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By Root 2586 0

France–There is a France–There will always be a France–ALWAYS.’ The actors Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin took part. New Yorkers and overseas Parisians danced congas, rhumbas, waltzes and the ‘Beer Barrel Polka’ on the cobbled ground. At a minute before midnight, a French sailor took the microphone and asked for silence. A young woman wearing red shoes and blue slacks played the accordion, and the Frenchman called on the crowd to join in singing La Marseillaise. Even hard-bitten American New Yorkers sang along. At the last refrain, the French sailor said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we owe this celebration to the generosity and hospitality of our American allies and our American hosts. Vive l’Amérique!’

That holiday morning in Paris, Phillip Jackson cycled through deserted streets past German sentries in the avenue Foch and around the Arc de Triomphe to the American Hospital in Neuilly. Phillip was carrying eggs from the family’s maid, Louise, for his father. At the hospital where he had been born fifteen years earlier, a British woman patient had posted a poem on the hospital bulletin board to honour a physician on whom she clearly had a crush:

Portrait of an American:

We all agree he’s a perfect dear

Altho at times he inspires fear

And we quake when he draws near

Oh, so severe!

But those eyes so stern and steel blue

Can gleam with laughter, too

And life takes on a brighter hue

When he smiles at you.

Sumner was operating on a patient, so the boy went up to the roof to wait. The summer morning was tranquil, until German anti-aircraft batteries suddenly erupted with fire. American Flying Fortresses roared towards the air base at Le Bourget and dropped their payloads. Like his father from the same roof on 4 April, Phillip watched the Luftwaffe and the American Eighth Air Force duelling in the sky. Bombs fell, air gunners fired at one another, planes screamed in flames to the ground and parachutes snapped open. To the 15-year-old, the sight was unforgettable, almost hypnotic. Then his father appeared on the roof. Wearing a white, blood-spattered surgeon’s gown, Sumner Jackson shouted, ‘Damn, Pete! Get the hell out of here. Shrapnel’s flying all around.’ In the distance, American airmen were burying their parachutes and running for cover.

Before Sumner left the hospital that afternoon, he modestly removed the British woman’s poem from the board. He and Phillip then bicycled with Toquette to their house on the lake at Enghien to spend the rest of the holiday with Toquette’s sister, Tat. When Phillip recounted the story of the air battle he had seen, his mother ordered him to stay off the hospital’s roof. This seemed strange to a boy whose parents let him risk his life to photograph German naval installations at Saint-Nazaire. That was war. To be injured by falling ack-ack was unnecessary voyeurism.

The Jacksons’ lives were increasingly threatened. Toquette told Sumner that General Karl Oberg was paying 50,000 francs to anyone who led his agents to an Allied flyer in hiding. Those assisting the airmen would be shot. Someone had already taken the money, and one British airman disappeared. The informer responsible was himself murdered by the Resistance. One Resistance cell, she said, had been penetrated by Oberg’s men. Theirs could be next.

When the family weekend was over, Dr Jackson cycled back to work at the hospital. More airmen needed help to reach England, and more patients were brought from the internment camps. It was business as usual. On the bulletin board, to Sumner’s irritation, someone had pinned back the English patient’s poem praising her ‘perfect dear’, Dr Jack.

A month after Phillip Jackson watched the 331st Squadron of the American Eighth Air Force from the hospital’s roof, a crewman from one of the downed Flying Fortresses suddenly appeared at the American Hospital. Gladys Marchal, a British woman working for the Resistance, delivered the 19-year-old tail-gunner to Dr Sumner Jackson. The airman’s civilian clothes did not fit, and he did not look or speak French. Joe Manos was a half-Greek, half-Polish