August 13, 2025 • 41 mins
Tom Young grew up on his family's farm in North Carolina. From a young age he was fascinated by his grandfather's stories of being part of a bomber crew during World War II. That helped to spark his interest in both flying and in service. Young served in the Maryland and West Virginia Air National Guard, serving as flight engineer for C-130 Hercules and C-5 Galaxy transport planes. Missions took him to the war zones in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also a military novelist and his latest work is The Mapmaker, which focuses on the French Resistance during World War II.
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Senior Master Sergeant Young tells us all about the C-130 and C-5, his role of flight engineer during flight, and coming under enemy fire in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Young also takes us into the world of the French Resistance, how it was so creatively organized, and the critical role it played in helping the Allies before and after D-Day. He also talks about how dangerous it was to be part of the resistance, especially in the face of the speakable cruelty of the Nazi Gestapo and SS forces towards the people of France
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Senior Master Sergeant Young tells us all about the C-130 and C-5, his role of flight engineer during flight, and coming under enemy fire in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Young also takes us into the world of the French Resistance, how it was so creatively organized, and the critical role it played in helping the Allies before and after D-Day. He also talks about how dangerous it was to be part of the resistance, especially in the face of the speakable cruelty of the Nazi Gestapo and SS forces towards the people of France
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is Tom Young, a veteran of the Maryland
and West Virginia Air National Guard. He served as a
flight engineer aboard the C one, thirty Hercules and C
five Galaxy transport planes. He's a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.
He's also the author of nine military themed novels. The
(00:32):
latest is The Map Maker, which centers on the French
resistance in World War Two. Tom Young was born on
his family's farm in North Carolina, and there was also
a history of military service in his lineage.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
My grandfather served in World War II. He was a
B seventeen mechanic with the legendary eighth Air Force. So
I grew up hearing his stories from World War Two.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
And what interested you in joining the Air National Guard
and why specifically the Guard as opposed to another branch
of the service.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, I'd always had an interest in flying, but I've
had an unlikely dual career in aviation and in writing
in journalism. As I mentioned, my grandfather was a World
War Two veteran, an eight Air Force veteran, and his
stories were part of what sparked my interest in flying.
(01:26):
But I also had an interest in journalism and writing,
and when I started college at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, I seriously considered going through Air
Force ROTC and pursuing a full time active duty Air
Force career. But I also had this interest in journalism,
and in my youthful ignorance, I thought I had to
(01:49):
choose one or the other and never look back. So
for a long time I pursued journalism pretty single mindedly.
I worked with the broadcast division of the Associated Press
in Washington. But during that time I also began taking
private pilot flying lessons, and that was like throwing gas
on a fire. I found out I loved flying. I
(02:10):
had a passion for it. I dare say I had
an attitude for it, and I wanted to experience more
of it, so I joined the Air National Guard. By
the time I joined the Guard, I got a late start.
I was above the age limit for pilot training, but
there was no age limit for flight engineer training as
long as you enlisted by age thirty five. So I
(02:31):
became a flight engineer, initially on the sea one thirty
Hercules just loved it. It really enjoyed flying as a
flight engineer. And then when the one sixty seventh Airlift
Wing converted to the C five Galaxy, I spent the
last eight years of my career on the C five.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Well, let's talk about the planes. First of all, the
Sea one thirty Hercules. He said just a minute ago
that that she loved it. What did you love about it?
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I just loved that aircraft.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It's it can do anything. It always brought me home safely,
beautifully designed aircraft. They're still making C one thirties. Of course,
the J models they make now are quite different from
the A models that first began flying, I believe in
nineteen fifty four. But it's such a tough, versatile aircraft.
(03:14):
It's why it's still around. It's why it's still being made.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
And then the C five, I know, it's a lot bigger,
So talk about what that plane was like to deal with.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
The C five was very different. And when our unit
first began to convert from the C one thirty to
the C five, silly me I thought, well, it's another
Lockheed aircraft and it's still an airlift mission. How different
could it be? Oh? I didn't know anything. It was
a very different aircraft with a different mission. We were
going from tactical airlift to strategic airlift, and it was
(03:46):
just a different lifestyle. A tactical airlift involves essentially moving
cargo around within a theater of operation. Strategic airlift is
taking very large loads of cargo all the way from
the US to the theater of operation and then flying
all the way back to the US. So it involves long,
long legs of flying very long days. Often your days
(04:10):
are overnight. So it was quite a culture change.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
And so if you're going all the way to Afghanistan
or Iraq, how many times would you have to stop
and refuel to get from one place to the other.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
It would depend on how the mission was planned. Most
often what we would do was we take off from
an East coast base wherever we picked up cargo, and
that could be Dover, that could be Charleston, it could
be Maguire, any number of bases on the East coast,
and then you fly overnight, usually to stay overnight either
at Roda Naval Air Station in Spain or Ramstein Air
(04:45):
Base in Germany, and then after crew rest, you would
continue the leg either to bag Dad perhaps if you're
going to Iraq, or to Bogram Air Base if you're
going to Afghanistan. We had an aerial refueling capability, but
we didn't use that all the time because that's the
most expensive way to refuel. We would use it when
(05:06):
we had to, but it's not something you always planned
on doing. To give you a good example of a
time when it was necessary involves my last deployment. It
was in two thousand and twelve and the one hundred
and first Aviation Brigade was swapping out helicopters with the
(05:27):
eighty second. We were involved in something called a multi
mode operation to swap those helicopters in and out, and
it was intricately planned like clockwork. The inbound helicopters came
to Rota on ships, then they were loaded on our
C fives with the rotors folded up. Of course, we
(05:48):
would fly them into Afghanistan, offload the inbound helicopters, onload
the outbound helicopters. You couldn't take off during the day
with a load that heavy and have enough fuel to
do much of anything, so the mission was cut so
that we would take off at night when it was
cooler aircraft performance would be better, but even then you
(06:10):
couldn't put on enough fuel to fly from Bogram all
the way back to Roda. So we would take off
from Afghanistan, refuel in the air, and then fly back
to Rota.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Walk us through your duties as a flight engineer.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
The flight engineer does not steer the aircraft, but he
or she monitors and operates all the systems such as hydraulics, electrics, pressurization,
all of that sort of thing. To give you a
mental picture if you've ever seen any photos or videos
of some of the larger, older transport aircraft. Of course
(06:45):
you see the pilot and co pilots sitting in the
front two seats, but then there's a third seat with
someone sitting facing to the right at a great big
panel of switches and instruments. That's the flight engineer on
some and that's on the C five and other aircraft
like the seven forty seven in the Sea one thirty,
(07:06):
and for that matter, in other aircraft like the P
three oryon the engineer is not sitting facing to the right,
but he's sitting between and slightly after the pilots, and
his panel is overhit. But generally speaking, flight engineer positions
have this position where you're facing to the right, so
you're monitoring all the systems, but you're also the crew mathematician.
(07:29):
It's the engineer's responsibility to calculate things like takeoff speed,
clomb rate, fuel consumption, take off distance, fuel burn, landing distance,
anything to do with aircraft performance.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Did you ever come under fire?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yes, oh, yes, a lot of Sea one thirty crews
came under fire. Nothing ever hit an aircraft that I
was in. In fact, to my knowledge, I don't think
anything ever hit any of the one sixty sevenths aircraft,
but there were one sixty seven, or rather there were
UH Sea one thirties that were struck by fire in
(08:06):
UH I know in Iraq and probably in Afghanistan as well.
