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By Root 2594 0

American from New York City, who, like Jackson, stood just over six feet tall. Joe had been on the run for a month, since that 14 July morning when Phillip Jackson saw his plane shot down. Two of Joe’s crewmates had been killed inside the B-17. Joe had parachuted from 16,000 feet with seven others onto a field of sugar beet near Le Bourget. Cut off from the other seven, he wandered along a country road. Two Frenchmen spotted him and warned that a German soldier was cycling past. Joe hid in the brush, until the two men returned with a car, covered him in firewood and took him to a safe house. By the time Gladys Marchal brought Joe to the hospital, he had been in three safe houses waiting for the Resistance to bring him false travel documents. Somehow, though, the résistants could not obtain the papers he needed.

Joe appealed to Dr Jackson for help. Jackson took him into his office, which Joe remembered as ‘a nice place, well furnished. A citation framed on the wall caught my eye and I believe it was the French Legion of Honor.’ After giving Joe a thorough physical examination, Jackson asked Elisabeth Comte to lodge the airman in one of the rooms for patients. ‘Everything, bed and linens were spotlessly white,’ Joe wrote later. When they could not find a safe house for him, the Jacksons invited Joe to their apartment at 11 avenue Foch. They had taken the precaution of asking Toquette’s sister, Tat, to keep Phillip at Enghien for a few days. ‘I suppose my mother thought that at fifteen, being with an American B-17 gunner was a bit too much for me,’ Phillip told his father’s biographer, Hal Vaughan, years later. ‘I think my father brought Joe to the apartment on the back of his bike.’ Even without Phillip there, Joe’s presence was a hazard. A neighbour might denounce them to the Nazi SD secret police, whose bureau was just down the road at Number 19, or to the Gestapo at Number 43. Sumner knew the danger of mixing different Resistance networks. The American Hospital was part of one, and Goélette-Frégate was another. Sumner had kept them separate to avoid the possibility of a captured résistant revealing under torture the secrets of both. Toquette fed Joe on their meagre rations, and she contacted the escape networks to get him out of Paris before the Germans found him.

Gilbert Asselin of another Resistance group, Libération, was the man Toquette decided could provide Joe with false papers and a safe route to Spain. When she asked Asselin to take responsibility for Joe, the Frenchman did not hesitate. He moved him into the flat of his mistress, Lise Russ. Joe spent long, dull hours there, waiting to go outside again. At any moment, he knew, a neighbour might guess he was there and inform the police to claim Oberg’s reward. The Germans were searching everywhere for Joe and the rest of his B-17 crew, arresting French men and women whom they suspected of assisting them. After three weeks, everything was ready. Asselin presented Joe with well-forged documents and delivered him to another safe house near Sainte-Foy-la-Grande. From there, Joe was taken to Toulouse in southwest France to wait for an escort to lead him over the border to Spain. In late October, along with RAF Squadron Leader Frank Griffiths, he was taken across the Pyrenees. Spain did not automatically mean freedom. Spanish police arrested Joe and Griffiths in Barcelona, where a German officer was allowed to interrogate them. For more than a month, they were moved with other Allied airmen from prison to prison. At the end of November, the Spaniards released them to the British Consul and allowed them to cross the border to Gibraltar. Back in England, Joe gave a full account to US military intelligence of his escape route and the help he had received from Sumner and Toquette Jackson.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Calumnies

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1943, the war appeared to turn in the Allies’ favour. The British, American and Free French had secured North Africa and the Middle East. The Anglo-American invasion of Italy from Tunisia led to a new Italian government that switched sides