Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [204]
On the morning of May 3rd, the English, who were close by on the shore, ordered the ships to enter into the port, as they believed the ships carried troops or runaway Germans. The ‘Adlon’ returned to port. The two others were ordered by the S.S. on board to remain in the shoals. At 3 p.m. after having been given warning we were sunk. First the ‘Cap [d’] Ancona,’ then the ‘Thielbeck’ on which we both were, my father and self, [hit] by rocket carrying Typhoons. The Cap [d’] Ancona was set on fire by the projectiles. Fortunately I was on deck and was not hit by the projectiles. I waited 5 minutes in hopes of seeing my father. I could not see him. I then jumped into the sea.
After the RAF bombed the ships, Phillip splashed through the cold sea to climb into a lifeboat. The Germans threw him overboard when they realized he was a prisoner rather than a sailor. He and another 200 men swam towards the beach. ‘The first 150 who landed on the shore,’ Phillip wrote, ‘were shot by the S.S.’ The rest then swam in the opposite direction. Once ashore, Phillip could not find Sumner. It was only later that a French prisoner told him he had seen his father ‘about a hundred yards from the ship “swimming with a plank,” already in difficulties’.
Dr Sumner Jackson was never seen again, and his body was not recovered. The brave American partisan, who refused all compromise with the Nazis from the day they occupied Paris, died three days after Hitler killed himself in Berlin and five days before Germany surrendered. The RAF did not conduct an inquiry to discover why its pilots had attacked three shiploads of Allied prisoners in the Bay of Lübeck. Of the estimated 7,000 inmates aboard the Thielbeck, only 200 survived.
Phillip Jackson, believing his mother had already died in a concentration camp, volunteered for the British army. Toquette, however, had survived many months in the Ravensbrück camp, although badly disabled from starvation and exhaustion, to be repatriated to Sweden through the efforts of Count Folke Bernadotte. She and Phillip were reunited in Paris two months after the German surrender. On 18 July, Toquette wrote to Sumner’s sister Freda, ‘I want you to know that I never ceased to be in love with Sumner for whom I had forever a great admiration and respect. He had such big qualities.’
ENDNOTES
PART ONE: 14 JUNE 1940
Chapter One: The American Mayor of Paris
p. 9 Two million people Henri Michel, Paris Allemand, Paris: Albin Michel, 1981, p. 29.
p. 9 ‘The only living’ Robert Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors: Secret Decisions that Changed the World, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1964, p. 55.
p. 10 ‘We in the embassy felt’ Ibid., p. 53.
p. 10 The exiled American Ambassador Herbert Lottman, The Fall of Paris: June 1940, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992, p. 250.
p. 11 ‘The few people who remained’ Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors, p. 53.
p. 11 ‘Contrary to rumors’ Letter from Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, quoted in Orville H. Bullitt (ed.), For the President: Personal and Secret, Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972, p. 469.
p. 11 Robert Murphy, rather than let Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors, p. 53.
p. 12 ‘Most Americans Staying’ New York Times, 19 May 1940, p. 1.
p. 12 ‘They showed us’ ‘U.S. Flier Returns, Bitter at France’, New York Times, 3 August 1940, p. 10.
p. 13 The embassy issued more ‘U.S. Property in France Has Light War Toll’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 July 1940, p. 9.
p. 13 ‘The American Church will’ ‘The American Church in Paris’, Sunday Bulletin, 9 June 1940, p. 2, from the Archives of the American Church, 63–65 Quai d’Orsay, not catalogued.
p. 13 ‘No American ambassador’ Bullitt to Roosevelt, 30 May 1940, in Bullitt (ed.), For the President, p. 441.
p. 14 ‘But our government’ Will Brownell and Richard N. Billings, So Close to Greatness: A