I credit luck for part of that, but also I
credit the one sixty seventh high standards of training and readiness.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
At that time.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
We had an excellent wing commander, a Colonel Jesse Thomas,
and he made sure that by the time we got there,
we were very familiar with things like flying on night
vision goggles, running those combat entry entrants and and exit checklists.
He made sure his unit was ready before we got there.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
What's that like the first time people are shooting at you.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
It happened so fast you don't have time to get scared.
And of course I realized coming under fire is very
different depending on where you are and what your situation is.
It's very different. I'm sure probably a lot worse for
troops on the ground. But if you're in a C
(09:08):
one thirty flying over Iraq at night, it just happens
so quickly. You hear the missile warning system go off,
the defensive flares launch, and it's over in an instant.
And as I say, you don't have time to get scared.
If you get scared, it's later when you look back
(09:29):
on it and you think what could have happened.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Thinking about those particular planes, they're not known for their elusiveness,
So is there any sort of evasive action taken?
Speaker 2 (09:37):
There are maneuvers you can take, and you would be
surprised how effective it can be in a C one thirty.
It's been a while, so I don't remember exactly what's
classified and what's not, so I won't get into details.
But see one thirty is with their defensive systems and
with their defensive tactics are more then you might think.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Is there any particular incident that stays with you as
perhaps being the most intense enemy fire or the.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Most intense happened in May of three. We had just
taken off from Baghdad, and this was about eleven o'clock
at night, and I suppose some of the insurgents decided
that night they wanted to take out an airlifter, and
they were waiting some distance off the end of the
runway for the next aircraft to come along. And as
(10:30):
we're climbing out, and this is still at fairly low altitude,
all of a sudden, in much less time than it
takes to tell it, we hear the warning system tones
go off, the defensive flares launched automatically. The flares are
hotter than the heat signature of your engines, and they
help defeat a heat seeking missile. So you hear these
(10:52):
gosh off warning tones, the flares punch, and the flight
deck lights up like the sun because of those flares.
And then instantly, because we have had a very alert,
very good aircraft commander, he racks the aircraft into a
hard turn, and people were making the call outs they're
supposed to make to do the things you're supposed to
(11:14):
do in that situation, and just like that, it's over.
And then the flight day gets really quiet, and we
climb up to altitude and we flew the rest of
the way back to Massira Island. And since then we've
often discussed about how quiet the rest of that flight was.
(11:34):
There wasn't much more conversation except for what was required
to do checklists, and I think it was because everybody
was reflecting on what could have happened.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
That's Tom Young, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as
a flight engineer with the Air National Guard. When we
come back, we'll focus on the French resistance and Young's
new book, The Map Maker. I'm Greg Corumbus and this
is Veterans Chronicles Sixty Seconds of Service.
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Speaker 1 (12:57):
This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest in
this edition is Tom Young, a veteran of the Maryland
and West Virginia Air National Guard. He served in Iraq
and Afghanistan as a flight engineer aboard C one thirty
Hercules and C five Galaxy transport planes. He's also the
author of nine novels. The latest is The Map Maker,
(13:18):
about the French resistance in World War Two. One of
the fascinating aspects of the novel is that Young's main
characters are fictional, but he has them carrying out missions
that really happened. So I asked him how he weaved
fact and fiction for this novel.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
That required some research, but it was fascinating research and
I had a lot of fun looking into it. And
the reason I picked that subject matter is now we're
in the eightieth year since the end of World War Two,
so World War Two is pretty well tilled ground for
fiction by now. So I try to look for some
of the lesser known corners of World War II history,
(13:56):
and for me, one of those corners was the French
resistance and the air operations that supported it. So when
I began looking into that, I found that fascinating and
thought that would be a good corner to explore.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
So the way I set up.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
The initial conflict in The Map Makers, I have two
main characters. One is a French American woman named Charlotte Denoux.
She's a resistance agent and she used to be an
art student, so she has turned her talents to drawing
maps and charts and diagrams on German positions and capabilities
to give targeting information to the resistance and to the Allies.
(14:37):
The problem is she's a little too good, and the
Gestapo knows about her. So she's on the run as
the novel opens, on the run across occupied France, trying
to stay a step ahead of the Gestapo and keep
them from dragging her into an interrogation chamber. And what
she really needs is a ride. She needs a flight
out because she needs to stay away from the Gestapo
(14:57):
and she still has important information to get to the Allies.
My other main character is a French pilot, Phelipe Gerard.
He is entirely fictional, but the things he does are
historically based. He was a pilot for the French Air Force.
After the fall of France, he got out of France
and made his way to Britain where he joined the
(15:18):
British Royal Air Force, and there were a lot of
pilots from Nazi occupied countries who did that. So as
the novel opens, he's flying for the RAF in what
the RAF called a Special Duties Squadron nowadays we'd call
it Special Operations and his unit flies light single engine aircraft,
the Westland Lysander, in and out of occupied France by night,
(15:42):
navigating by moonlight to land in clandestine airfields like a
farmer's pasture and deliver supplies and ammunition to the resistance,
or to pick up agents sometimes to bring them to
Britain for consultations, and then to fly them back in
and go right back into the fray. It's a hell
of a way to commute to and from work. They
actually did this, and Philippe gets task with the job
(16:04):
of finding Charlotte and flying her out. But that's harder
than it sounds, because she's on the run and she
can't stay in one place for any length of time. Plus,
even if Philippe does get information on her whereabouts, does
he trust that information or is it a Nazi trap?
So that's the opening setup for the map maker.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Well exactly, because I believe the very first sequence in
the book is that he lands in a place where
it basically was a trap. It'll be too many spoilers here,
but in terms of how this was arranged, because obviously,
when people think of the formal French military, obviously the
Nazis swept through France in about a month and a half.
The miracle at Dunkirk saves a lot of lives. Obviously,
(16:47):
how did they connect and organize with these figures still
in France to set up these networks focusing on different
things and having these codes arranged where you could identify, yes,
this is the right person I'm supposed to meet. It
seems very intricate and elaborate, but it seems like it
had to have been done on the fly pretty much.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
It was very intricate, and it was done on the fly.
And that's part of what makes the French resistance so amazing,
because you know, after the French military has been taken down,
who's going to serve in the resistance but volunteers. Whoever volunteers.
One of the books I read for research made a
fascinating point. It said, for the most part, the French
(17:27):
resistance was amateurs going up against the best trained police
force in the world, the Gestapo.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
But they did have.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Some help in getting organized, initially from the British, from
the British Special Operations Executive, and they would parachute in
an agent to help the resistance organize into various cells.
They call them circuits, and there was sometimes not a
(17:57):
lot of communication between the various circuits, and that was
by design, so that if one circuit got taken down,
or if a number of people from one circuit got arrested,
there would be a limit to how much information you
could get out of them. And then later when the
US was involved in the war, the forerunner of the CIA,
the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, also got involved
(18:20):
in coordinating with the resistance. But that was one of
the biggest challenges, was to how to coordinate and organize
these cells, how to herd these cats, but at the
same time not have them too linked, because you wanted
plausible deniability and you know, that sort of thing for
security purposes. So it was really quite a challenge. And
the trade craft that they used, you know, the coded
(18:42):
transmissions and things on the radio, was just absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Tom Young is a veteran of the Maryland and West
Virginia Air National Guard, serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan
as a flight engineer aboard C one thirty Hercules and
C five Galaxy transport planes. His latest novel is The
Map Maker, focusing on the French resistance during World War Two.
When We Come Back. Young's expertise and love of flying
(19:06):
comes through in the novel. We'll also discuss just how
important the French resistance was to the overall success of
the Allies and just how vicious the Nazi, Gestapo and
SS forces were towards French civilians. I'm Greg Corumbus and
this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus.
