Last Message Read Online Free

lived there just kind of went about their business, far from the battlegrounds, ignorant of what Hitler was doing to the Jews and the violence he was perpetrating on us and the Allied Forces all over Europe. (Canadians, of course, were in the big fight from the get-go; then you Americans came on board a few years later, after the Allies had held the fort and suffered terrible losses, and you “won the war for the world,” as you guys like to say.)
    But there was an underground war going on in Vichy too. Not all the French were avoiding the conflict. A significant number were very brave and became members of the French Resistance, who fought the bad guys tooth and nail, secretly, risking their lives by helping spies and committing guerrilla warfare against the Vichy government, its military, German soldiers and officials.
    Then there were the REALLY bad guys: French Nazis who formed a militia called the Milice. You may have heard of the Gestapo and the SS, the German state police known for their black uniforms and skull-and-crossbones badges? Well, the Milice were just as evil, maybe worse. They hunted the French Resistance fighters like dogs, and when they caught them or anyone else who helped the Allies or Jews, they tortured them and murdered them without thinking twice. Everyone in southern France was terrified of them.
    By late in the war, the tide was turning against the Nazis, and by early June of 1944 we’d landed in Normandy on the French coast across from England—that was the big D-Day invasion. But we still needed to know more about the enemy, where their strengths and weaknesses were, so we could overrun them, sweep across France and into Germany, and take them out for good. In Vichy (by then directly operated by the anxious Germans) things were getting bad for the Nazis and their supporters. They and the Milice knew the end was coming, and they were all desperate, which made them even more vicious.
    This is where I come in.
    There I was one night, flying over southern France in June of 1944 on a reconnaissance mission, gliding as quietly as possible, getting low but not too low, taking aerial photographs of enemy locations, looking down upon the land of the Milice and the Nazis.
    Then someone put a round of anti-aircraft bullets into my engine. It was a funny thing. Everything was quiet until they hit. Suddenly, there was a sound like big mosquitoes coming up from the ground and in an instant everything was on fire. The plane did a nosedive and I couldn’t stop it. I was scared, but I did what I had to do, what I’d been trained to do. In seconds I was out of the aircraft and into the sky, just me and my parachute.
    Down I went, down toward the land of evil. It was just about dusk, the perfect time to get pictures and yet not be observed particularly well. I couldn’t see much below me, just fields.
    I knew I was somewhere over Arles.
    â€œLearning anything new?” asked Dad.
    â€œYeah, a bit. It’s pretty good.”
    â€œGood?” asked Mom.
    I looked out the window. We were somewhere between Hamilton and Niagara Falls.
    â€œJust let me read.”
    I landed in an open field, which wasn’t a good thing. I had noticed an area nearby that was full of trees—turned out later to be grapevines—and tried to steer toward it, but couldn’t quite manage it. We hadn’t spent much time on parachute training, so I hit the ground at a pretty good rate, and awkwardly, and busted my ankle.
    I figured I was a goner. As I was rolling around in the grass, trying to gather up my chute, I was half expecting to see a bloodthirsty contingent of Milice coming at me, lights blazing, guns trained. And sure enough, within seconds, someone appeared. He was alone, but armed. He had an ax in his hand and he looked at me with what appeared to be terror. His eyes were almost bulging out of his head.
    At first I could tell that he wasn’t sure what to do: yell that the enemy