20 cities which were erased at 60, 70 or 80 percent by the Allied bombs.
Altogether, probably anything up to 15,000 French civilians were killed during the preparations for Normandy. And I remember being deeply shocked when finding that if one
totted up all of the French civilians killed by the British and the Americans during the Second World War. It was more than the total number of British civilians killed by the Luftwaffe, even with the Blitz and the V-bomb attacks later on. I must say I was shaken by that. On D-Day, the French resistance offers a priceless gift to their fellow countrymen, a morale boost after four miserable years of occupation.
From the proliferation of V for Victory signs on walls all over France to the reclamation of the tricolour, self-belief is back. When the resistance emerged with their guns and their trucks and singing their songs and singing the Marseillaise and so on, it gave an immense boost. Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval is worried. He makes a special radio broadcast.
The French government stands by the armistice of 1940, he warns, and appeals to Frenchmen to honour their country's signature. After the war, Laval will be tried and executed on a charge of treason. Right now, his words fall on deaf ears, and France is soon sliding towards anarchy.
And so what you get in June and July 1944 is a lot of very angry young men with guns running around taking vengeance on people, excited as hell, thinking they've got right on their side and doing a lot of things which were hushed up later. The chaos is dangerous for everybody. On D-Day itself, 124 resistance fighters are killed by friendly fire coming out of hiding to greet the Allied soldiers.
Meanwhile, at Caen prison, where 87 resistance are being held, they're brought out in batches of six by the Gestapo for summary execution. Because the French resistance was a secret army, one that kept no official records, it's impossible for us to quantify the precise number of actions carried out on D-Day, just as it is to identify who exactly took part in them. It's estimated that over a thousand acts of sabotage take place.
causing massive and crucial disruption to the Nazi war machine. Decades later, in his memoirs, General Eisenhower will praise the role of the resistance on D-Day and beyond. Their contribution to the liberation of France, he will claim, was worth 15 divisions. Eisenhower believed that SOE collectively shortened the war by about six months and he said they played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.
Others consider the Supreme Commander's estimate to be rather generous.
altogether there were nearly some 30,000 makin. Only a small percentage actually had weapons, but they did help tremendously later on. General Patton was asked, in fact, by Allied journalists, what was the role of the resistance in operations for Normandy and the liberation of France? And Patton, for once, was slightly more subtle than he was usually. His reply was, "Better than expected, but less than advertised." And that put it actually quite succinctly, I think.
Arguably, the biggest contribution of the resistance to D-Day comes far away from the invasion beaches. The main actions were made out of Normandy. The idea was to transform Normandy in an island, totally isolated, where the Germans would not be able to enter. France's role in the success of D-Day will be crucial to the country's post-war narrative.
The whole myth of the resistance and of the liberation was absolutely essential for French politics to try to give this impression of "la France résistante" and the idea that France had liberated itself, which was of course very irritating for the Americans and the British. But one has to understand this from the point of view of the reality of French humiliation from 1940,
the moral quandary of the Vichy years in collaboration with Germany. You don't have one unique France. You have many Frances. And the country was totally scattered. You know, a destroyed country with people at each other's throats had to be given some narrative to allow the country to go forward, to pick itself back up. And it was one that the Allies were happy to fall in with.
In the next episode, General Dwight D. Eisenhower spends the eve of D-Day wracked with nerves. As Supreme Commander, he writes a heartfelt letter of apology to be released if the operation fails. And from airfields in England, the first Allied planes take to the skies. That's next time. Special thanks to Martin Cox for the excerpts from his Our Secret World War II archive. To view the full interviews,
visit legacy.org.uk. That's L-E-G-A-S-E-E dot org dot UK.