(19:26):
Our guest is Tom Young, and we're talking about his
new novel, The Map Maker, and we pick up the
conversation with Young explaining how he incorporated aviation extensively into
the novel.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Well, history dictated that the Special Duty Squadron that I
assigned Felipe to in the novel really existed, and they
flew the Westland Lysander, so that was an easy choice.
The light aircraft he flies from France when he steals it,
that was a commonly used light aircraft in France. And
(19:59):
then when his French Air Force unit is reconstituted in
North Africa, that real world unit was assigned the photo
reconvariant of the P thirty eight Lightning. So all of
that was dictated by real world history and as far
as researching how those aircraft were flown. Oddly enough, I
(20:19):
found YouTube to be a very valuable resource because someone,
probably several someones, has done US authors and historians a
great favor by uploading the YouTube a lot of World
War Two era training films, and those films are excellent.
Back then, the War Department enlisted a lot of a
list Hollywood talent to make those films, and they're fantastic.
(20:41):
They're as good as anything any training film I ever
saw in the military, except what I saw was in color,
and they were in black and white. And you can
find on YouTube a training film from World War II
on anything. You can imagine how to feel strip an
M one rifle, how they packed parachutes back then, how
they use those great big backpack radios, and how they
(21:03):
operated most of the aircraft of that era. You can
find a training film that walks you through the checklist
from pre flight to shutdown, and if you're an aviation
geek like I am, you can get lost in that stuff.
And then one of the challenges becomes not overloading the
reader with too much of that detail.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
It's also interesting the time frame in the war that
you chose here, because the fall of France to the Nazis,
of course, came in nineteen forty, and so Philip has
been doing what he's been doing pretty much ever since then.
We pick it up in the summer in nineteen forty
three in your novel, and it's feeling pretty bleak, pretty hopeless.
He's not even sure why he's still doing this. There's
(21:45):
a backstory to something he feels guilt over. How does
that kind of help us understand what the mood the
outlook was at that point in the war, kind of
between forty and forty three, where not a lot was
going really well.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
In nineteen forty three, things really did look bleak for
the French resistance. The Germans had pretty much rolled up
one of the most effective circuits or cells. One of
the high ranking French resistance agents, Jean Moulon, who had
been sent into France to try to organize these various
(22:20):
circuits to the extent possible, and he had been captured.
So things looked very bad for the resistance at that time,
but they pressed on despite the odds and eventually prevailed.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
There's also kind of an interesting amalgamation of groups that
are part of the resistance, but they're very different from
one another. So for example, when Charlotte's on the run,
she runs into one group that's not one that she's
real familiar with. Then they end up with a bunch
of Spaniards for a while, and then they've got a
trust communists to get them to different points. So talk
about how the resistance was kind of this.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Hodgepides, Yes, when I referred to herding the cats early,
I was not being entirely facetious. There were really very
widely disparate groups participating in the resistance, and sometimes they
were across purposes. And part of the challenge that Jean
Mulan had before he was captured, and part of the
challenge that for example, Charles de Gaulle had trying to
(23:19):
influence events from where he was in Britain at the time,
was organizing these groups and it was quite a challenge.
And one of the things I tried to do in
The Map Maker was to give the reader something of
a tour of some of the things the French resistance
was doing. And Charlotte being on the run across France
(23:40):
was a good excuse to do that. So I chose
a handful of real world things that the resistance got
involved in and had Charlotte give a look at those
events from her point of view, and sometimes from Philippe's
point of view. For example, there is a part in
(24:00):
the novel where she takes shelter with the resistance cell
that is participating in this absolutely brilliant effort to break
prisoners out of a prison in Amnion, France. The Germans
were using that prison to house resistance prisoners. The British
(24:21):
Special Operations Executive received intelligence that the Germans were about
to execute all or most of the prisoners in that prison,
so they came up with this brilliant operation to use
light bombers to come in at low level and bomb
the walls of the prison, to breach the walls to
give the prisoners a chance to escape. It was just
(24:42):
an absolutely daring, brilliant mission and it would be challenging now,
I imagine with laser guided bombs. And they pulled this off
with nineteen forties technology, you know, a chart and a
stopwatch and a vector bomb site. But they really did this.
These mosquito bombers came in solo. You read the accounts
says their propa wash was kicking up, snow bombed very
(25:03):
accurately for that day. Don't hold me to the numbers,
but roughly I believe there were about eight hundred prisoners
in the prison. Of course, some died from collateral damage
from the bombing about one hundred, which made it controversial.
About two hundred and fifty. Some got out, Many of
them were recaptured, but some got out and stayed gone.
(25:26):
And even though a number of them were lost in
the mission, one could argue that having any of them
escape is better than having all of them executed. Just
absolutely fascinating real world history. And so that's one of
the things that Charlotte participates in in the course of
The Map Maker. And it's funny. Back in May, my
(25:48):
wife and I were doing a tour of World War
II sites in Europe and we stopped for lunch in
amy On, France. The prison was not on the tour,
but the bus just happened to drive right by that prison.
And if you look at contemporary photos from the war,
it's it's out in the country where prisons are usually built.
(26:10):
Since then, the suburbs have kind of encircled it, so
it's it's not in the country anymore. But it really
surprised me to drive right by it.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
And of course, you know the focal point of the
title of The Map Maker. That's that's the very valuable
thing that Charlotte's got with her for the vast majority
of the novel, the value of the drawings, the intel
that then got back to England and US and British planners.
Just how critical was that intelligence to D Day, Operation
(26:39):
Dragoon and everything else that followed thereafter.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
It was very critical. And one of the things I
learned as I researched the Resistance for this novel is
how so much of what the Resistance did was aimed
specifically toward tripping up and impeding the German forces during
an after D Day. They weren't just looking to pop
(27:03):
in a German soldier wherever they could find them. They
weren't just looking to carry out random acts of sabotage.
They did carry out a lot of sabotage, but there
was there was more of a purpose behind it than
just doing whatever damage they could anywhere. The main thrust
was to impede the Germans once the Allies came ashore UH.
(27:27):
To give you an example, there was a h notorious
Panzer division that was UH located in south central France.
They responded to D Day. They were told to move forward,
and had they not been impeded by the Resistance, if
my memory serves, they could have traveled from their base
(27:48):
to Normandy in about three days, but because of the
harassment and u impeding operations of the resistance, it took
them two weeks.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
That made a significant difference. Then in the battle Normandy,
it was hard anyway, but just little delays here and
there was a big advantage exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
In fact, there was a broadcast that went out on
or immediately after D Day, a broadcast in French to
French citizens that basically said, anything you can do to
slow down the Germans for any amount of time is
going to be helpful. You know, if your car breaks
(28:28):
down in an intersection, if you do anything to delay
them any way anywhere, it helps. So everyone was asked
to do their part for you, whatever they could do.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
And at that point they weren't even broadcasting cryptically, they
were literally just saying get in their way. Exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
It was by the n it was in the clear.
But speaking of broadcasting and tradecraft, another fascinating thing is
how the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, would help send
coded messages to the resistance. There was a program in
French that they broadcast. I believe the title in English
(29:09):
would be the French Talk to France or something like that,
ostensibly UNUS and information program for the French, but they'd
get to the end of the program and they would
have what were presented as personal messages, something like Marie
sends greetings for her grandmother's birthday. Well, that might be
(29:29):
a coded message that means blow that bridge tonight. Just
fascinating stuff that they did.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
One of the other things I think comes through very
well in your novel is the cruelty, just the vicious
cruelty of whether we're talking about the SS or the Gestapo.
