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all run by American and French volunteers, daily left the Hospital for the prisoner camps in the Paris area, some of them went even as far as Château-Thierry, Chartres and Alençon. From June 15 they visited 250,000 prisoners desperately in need of food.’ Dr Sumner Jackson, who worked without rest, did not believe enough was being done for the prisoners. He blamed what he called the ‘bullshit bureaucracy of old men’, both German and French, for failing to distribute all the American aid intended for the prisoners. The hospital, while providing assistance to demoralized French PoWs, had the most up to date intelligence on the locations, security measures and sizes of all the German camps in the Paris region. Some of the injured prisoners that the ambulances brought to the hospital did not, when they recovered, return to the camps. Dr Jackson made certain that those who walked out of the hospital left no trace for the Germans to follow.

Immediately after the Germans entered Paris, a report prepared by the American Hospital for its US governors in New York concluded, ‘Too much praise cannot be given to Dr. Sumner W. Jackson, who has been a member of the attending Staff since 1925 and who accepted the professional supervision of the wounded for the period of the war.’

Dr Thierry de Martel left a nephew, Jacques Tartière, an actor who used the stage name Jacques Terrane. Jacques’ wife was a glamorous, long-legged American actress, Drue Leyton. They had met in New York in 1937, while he was visiting his father and his American stepmother. Drue was acting in a Work Projects Administration (WPA) Theatre Project–‘for I had grown weary,’ she wrote, ‘of the part of the blonde heroine in Charlie Chan mysteries to which I had been confined in Hollywood’. She recalled meeting Jacques, ‘He was a good-looking, tall man, twenty-six years old, six years younger than I. He had been educated in England as well as France and spoke English perfectly.’ They went together to England, where Drue played in Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy. They married in London in 1938, the day before Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier ceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich. When war began in September 1939, Jacques enlisted in the French Army. His weak lungs kept him out of combat, so the army assigned him to liaise with British forces in Brittany. Drue, meanwhile, accepted a theatrical agent’s proposal to work for the Ministry of Information at its international Radio Mondiale. There, she produced programmes that promoted France in America, interviewing the French novelist Colette, the comedienne Mistinguett and American reporters like Dorothy Thompson and Vincent Sheean. Her broadcasts under the name Drue Leyton won the attention of the Nazis. German radio announced in five of its French language broadcasts that, when Germany conquered France, she would be executed.

In late May 1940, 35-year-old Drue Leyton Tartière watched Belgians seeking safety from the Nazis in Paris, ‘grandmothers holding dead babies in their arms, women with parts of their faces shot away, and insane women who had lost their children, their husbands, and all reasons for living’. It was then that ‘we realized that the so-called “phony” war was over, and that horror had begun in earnest’. Her desire to help contrasted with the response of another American, mining heiress Peggy Guggenheim. She had seen the same refugees dragging their meagre belongings through Paris and admitted later that she felt and did nothing for them. She was buying paintings from artists desperate to leave Paris before the Nazis reached it–acquiring for $250,000 a collection that would be worth over $40 million. When she called uninvited at Picasso’s studio, the artist told her, ‘Lingerie is on the next floor.’ Soon, as the Nazis shelled the outskirts of Paris, Guggenheim fled south. Drue Tartière was not far behind.

At ten in the morning on 11 June, the ‘forty-two assorted nationals’ of Radio Mondiale left Paris for Tours in a convoy of cars loaded with heavy bags.

The day was stifling, and there were panic,