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By Root 2367 0

It was also magnifying the danger to Dr Jackson and the other résistants who were dedicated to saving the Allied survivors. Americans, British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and free Poles and Czechs were parachuting onto French soil in greater numbers. Some were captured immediately, but others were found by sympathetic Frenchmen who handed them over to clandestine organizations. Many waited in the homes of French and American friends of the Resistance or at the American Hospital for the false documents, civilian clothes and guides they needed to undertake the perilous route back to England. Most spoke no French, and they were vulnerable to capture if the wrong person asked them a question. The pilots, navigators, bombardiers and radio engineers with their valuable training and combat experience were assets the Allies could not afford to lose. For the Resistance, including Sumner Jackson, returning them to fight the Nazis was worth the risk of torture and execution.

The Germans used the air raids to rouse French fear of America’s long-term intentions. ‘German propaganda was falling upon willing ears in France,’ Ninetta Jucker, the Englishwoman who was not interned because she had a young child, remembered. ‘We were told that the air raids were intended to destroy French industry so that the “Yankees” should find no competition here after the war; while the “systematic” destruction of French cities would create vast markets for American industry when the time came to build them.’

In 1943, the lack of food in Paris had, in General de Chambrun’s words, ‘reached its crucial point’. The hospital had to feed 500 staff and patients, who desperately needed a sufficient calorie intake to guarantee their recovery, as well as fifty unpaid volunteers and a group of elderly Englishmen in a hostel. Ninetta Jucker wrote that the house for old Englishmen beside the American Hospital had been a retreat for old women before the war. The Germans requisitioned it and left it empty, until the American wife of a pro-Vichy French diplomat managed to have the house reopened as a hostel in the spring of 1943. Its inhabitants paid no rent, but contributed the small sum of thirty francs a day for three meals at the American Hospital. The hostel somehow came under the supervision of a retired British general. ‘He was suffering from a combination of sex, religious and persecution mania,’ Ninetta Jucker wrote. When the general forced some elderly Englishwomen to move out of the hostel, Mrs Jucker complained on their behalf. ‘There used to be women here,’ the general told her, ‘but I had to get rid of them. Couldn’t do with women around. Females, you know.’ When Ninetta complained to the Red Cross, the general was soon ‘deprived of his powers’. The hospital, though, had to feed the elderly British subjects along with everyone else–more than six hundred people daily–when France was nearly starving.

‘The problem was solved,’ Clara de Chambrun wrote, ‘by making large farming contracts for regular supplies. Three departments collaborated in this effort: Comte de Caraman and M. Hincelin in Seine-et-Oise, M. André Dubonnet in Seine-et-Marne, and Alexandre de Marenches in the Eure lent their acres to furnish vegetables and fruits.’ Otto Gresser recalled that the lawns and flowers that had made the grounds of the hospital so congenial to patients like André Guillon in 1940 were dug up and replaced with furrows of tomatoes, beans, carrots and potatoes. Gresser himself was buying as much food as he could on the black market and from the wholesale food outlets at Les Halles, where the vendors knew him as the hard-bargaining ‘Ferdinand’.

Allied air raids around Neuilly raised the fear that the hospital might be cut from its water supply. ‘So,’ Gresser said, ‘we did some digging in the hospital grounds and after about fifteen meters down we found unlimited quantities of water. In fact, it was an underground Seine.’ The well was easier to hide than the increasing number of Allied flyers in the hospital.

René Rocher, the French