I mean, obviously we know very well the unspeakable atrocities
committed to the East, and the concentration camps and the
death camps and that sort of thing, but the way
they also treated everyday citizens, especially if they were suspected
(29:57):
of being subversives. Talk about that with the s S
and the Gestapo, and just the terror that they inflicted
wherever they happened.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
To be exactly they tried to rule by terror. A
moment ago I was discussing the Panzer division, it was
slowed down by the resistance. They took vengeance for that.
They essentially wiped out the village of Orodor. Sir Glenn
in France. I think they killed six hundred and some people.
(30:25):
After the war, Charles de Gaull made the decision to
maintain the ruins of Orodor as a memorial to what happened,
So to this day you can see the rusted cars
of that era, the burned out buildings, all of that
remained as a memorial to the sacrifice of the people there.
(30:48):
But yeah, the SS pretty much wiped out a village
full of civilians to take revenge.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
We also, at various points have fictionalized bulletins from Klaus Sparby,
the butcher of Leon. Why'd you decide to bring him
in as a real life character in this novel?
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Well, I will fess up to borrowing that technique from
one of my literary heroes. Hermann Wooke, the author of
The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, and some other
Great World War Two novels. He intersperses The Winds of
War and War in Remembrance with memoirs from a fictitious
German general, General Armand von Run, and that way he
(31:30):
gives the German perspective as the story advances. So similarly,
I use memoranda from Klaus Barbie to give the German
perspective as the story advances and as the Gestapo is
pursuing Charlotte pursuing other members of the resistance. Those memos
are completely fictional. I just made those up. But sadly
I did not make up Klaus Barbie. He is all
(31:52):
too real. As you mentioned, he's known as the Butcher
of Leone. He was known to have personally tortured resistance
agents and for a long time he evaded justice. He
got out of Europe at the end of the war
and made his way to South America, where he lived
for decades under the alias Klaus Altman, and then in
nineteen seventy one, the Nazi hunters Serge and Beata Clarsfeld
(32:16):
identified him as living in South America. After a lengthy process,
he was eventually extradited to France, tried for war crimes,
and he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison
in nineteen eighty seven. He didn't live long after that.
He died of cancer, I believe in nineteen ninety one.
And just a funny story from the other part of
(32:37):
my life. When I first started working with the broadcast
division of the Associated Press, that was in eighty seven
when Barbie was on trial. I was not a foreign correspondent.
I did not go to France to cover the trial,
but I do remember writing brief items for the broadcast
wire on that trial, and now all these years later,
(32:57):
I put him on a novel.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
It's also some real life people that you weave in.
Besides Klaus Barbie. One is a female resistance figure who
is briefly on the boat at one point with Charlotte,
and another one is a pilot that Felipe interacts with
quite a bit, So tell us a little bit about them.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yes, Virginia Hall makes a cameo appearance in The Map Maker.
She was an American woman who worked with resistance, initially
with the British SOE, and then she eventually began working
through the American OSS, and she's a legend in American
intelligence circles. In fact, to this day, the OSS Society
presents an annual award called the Virginia Hall Award, to
(33:39):
people who've made significant contributions to American intelligence and special operations.
Another real world figure who makes a cameo appearance is
another literary hero of mine, the French author and aviator
Antoine de Sonic superre and he was a photo recon
pilot for the French Air Force and then he spent
(34:00):
part of the war in the US, and then when
his unit got reconstituted in North Africa, he went back
into the fight and continued flying photo recon missions in
this modified version of the P thirty eight, and sadly
he was lost during the war. He disappeared on a
photo recon mission in nineteen forty four. And his writing
(34:24):
was part of what got be fascinated both with World
War II and with flying. I can remember when I
was a kid in the seventies in rural North Carolina
going into our public library and going to the card
catalog and looking for anything to do with flying. And
they had a number of his books, and one of
them was a book called Flight to Aras, which was
(34:45):
his memoir of flying photo recon missions for the French
Air Force during the Battle of France in nineteen forty.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
That's Tom Young. The novel is The Map Maker. When
we come back more reflections on the French Resistance. I'm
Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans' Chronicles.
I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Tom Young.
He's a veteran of the Maryland and West Virginia Air
(35:13):
National Guard. He served as a flight engineer aboard the
C one, thirty Hercules and C five Galaxy transport planes.
Earlier in our conversation, he described the duties of the
flight engineer and even described coming under enemy fire while
flying into and out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those deployments
(35:34):
are also where he first got ideas for his early novels,
and he started writing his first one when he and
his crew were in South Korea for a few days
waiting for parts to come to repair their plane. Young
has now released his ninth novel. It's called The Map Maker.
It focuses on the French Resistance during World War Two
(35:54):
and how it collaborated with the Allies to pass along
critical intelligence to benefit the war. Effort that required high
stakes efforts by resistance members to find Allies and avoid
the Germans, and you could never be too sure whom
you could trust. Young says, it took immense courage and resolve.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
It's hard to convey just how dangerous it was and
just how brave those people were, because, as you say,
there was danger at every intersection, and even the people
that they should have been able to trust. You know,
if they're captured and turned you know, someone's going to
stand up under torture only for so long. So even
(36:38):
if there's somebody that you know to be loyal, you
know you can trust them, Okay, if they get captured
and interrogated, how long are they going to hold out?
In fact, one of the things I learned during my
research was that resistance agents were asked to try to
hold out for twenty four hours if they were captured
(36:58):
and interrogated. Recognized that nobody was going to stand up
under torture forever, but they set a goal of trying
to hold out for just twenty four hours because that
would give the other people with whom they'd been working
time to go to ground, maybe time to get out
of the region, time to do whatever they could do
to protect themselves. But that was a goal that they set,
(37:21):
just try not to talk for twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
There's a couple more questions here time on this fascinating book,
The Map Maker. In addition to enjoying a fantastic story,
which I highly endorse folks picking up and reading, what
do you want folks to learn about the French resistance,
because you mentioned it's one of those corners of the
war that a lot of people don't understand. With a
lot of death.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
There are so many stories about people who endured so
much and sacrifice so much in World War II that
we just don't hear. And I think people should know
what that generation did for us to fight Nazism and
fascism and to preserve the freedoms that we have. So
(38:05):
much of it is not taught in schools. You know,
when you're in high school, there's so much history to learn.
You can't spend a whole semester just on World War Two,
but you know, you at least learn that it's there,
and you learn that there's more history to learn as
you have time. But there's just so many fascinating stories,
and so much happened in World War Two over so
(38:26):
much of the world, and such a what now seems
like a fairly brief period of time that historians are
still learning about it. So, you know, unless you already
have a degree in history, there's always plenty more to
learn about World War Two, and even the professionals are
still learning more about it.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
So It's just an.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Absolutely fascinating part of history and it shaped the world
that we live in today. Another thing I hope people
get from the French Resistance is or get from the
storylories of the French resistance and the French in World
War Two is a lot of people have this mistaken
idea that the French just dropped their rifles and gave up,
(39:09):
And it wasn't like that at all. They were overmatched
by the German military, there were some bad political decisions
made prior to the war and that sort of thing.
But the individual French, many of them, were so brave
and they were pretty tough in World War One as well,
and we tend to forget that, and then people tend
to forget that they were America's first ally and we
(39:31):
may not have won at Yorktown had it not been
for French assistance. So a sharp salute to the French.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Lastly, what are you most proud of your own service?
