When my mom goes to England she will always stop in a used bookstore or two and get a couple of history books for me. Most are good, some poor, and some extraordinary. One trip she sent me one titled A Thousand Shall Fall by Hans Habe. It didn't look like much but it was about a part of WWII I had never read much about so I figured a poor book was better than nothing.
Wow! It was amazing.
It starts off in an international brigade in the French army at the start of WWII. Hans Habe was a Hungarian Jew who joined the brigade to help fight Hitler. I never read much about the German blitz into France – most history sums it up as the Germans came in fast with tanks and the British pulled off an amazing retreat at Dunkirk. But the actual movement and fighting between the Germans & French – not much written about that.
So I'm reading this and it's from the perspective of a smart & worldly soldier in a brigade. So he knows what they are doing, but not any of the larger picture. Ok, that's a good perspective. So you see them prepare to fight the Germans, then are ordered to pull back to a better line. They pull back and prepare, and again are ordered to pull back. Throughout all of this he discusses the esprit-de-core in the brigade which is high. They want to fight the Germans. They want to protect France. They are ready to fight and die to stop or even delay the German army.
As you are reading and the retreat back again and again, never stopping to fight, always on orders from higher up, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach. They never fought. Yes there were some small skirmishes with recon units. But no serious battle. Now this is one person's viewpoint but reading this book you get the impression that while the troops wanted to fight, the French general staff was unwilling to do so.
Now granted WWI had been horrible for France. And the memory of the devastating losses they sustained were still fresh in everyone's mind. But normally in that case the one group you would expect to still be willing to fight is the military leadership as that is what they have trained for their entire life. If anyone will be unwilling to fight, it would be the enlisted men. But here you had the exact opposite where the troops wanted to fight and their leaders had given up. (And as I said above, this is one person's viewpoint.)
Ok, so the brigade was told to surrender. Unfortunately for Hans that would mean death as he was considered a political enemy due to his writing in Austria (before the Anschluss). The next part of the book concerns his running across France trying to escape. It is a story of a French populace that was very scared and the reaction when he asked for help spanned the gamut from hostility to substantial help. In the course of running he was able to take over the identity of a French soldier.
He was captured, but captured as a French soldier and then placed in a prison camp. The book then takes you through the life in the camps including the almost banal everyday corruption of the German guards all the way up to the commanders of the camps. It also includes one moment that could have been the end of everything – when being transported one time one of the German guards kept looking at him quizzically. When it was just the two of them the guard told Hans that he had been a waiter in a Vienna restaurant that Hans frequented. But because Hans had always been a good tipper, he kept his secret.
Hans worked his way into working in the camp administration and from that vantage point he saw that the Germans were trying to find what prisoners were using fake identification and in those cases determining who people really were. This means he did not have much time left before they would uncover his case. At this point he connected up with the French underground and they got him out of France and he made it to the U.S.
Part of what makes this so good is you have a professional newspaperman & writer who is putting those skills to their own story. And it is a compelling story that is too amazing to be true, yet it is. It's a hard book to find but well worth the effort.

