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By Root 995 0

the addition of “de Pellepoix,” and it would have remained only an oddity if Callil had not later seen the documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) by Marcel Ophüls. The English subtitles contained Anne’s full surname, but in reference to a Vichy government official. Callil’s curiosity was piqued, and she began to investigate Anne’s story and that of her father, who had been a leading French anti-Semite before the war and who had added the fictitious “de Pellepoix” to his original name. He later became commissioner for Jewish affairs, and in July 1942 he was put in charge of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ (Vélodrome d’Hiver) roundup in Paris, which led to the deportation of nearly thirteen thousand Jews, almost a third of whom were children. According to Callil, Darquier “worked tirelessly to provide more Jews for deportation. He introduced the yellow star and took life-and-death decisions over the fate of the Jews of France.” She also informs us that after the German occupation of France ended in 1944, the épuration (purge) followed, and it was reported that a man believed to be Darquier was lynched by a mob in either Limoges or Brive. But apparently the mob got the wrong man. Callil’s book is a much bigger story than Anne’s and is a monumental work.

The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940, William Shirer (Simon & Schuster, 1969). As you might expect, Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) has written another work that is thoroughly researched and revealing, and he carefully illustrates, point by point, how the fall of France was an absolute debacle. Until reading this, I hadn’t realized the extent of the utter chaos—the complete lack of communication among government officials as well as with the general public—that followed the news that the Germans were en route to Paris. In the words of the French historian Marc Bloch, “It was the most terrible collapse in all the long story of our national life.”

D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, Stephen Ambrose (Simon & Schuster, 1994). There is a plethora of books available about the D-Day battles, but none of them is as definitive as this. Ambrose, who passed away in 2002, was a World War II historian and the author of more than a dozen books, including a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower; he also founded the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. He was devoted to D-Day scholarship and has been referred to as the premier American narrative and military historian. For this work he drew upon fourteen hundred oral histories from the men who lived through it. This is the story of the enlisted men and junior officers who freed the Normandy coastline, and it is not exaggeration when Operation Overlord is called “the most important day of the twentieth century.”

Decisive Battles of the Western World and Their Influence upon History, J. F. C. Fuller (Eyre and Spottiswoode, London): volume 1, From the Earliest Times to the Battle of Lepanto (1954); volume 2, From the Defeat of the Spanish Armada to the Battle of Waterloo (1955); and volume 3, From the American Civil War to the End of the Second World War (1956). Though only the third volume in this trio deals with the two world wars, all three books are worth your most determined efforts to obtain. Fuller wisely notes that it may be disputed whether war is necessary to mankind, “but a fact which cannot be questioned is that, from the earliest records of man to the present age, war has been his dominant preoccupation. There has never been a period in human history altogether free from war, and seldom one of more than a generation which has not witnessed a major conflict: great wars flow and ebb almost as regularly as the tides.”

Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, David Fromkin (Knopf, 2004). I was predisposed to like this as I’m a huge fan of Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace, and I wasn’t disappointed. Fromkin maintains that “the sky out of which Europe fell was not empty; on the contrary, it was alive with processes and powers.