Speaker 2 (39:42):
That would be hard to say, I would I guess
I would say I'm proud to have served with such
good people and in such good units. Both the one
thirty fifth Airlift Wing the one sixty seventh Airlift Wing
were fantastic units with high standards, wonderful people, very effective
at their missions, and I was just honored to get
(40:05):
to be a part of all that.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
That's Tom Young, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who
served as a flight engineer aboard the C one thirty
Hercules and the C five Galaxy transport planes. His latest
novel is The Map Maker, which focuses on the French
resistance in World War Two. I'm Greg Corumbus and this
is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks
(40:39):
for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American
Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter dot org.
You can also follow the American Veterans Center on Facebook
and on Twitter. We're at AVC update. Subscribe to the
American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full oral history and
(41:00):
special features, and of course, please subscribe to the Veterans
Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening,
and please join us next time for Veterans Chronicles
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is Tom Young, a veteran of the Maryland
and West Virginia Air National Guard. He served as a
flight engineer aboard the C one, thirty Hercules and C
five Galaxy transport planes. He's a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.
He's also the author of nine military themed novels. The
(00:32):
latest is The Map Maker, which centers on the French
resistance in World War Two. Tom Young was born on
his family's farm in North Carolina, and there was also
a history of military service in his lineage.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
My grandfather served in World War II. He was a
B seventeen mechanic with the legendary eighth Air Force. So
I grew up hearing his stories from World War Two.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
And what interested you in joining the Air National Guard
and why specifically the Guard as opposed to another branch
of the service.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, I'd always had an interest in flying, but I've
had an unlikely dual career in aviation and in writing
in journalism. As I mentioned, my grandfather was a World
War Two veteran, an eight Air Force veteran, and his
stories were part of what sparked my interest in flying.
(01:26):
But I also had an interest in journalism and writing,
and when I started college at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, I seriously considered going through Air
Force ROTC and pursuing a full time active duty Air
Force career. But I also had this interest in journalism,
and in my youthful ignorance, I thought I had to
(01:49):
choose one or the other and never look back. So
for a long time I pursued journalism pretty single mindedly.
I worked with the broadcast division of the Associated Press
in Washington. But during that time I also began taking
private pilot flying lessons, and that was like throwing gas
on a fire. I found out I loved flying. I
(02:10):
had a passion for it. I dare say I had
an attitude for it, and I wanted to experience more
of it, so I joined the Air National Guard. By
the time I joined the Guard, I got a late start.
I was above the age limit for pilot training, but
there was no age limit for flight engineer training as
long as you enlisted by age thirty five. So I
(02:31):
became a flight engineer, initially on the sea one thirty
Hercules just loved it. It really enjoyed flying as a
flight engineer. And then when the one sixty seventh Airlift
Wing converted to the C five Galaxy, I spent the
last eight years of my career on the C five.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Well, let's talk about the planes. First of all, the
Sea one thirty Hercules. He said just a minute ago
that that she loved it. What did you love about it?
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I just loved that aircraft.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It's it can do anything. It always brought me home safely,
beautifully designed aircraft. They're still making C one thirties. Of course,
the J models they make now are quite different from
the A models that first began flying, I believe in
nineteen fifty four. But it's such a tough, versatile aircraft.
(03:14):
It's why it's still around. It's why it's still being made.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
And then the C five, I know, it's a lot bigger,
So talk about what that plane was like to deal with.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
The C five was very different. And when our unit
first began to convert from the C one thirty to
the C five, silly me I thought, well, it's another
Lockheed aircraft and it's still an airlift mission. How different
could it be? Oh? I didn't know anything. It was
a very different aircraft with a different mission. We were
going from tactical airlift to strategic airlift, and it was
(03:46):
just a different lifestyle. A tactical airlift involves essentially moving
cargo around within a theater of operation. Strategic airlift is
taking very large loads of cargo all the way from
the US to the theater of operation and then flying
all the way back to the US. So it involves long,
long legs of flying very long days. Often your days
(04:10):
are overnight. So it was quite a culture change.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
And so if you're going all the way to Afghanistan
or Iraq, how many times would you have to stop
and refuel to get from one place to the other.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
It would depend on how the mission was planned. Most
often what we would do was we take off from
an East coast base wherever we picked up cargo, and
that could be Dover, that could be Charleston, it could
be Maguire, any number of bases on the East coast,
and then you fly overnight, usually to stay overnight either
at Roda Naval Air Station in Spain or Ramstein Air
(04:45):
Base in Germany, and then after crew rest, you would
continue the leg either to bag Dad perhaps if you're
going to Iraq, or to Bogram Air Base if you're
going to Afghanistan. We had an aerial refueling capability, but
we didn't use that all the time because that's the
most expensive way to refuel. We would use it when
(05:06):
we had to, but it's not something you always planned
on doing. To give you a good example of a
time when it was necessary involves my last deployment. It
was in two thousand and twelve and the one hundred
and first Aviation Brigade was swapping out helicopters with the
(05:27):
eighty second. We were involved in something called a multi
mode operation to swap those helicopters in and out, and
it was intricately planned like clockwork. The inbound helicopters came
to Rota on ships, then they were loaded on our
C fives with the rotors folded up. Of course, we
(05:48):
would fly them into Afghanistan, offload the inbound helicopters, onload
the outbound helicopters. You couldn't take off during the day
with a load that heavy and have enough fuel to
do much of anything, so the mission was cut so
that we would take off at night when it was
cooler aircraft performance would be better, but even then you
(06:10):
couldn't put on enough fuel to fly from Bogram all
the way back to Roda. So we would take off
from Afghanistan, refuel in the air, and then fly back
to Rota.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Walk us through your duties as a flight engineer.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
The flight engineer does not steer the aircraft, but he
or she monitors and operates all the systems such as hydraulics, electrics, pressurization,
all of that sort of thing. To give you a
mental picture if you've ever seen any photos or videos
of some of the larger, older transport aircraft. Of course
(06:45):
you see the pilot and co pilots sitting in the
front two seats, but then there's a third seat with
someone sitting facing to the right at a great big
panel of switches and instruments. That's the flight engineer on
some and that's on the C five and other aircraft
like the seven forty seven in the Sea one thirty,
(07:06):
and for that matter, in other aircraft like the P
three oryon the engineer is not sitting facing to the right,
but he's sitting between and slightly after the pilots, and
his panel is overhit. But generally speaking, flight engineer positions
have this position where you're facing to the right, so
you're monitoring all the systems, but you're also the crew mathematician.
(07:29):
It's the engineer's responsibility to calculate things like takeoff speed,
clomb rate, fuel consumption, take off distance, fuel burn, landing distance,
anything to do with aircraft performance.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Did you ever come under fire?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yes, oh, yes, a lot of Sea one thirty crews
came under fire. Nothing ever hit an aircraft that I
was in. In fact, to my knowledge, I don't think
anything ever hit any of the one sixty sevenths aircraft,
but there were one sixty seven, or rather there were
UH Sea one thirties that were struck by fire in
(08:06):
UH I know in Iraq and probably in Afghanistan as well.
I credit luck for part of that, but also I
credit the one sixty seventh high standards of training and readiness.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
At that time.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
We had an excellent wing commander, a Colonel Jesse Thomas,
and he made sure that by the time we got there,
we were very familiar with things like flying on night
vision goggles, running those combat entry entrants and and exit checklists.
He made sure his unit was ready before we got there.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
What's that like the first time people are shooting at you.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
It happened so fast you don't have time to get scared.
And of course I realized coming under fire is very
different depending on where you are and what your situation is.
It's very different. I'm sure probably a lot worse for
troops on the ground. But if you're in a C
(09:08):
one thirty flying over Iraq at night, it just happens
so quickly. You hear the missile warning system go off,
the defensive flares launch, and it's over in an instant.
And as I say, you don't have time to get scared.
