Americans in Paris

by Charles Glass, Harper, 528pp, £20, Week Bookshop £18 (incl. p&p) "If Germany had conquered this country in 1940, what, as an adult at the time, would you have done?" asked Noel Malcolm in the Sunday Telegraph. In our imaginations, I suspect, we all join the resistance and fight to the last breath. "But real life is not so simple. Collaboration is seldom all or nothing." Charles Glass's "highly impressive new book" tells the story of how various US citizens who stayed in Paris after the German invasion confronted the problem. From our perspective, Clara de Chambrun, a cousin of President Roosevelt, may seem compromised by her close friendship with Marshal Petain and other Vichy leaders, but with her husband Aldebert she worked tirelessly to keep the American Library and Hospital open, treating wounded French and Allied servicemen. The Franco-American millionaire Charles Bedaux was charged with treason by the US liberators because he treated the occupation as a business opportunity, cultivating high-ranking Nazis to back his Saharan oil pipeline. He committed suicide in disgrace; yet on closer examination, he seems to have used his influence to protect Jews and fellow Americans.

The outstanding hero of the story is the surgeon Sumner Jackson, said Antony Beevor in the Daily Telegraph. Jackson hid downed airmen in his hospital and collected intelligence for the Allies; his teenage son Phillip risked his life by photographing the U-boat pens in Saint-Nazaire. Arrested less than a month before D-Day, they survived the concentration camps, only for Dr Jackson to die when the ship he was transported on was sunk by the RAF. Despite "occasional excesses of detail", Americans in Paris is "a fascinating treat" for anyone interested in France during this period.

FIRST POSTED APRIL 16, 2009