If you get scared, it's later when you look back
(09:29):
on it and you think what could have happened.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Thinking about those particular planes, they're not known for their elusiveness,
So is there any sort of evasive action taken?
Speaker 2 (09:37):
There are maneuvers you can take, and you would be
surprised how effective it can be in a C one thirty.
It's been a while, so I don't remember exactly what's
classified and what's not, so I won't get into details.
But see one thirty is with their defensive systems and
with their defensive tactics are more then you might think.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Is there any particular incident that stays with you as
perhaps being the most intense enemy fire or the.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Most intense happened in May of three. We had just
taken off from Baghdad, and this was about eleven o'clock
at night, and I suppose some of the insurgents decided
that night they wanted to take out an airlifter, and
they were waiting some distance off the end of the
runway for the next aircraft to come along. And as
(10:30):
we're climbing out, and this is still at fairly low altitude,
all of a sudden, in much less time than it
takes to tell it, we hear the warning system tones
go off, the defensive flares launched automatically. The flares are
hotter than the heat signature of your engines, and they
help defeat a heat seeking missile. So you hear these
(10:52):
gosh off warning tones, the flares punch, and the flight
deck lights up like the sun because of those flares.
And then instantly, because we have had a very alert,
very good aircraft commander, he racks the aircraft into a
hard turn, and people were making the call outs they're
supposed to make to do the things you're supposed to
(11:14):
do in that situation, and just like that, it's over.
And then the flight day gets really quiet, and we
climb up to altitude and we flew the rest of
the way back to Massira Island. And since then we've
often discussed about how quiet the rest of that flight was.
(11:34):
There wasn't much more conversation except for what was required
to do checklists, and I think it was because everybody
was reflecting on what could have happened.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
That's Tom Young, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as
a flight engineer with the Air National Guard. When we
come back, we'll focus on the French resistance and Young's
new book, The Map Maker. I'm Greg Corumbus and this
is Veterans Chronicles Sixty Seconds of Service.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
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Speaker 1 (12:57):
This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest in
this edition is Tom Young, a veteran of the Maryland
and West Virginia Air National Guard. He served in Iraq
and Afghanistan as a flight engineer aboard C one thirty
Hercules and C five Galaxy transport planes. He's also the
author of nine novels. The latest is The Map Maker,
(13:18):
about the French resistance in World War Two. One of
the fascinating aspects of the novel is that Young's main
characters are fictional, but he has them carrying out missions
that really happened. So I asked him how he weaved
fact and fiction for this novel.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
That required some research, but it was fascinating research and
I had a lot of fun looking into it. And
the reason I picked that subject matter is now we're
in the eightieth year since the end of World War Two,
so World War Two is pretty well tilled ground for
fiction by now. So I try to look for some
of the lesser known corners of World War II history,
(13:56):
and for me, one of those corners was the French
resistance and the air operations that supported it. So when
I began looking into that, I found that fascinating and
thought that would be a good corner to explore.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
So the way I set up.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
The initial conflict in The Map Makers, I have two
main characters. One is a French American woman named Charlotte Denoux.
She's a resistance agent and she used to be an
art student, so she has turned her talents to drawing
maps and charts and diagrams on German positions and capabilities
to give targeting information to the resistance and to the Allies.
(14:37):
The problem is she's a little too good, and the
Gestapo knows about her. So she's on the run as
the novel opens, on the run across occupied France, trying
to stay a step ahead of the Gestapo and keep
them from dragging her into an interrogation chamber. And what
she really needs is a ride. She needs a flight
out because she needs to stay away from the Gestapo
(14:57):
and she still has important information to get to the Allies.
My other main character is a French pilot, Phelipe Gerard.
He is entirely fictional, but the things he does are
historically based. He was a pilot for the French Air Force.
After the fall of France, he got out of France
and made his way to Britain where he joined the
(15:18):
British Royal Air Force, and there were a lot of
pilots from Nazi occupied countries who did that. So as
the novel opens, he's flying for the RAF in what
the RAF called a Special Duties Squadron nowadays we'd call
it Special Operations and his unit flies light single engine aircraft,
the Westland Lysander, in and out of occupied France by night,
(15:42):
navigating by moonlight to land in clandestine airfields like a
farmer's pasture and deliver supplies and ammunition to the resistance,
or to pick up agents sometimes to bring them to
Britain for consultations, and then to fly them back in
and go right back into the fray. It's a hell
of a way to commute to and from work. They
actually did this, and Philippe gets task with the job
(16:04):
of finding Charlotte and flying her out. But that's harder
than it sounds, because she's on the run and she
can't stay in one place for any length of time. Plus,
even if Philippe does get information on her whereabouts, does
he trust that information or is it a Nazi trap?
So that's the opening setup for the map maker.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Well exactly, because I believe the very first sequence in
the book is that he lands in a place where
it basically was a trap. It'll be too many spoilers here,
but in terms of how this was arranged, because obviously,
when people think of the formal French military, obviously the
Nazis swept through France in about a month and a half.
The miracle at Dunkirk saves a lot of lives. Obviously,
(16:47):
how did they connect and organize with these figures still
in France to set up these networks focusing on different
things and having these codes arranged where you could identify, yes,
this is the right person I'm supposed to meet. It
seems very intricate and elaborate, but it seems like it
had to have been done on the fly pretty much.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
It was very intricate, and it was done on the fly.
And that's part of what makes the French resistance so amazing,
because you know, after the French military has been taken down,
who's going to serve in the resistance but volunteers. Whoever volunteers.
One of the books I read for research made a
fascinating point. It said, for the most part, the French
(17:27):
resistance was amateurs going up against the best trained police
force in the world, the Gestapo.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
But they did have.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Some help in getting organized, initially from the British, from
the British Special Operations Executive, and they would parachute in
an agent to help the resistance organize into various cells.
They call them circuits, and there was sometimes not a
(17:57):
lot of communication between the various circuits, and that was
by design, so that if one circuit got taken down,
or if a number of people from one circuit got arrested,
there would be a limit to how much information you
could get out of them. And then later when the
US was involved in the war, the forerunner of the CIA,
the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, also got involved
(18:20):
in coordinating with the resistance. But that was one of
the biggest challenges, was to how to coordinate and organize
these cells, how to herd these cats, but at the
same time not have them too linked, because you wanted
plausible deniability and you know, that sort of thing for
security purposes. So it was really quite a challenge. And
the trade craft that they used, you know, the coded
(18:42):
transmissions and things on the radio, was just absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Tom Young is a veteran of the Maryland and West
Virginia Air National Guard, serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan
as a flight engineer aboard C one thirty Hercules and
C five Galaxy transport planes. His latest novel is The
Map Maker, focusing on the French resistance during World War Two.
When We Come Back. Young's expertise and love of flying
(19:06):
comes through in the novel. We'll also discuss just how
important the French resistance was to the overall success of
the Allies and just how vicious the Nazi, Gestapo and
SS forces were towards French civilians. I'm Greg Corumbus and
this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus.
(19:26):
Our guest is Tom Young, and we're talking about his
new novel, The Map Maker, and we pick up the
conversation with Young explaining how he incorporated aviation extensively into
the novel.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Well, history dictated that the Special Duty Squadron that I
assigned Felipe to in the novel really existed, and they
flew the Westland Lysander, so that was an easy choice.
The light aircraft he flies from France when he steals it,
that was a commonly used light aircraft in France. And
(19:59):
then when his French Air Force unit is reconstituted in
North Africa, that real world unit was assigned the photo
reconvariant of the P thirty eight Lightning. So all of
that was dictated by real world history and as far
as researching how those aircraft were flown. Oddly enough, I
(20:19):
found YouTube to be a very valuable resource because someone,
probably several someones, has done US authors and historians a
great favor by uploading the YouTube a lot of World
War Two era training films, and those films are excellent.
Back then, the War Department enlisted a lot of a
list Hollywood talent to make those films, and they're fantastic.
(20:41):
They're as good as anything any training film I ever
saw in the military, except what I saw was in color,
and they were in black and white. And you can
find on YouTube a training film from World War II
on anything. You can imagine how to feel strip an
M one rifle, how they packed parachutes back then, how
they use those great big backpack radios, and how they
(21:03):
operated most of the aircraft of that era. You can
find a training film that walks you through the checklist
from pre flight to shutdown, and if you're an aviation
geek like I am, you can get lost in that stuff.
And then one of the challenges becomes not overloading the
reader with too much of that detail.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
It's also interesting the time frame in the war that
you chose here, because the fall of France to the Nazis,
of course, came in nineteen forty, and so Philip has
been doing what he's been doing pretty much ever since then.
We pick it up in the summer in nineteen forty
three in your novel, and it's feeling pretty bleak, pretty hopeless.
He's not even sure why he's still doing this. There's
(21:45):
a backstory to something he feels guilt over. How does
that kind of help us understand what the mood the
outlook was at that point in the war, kind of
between forty and forty three, where not a lot was
going really well.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
In nineteen forty three, things really did look bleak for
the French resistance. The Germans had pretty much rolled up
one of the most effective circuits or cells. One of
the high ranking French resistance agents, Jean Moulon, who had
been sent into France to try to organize these various
(22:20):
circuits to the extent possible, and he had been captured.
So things looked very bad for the resistance at that time,
but they pressed on despite the odds and eventually prevailed.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
There's also kind of an interesting amalgamation of groups that
are part of the resistance, but they're very different from
one another. So for example, when Charlotte's on the run,
she runs into one group that's not one that she's
real familiar with. Then they end up with a bunch
of Spaniards for a while, and then they've got a
trust communists to get them to different points. So talk
about how the resistance was kind of this.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Hodgepides, Yes, when I referred to herding the cats early,
I was not being entirely facetious. There were really very
widely disparate groups participating in the resistance, and sometimes they
were across purposes. And part of the challenge that Jean
Mulan had before he was captured, and part of the
challenge that for example, Charles de Gaulle had trying to
(23:19):
influence events from where he was in Britain at the time,
was organizing these groups and it was quite a challenge.
And one of the things I tried to do in
The Map Maker was to give the reader something of
a tour of some of the things the French resistance
was doing. And Charlotte being on the run across France
(23:40):
was a good excuse to do that. So I chose
a handful of real world things that the resistance got
involved in and had Charlotte give a look at those
events from her point of view, and sometimes from Philippe's
point of view. For example, there is a part in
(24:00):
the novel where she takes shelter with the resistance cell
that is participating in this absolutely brilliant effort to break
prisoners out of a prison in Amnion, France. The Germans
were using that prison to house resistance prisoners. The British
(24:21):
Special Operations Executive received intelligence that the Germans were about
to execute all or most of the prisoners in that prison,
so they came up with this brilliant operation to use
light bombers to come in at low level and bomb
the walls of the prison, to breach the walls to
give the prisoners a chance to escape. It was just
(24:42):
an absolutely daring, brilliant mission and it would be challenging now,
I imagine with laser guided bombs. And they pulled this off
with nineteen forties technology, you know, a chart and a
stopwatch and a vector bomb site. But they really did this.
These mosquito bombers came in solo. You read the accounts
says their propa wash was kicking up, snow bombed very
(25:03):
accurately for that day. Don't hold me to the numbers,
but roughly I believe there were about eight hundred prisoners
in the prison. Of course, some died from collateral damage
from the bombing about one hundred, which made it controversial.
About two hundred and fifty. Some got out, Many of
them were recaptured, but some got out and stayed gone.
(25:26):
And even though a number of them were lost in
the mission, one could argue that having any of them
escape is better than having all of them executed. Just
absolutely fascinating real world history. And so that's one of
the things that Charlotte participates in in the course of
The Map Maker. And it's funny. Back in May, my
(25:48):
wife and I were doing a tour of World War
II sites in Europe and we stopped for lunch in
amy On, France. The prison was not on the tour,
but the bus just happened to drive right by that prison.
And if you look at contemporary photos from the war,
it's it's out in the country where prisons are usually built.
(26:10):
Since then, the suburbs have kind of encircled it, so
it's it's not in the country anymore. But it really
surprised me to drive right by it.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
And of course, you know the focal point of the
title of The Map Maker. That's that's the very valuable
thing that Charlotte's got with her for the vast majority
of the novel, the value of the drawings, the intel
that then got back to England and US and British planners.
Just how critical was that intelligence to D Day, Operation
(26:39):
Dragoon and everything else that followed thereafter.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
It was very critical. And one of the things I
learned as I researched the Resistance for this novel is
how so much of what the Resistance did was aimed
specifically toward tripping up and impeding the German forces during
an after D Day. They weren't just looking to pop
(27:03):
in a German soldier wherever they could find them. They
weren't just looking to carry out random acts of sabotage.
They did carry out a lot of sabotage, but there
was there was more of a purpose behind it than
just doing whatever damage they could anywhere. The main thrust
was to impede the Germans once the Allies came ashore UH.
(27:27):
To give you an example, there was a h notorious
Panzer division that was UH located in south central France.
They responded to D Day. They were told to move forward,
and had they not been impeded by the Resistance, if
my memory serves, they could have traveled from their base
(27:48):
to Normandy in about three days, but because of the
harassment and u impeding operations of the resistance, it took
them two weeks.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
That made a significant difference. Then in the battle Normandy,
it was hard anyway, but just little delays here and
there was a big advantage exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
In fact, there was a broadcast that went out on
or immediately after D Day, a broadcast in French to
French citizens that basically said, anything you can do to
slow down the Germans for any amount of time is
going to be helpful. You know, if your car breaks
(28:28):
down in an intersection, if you do anything to delay
them any way anywhere, it helps. So everyone was asked
to do their part for you, whatever they could do.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
And at that point they weren't even broadcasting cryptically, they
were literally just saying get in their way. Exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
It was by the n it was in the clear.
But speaking of broadcasting and tradecraft, another fascinating thing is
how the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, would help send
coded messages to the resistance. There was a program in
French that they broadcast. I believe the title in English
(29:09):
would be the French Talk to France or something like that,
ostensibly UNUS and information program for the French, but they'd
get to the end of the program and they would
have what were presented as personal messages, something like Marie
sends greetings for her grandmother's birthday. Well, that might be
(29:29):
a coded message that means blow that bridge tonight. Just
fascinating stuff that they did.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
One of the other things I think comes through very
well in your novel is the cruelty, just the vicious
cruelty of whether we're talking about the SS or the Gestapo.
I mean, obviously we know very well the unspeakable atrocities
committed to the East, and the concentration camps and the
death camps and that sort of thing, but the way
they also treated everyday citizens, especially if they were suspected
(29:57):
of being subversives. Talk about that with the s S
and the Gestapo, and just the terror that they inflicted
wherever they happened.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
To be exactly they tried to rule by terror. A
moment ago I was discussing the Panzer division, it was
slowed down by the resistance. They took vengeance for that.
They essentially wiped out the village of Orodor. Sir Glenn
in France. I think they killed six hundred and some people.
(30:25):
After the war, Charles de Gaull made the decision to
maintain the ruins of Orodor as a memorial to what happened,
So to this day you can see the rusted cars
of that era, the burned out buildings, all of that
remained as a memorial to the sacrifice of the people there.
(30:48):
But yeah, the SS pretty much wiped out a village
full of civilians to take revenge.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
We also, at various points have fictionalized bulletins from Klaus Sparby,
the butcher of Leon. Why'd you decide to bring him
in as a real life character in this novel?
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Well, I will fess up to borrowing that technique from
one of my literary heroes. Hermann Wooke, the author of
The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, and some other
Great World War Two novels. He intersperses The Winds of
War and War in Remembrance with memoirs from a fictitious
German general, General Armand von Run, and that way he
(31:30):
gives the German perspective as the story advances. So similarly,
I use memoranda from Klaus Barbie to give the German
perspective as the story advances and as the Gestapo is
pursuing Charlotte pursuing other members of the resistance. Those memos
are completely fictional. I just made those up. But sadly
I did not make up Klaus Barbie. He is all
(31:52):
too real. As you mentioned, he's known as the Butcher
of Leone. He was known to have personally tortured resistance
agents and for a long time he evaded justice. He
got out of Europe at the end of the war
and made his way to South America, where he lived
for decades under the alias Klaus Altman, and then in
nineteen seventy one, the Nazi hunters Serge and Beata Clarsfeld
(32:16):
identified him as living in South America. After a lengthy process,
he was eventually extradited to France, tried for war crimes,
and he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison
in nineteen eighty seven. He didn't live long after that.
He died of cancer, I believe in nineteen ninety one.
And just a funny story from the other part of
(32:37):
my life. When I first started working with the broadcast
division of the Associated Press, that was in eighty seven
when Barbie was on trial. I was not a foreign correspondent.
I did not go to France to cover the trial,
but I do remember writing brief items for the broadcast
wire on that trial, and now all these years later,
(32:57):
I put him on a novel.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
It's also some real life people that you weave in.
Besides Klaus Barbie. One is a female resistance figure who
is briefly on the boat at one point with Charlotte,
and another one is a pilot that Felipe interacts with
quite a bit, So tell us a little bit about them.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yes, Virginia Hall makes a cameo appearance in The Map Maker.
She was an American woman who worked with resistance, initially
with the British SOE, and then she eventually began working
through the American OSS, and she's a legend in American
intelligence circles. In fact, to this day, the OSS Society
presents an annual award called the Virginia Hall Award, to
(33:39):
people who've made significant contributions to American intelligence and special operations.
Another real world figure who makes a cameo appearance is
another literary hero of mine, the French author and aviator
Antoine de Sonic superre and he was a photo recon
pilot for the French Air Force and then he spent
(34:00):
part of the war in the US, and then when
his unit got reconstituted in North Africa, he went back
into the fight and continued flying photo recon missions in
this modified version of the P thirty eight, and sadly
he was lost during the war. He disappeared on a
photo recon mission in nineteen forty four. And his writing
(34:24):
was part of what got be fascinated both with World
War II and with flying. I can remember when I
was a kid in the seventies in rural North Carolina
going into our public library and going to the card
catalog and looking for anything to do with flying. And
they had a number of his books, and one of
them was a book called Flight to Aras, which was
(34:45):
his memoir of flying photo recon missions for the French
Air Force during the Battle of France in nineteen forty.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
That's Tom Young. The novel is The Map Maker. When
we come back more reflections on the French Resistance. I'm
Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans' Chronicles.
I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Tom Young.
He's a veteran of the Maryland and West Virginia Air
(35:13):
National Guard. He served as a flight engineer aboard the
C one, thirty Hercules and C five Galaxy transport planes.
Earlier in our conversation, he described the duties of the
flight engineer and even described coming under enemy fire while
flying into and out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those deployments
(35:34):
are also where he first got ideas for his early novels,
and he started writing his first one when he and
his crew were in South Korea for a few days
waiting for parts to come to repair their plane. Young
has now released his ninth novel. It's called The Map Maker.
It focuses on the French Resistance during World War Two
(35:54):
and how it collaborated with the Allies to pass along
critical intelligence to benefit the war. Effort that required high
stakes efforts by resistance members to find Allies and avoid
the Germans, and you could never be too sure whom
you could trust. Young says, it took immense courage and resolve.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
It's hard to convey just how dangerous it was and
just how brave those people were, because, as you say,
there was danger at every intersection, and even the people
that they should have been able to trust. You know,
if they're captured and turned you know, someone's going to
stand up under torture only for so long. So even
(36:38):
if there's somebody that you know to be loyal, you
know you can trust them, Okay, if they get captured
and interrogated, how long are they going to hold out?
In fact, one of the things I learned during my
research was that resistance agents were asked to try to
hold out for twenty four hours if they were captured
(36:58):
and interrogated. Recognized that nobody was going to stand up
under torture forever, but they set a goal of trying
to hold out for just twenty four hours because that
would give the other people with whom they'd been working
time to go to ground, maybe time to get out
of the region, time to do whatever they could do
to protect themselves. But that was a goal that they set,
(37:21):
just try not to talk for twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
There's a couple more questions here time on this fascinating book,
The Map Maker. In addition to enjoying a fantastic story,
which I highly endorse folks picking up and reading, what
do you want folks to learn about the French resistance,
because you mentioned it's one of those corners of the
war that a lot of people don't understand. With a
lot of death.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
There are so many stories about people who endured so
much and sacrifice so much in World War II that
we just don't hear. And I think people should know
what that generation did for us to fight Nazism and
fascism and to preserve the freedoms that we have. So
(38:05):
much of it is not taught in schools. You know,
when you're in high school, there's so much history to learn.
You can't spend a whole semester just on World War Two,
but you know, you at least learn that it's there,
and you learn that there's more history to learn as
you have time. But there's just so many fascinating stories,
and so much happened in World War Two over so
(38:26):
much of the world, and such a what now seems
like a fairly brief period of time that historians are
still learning about it. So, you know, unless you already
have a degree in history, there's always plenty more to
learn about World War Two, and even the professionals are
still learning more about it.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
So It's just an.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Absolutely fascinating part of history and it shaped the world
that we live in today. Another thing I hope people
get from the French Resistance is or get from the
storylories of the French resistance and the French in World
War Two is a lot of people have this mistaken
idea that the French just dropped their rifles and gave up,
(39:09):
And it wasn't like that at all. They were overmatched
by the German military, there were some bad political decisions
made prior to the war and that sort of thing.
But the individual French, many of them, were so brave
and they were pretty tough in World War One as well,
and we tend to forget that, and then people tend
to forget that they were America's first ally and we
(39:31):
may not have won at Yorktown had it not been
for French assistance. So a sharp salute to the French.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Lastly, what are you most proud of your own service?
Speaker 2 (39:42):
That would be hard to say, I would I guess
I would say I'm proud to have served with such
good people and in such good units. Both the one
thirty fifth Airlift Wing the one sixty seventh Airlift Wing
were fantastic units with high standards, wonderful people, very effective
at their missions, and I was just honored to get
(40:05):
to be a part of all that.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
That's Tom Young, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who
served as a flight engineer aboard the C one thirty
Hercules and the C five Galaxy transport planes. His latest
novel is The Map Maker, which focuses on the French
resistance in World War Two. I'm Greg Corumbus and this
is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks
(40:39):
for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American
Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter dot org.
You can also follow the American Veterans Center on Facebook
and on Twitter. We're at AVC update. Subscribe to the
American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full oral history and
(41:00):
special features, and of course, please subscribe to the Veterans
Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening,
and please join us next time for Veterans Chronicles
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