instant media, was ready, internet traffic soared and we never slowed down, schools and businesses went virtual and we powered a new reality because that media, were built to keep you ahead. >> media, with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> tonight were pleased to welcome sarah rose. e nazis, and helped win world war ii" . in d-day girls sarah draws on recently declassified files, diaries and oral histories to tell the thrilling mostly unknown story of three remarkable women who ambushed not these, plotted present brakes and gather crucial intelligence laying the groundwork for the dd-day invasion that proved to be a turning point in the war. they call the controller in the form of a nonfiction book and booklist in its starred review said this book is

comprehensive and compelling threat readers get to know these amazing women as individuals as their duties unfold against the backdrop of the war. it flows smoothly into biographical details including the french wartime society through the calling it a satisfying mix of social history and biography. sarah rose is the author for china, england stole the world's favorite history she has written for the wall street journal, outside magazine, the saturday evening post . and in 2014 she was awarded a women's prize and travel writing. sarah we're so glad to have you here, thank you. >> thank you all for coming and before i start i want you to know that you have a responsibility here and that is i need you to ask questions . i'm going to get a little bit of a spiel and then i would do a short reading and then the nresponsibility is in your hands. so with that in mind, i want

you to picture all work that is being lost. inyou are three years into it. and you have nothing to celebrate. there isn't a battle that you have succeeded in. your city hasopbeen practically leveled in many respects by a foreign bombing . all of europe is gone. your looking at hitler, there isn't a democracy left on the continent and you geta call from the government and they say we need your help . you have three children. three little girls under the age of six. one is still in diapers and the government says we need your help, we can't quitetell you what we need you todo . but will you come work for us . it will be very dangerous and you might not come home.

odette sansom was a mother with three little girls, from board living in london. she married an englishman and the government called. her husband was at the front though she was a single mother alone and she was given this choice . help england, help europe, help the monarchy. leave your kids behind. and i felt that was a challenging choice. who leaves three little girls potentially motherless and potentiallyparentless ? but odette framed the entire entire conversation in a mother's language. she said what happens to my little girls if england is gone too? if it's not just europe but hitler, the has the last democracy left england is taken over? then where do they go? what kind of world are they growing up in? should i as a mother you

everything i can to make things safe for them even if it means leaving them and so she did. she joined the war. she was in the very first class of women in combat. 39 women like odette, they were mothers, they were divorcees, some were grandmothers. they ranged from 22 to 55 and they were recruited by an a government agency, a secret agency to parachute into france to arm and train the french resistance that ce that someday and at that moment it was many years hence, when d-day arrived, the day was just this word for the day that everybody came back and the fight went back to the continent. when d-day arrived, there were armed arms in the hands of the occupied nations. there was training that when hitler went to the beaches,

to defend against the invading allies there was someone at the rear carrying them from preventing reinforcements from gettingto the beaches . so odette, 30-year-old single mother with three small kids which gentry trained in parachuting and in secret writing and encryption, in hand-to-hand combat, she learned a hundredweight to kill a man violently with her bare hands. and she is one of 38 women who did the same thing and we don't know about. we don't know about it because men write more histories andwomen don't . until now. so d-day girls is the story of the very first class of the 38 women who were recruited, who were recruited over two years from 1942 to 1944. i wanted to focus on pioneers, the first women to do a man's job and they were

just doing a man's job, they were doing a job that women were forbidden from. there's no more masculine space on earth and in war. hthere's not a culture on the planet that doesn't have a combat taboo for women and children. so their swimming upstream in every single respect and it's not as if the allies got woke in the middle of the war and wanted to like be magnanimous for ewomen. they had run out of men . they are three years into hitler's war and every single man is at the front and there is a very specific need. whoever goes to france has to speak french. they have to be habituated in french. i have to look like a parisian, they have to blended not just to fool the germans because the germans are pretty easily full, their trenches and that .they have to full of french bread three years into the war every able-bodied man as has already been conscripted. winston churchill gives personal approval to send

women into combat because he really loved the real warfare and in part because he didn't have a choice. after dunkirk there were no soldiers in the continent but also because it made good battle sense. you could save 40, 50,000 men in combat if you were to put women in soldiers roles. plyou want would allow them to shoot a gun over london but what general wouldn't try to make use of every available asset? there were women in england who spoke french, who teaches teenager in france how to use a gun and they wanted to go. they should go. so with eywinston churchill's letter,they went . they were the very first women in combat and odette is not alone. she's among the first in her class and lise de baissac was different in every respect. she was dramatic but her

world was an inventor. itwas a romantic thing that she could do to help . and she was very common n sense, she was an aristocrat. she came from riches which is in island off the coast of africa . it had in france after the napoleonic wars. it was used as a stop on the way to empire so she spoke french growing up but she had abritish passport and she lived in paris most of her adult life . she becomes an enemy alien. if she stays in france she will end up in aconcentration camp . so she flees and gets to london where her brother is already working for this government agency. sensor name to a recruiter and for her it's a very commonsense decision. why wouldn't i do everything to say france? there's no balance to it or her. she is in and she's the

second female paratrooper ever in history. but this is the thing that captured my imagination about this story. she was commanding troops in normandy on d-day and we don't know about. there were soldiers under her command answering to her. when the allies arrived. the second in command of the french resistance find enemy lines on the most important day ofthe 20th century you haven't heard her name . she was second parachute paratrooper, second female paratrooper ever and very first paratrooper, her name is andrce borrel and she was 22when she parachuted into france . the first female combat paratrooper. andre was completely different where lease is this colonial high-class upper-class, educated parisian, andre leaves school

at 14 to meet with a girl at a bakery. but when hitler marched into paris, she marched out. with 16 million other frenchmen she walked south of the demarcation line into france. and volunteered to become a member of the red cross. shetrained as a nurse and while working there she joined the underground . she became part of the underground railroad where she helped get 65 allied airmen of france back to england so that they could continue bombing hitler. g 65 is a high number. the entire underground railroad over the course of the war. liberated at 600, she was responsible for one 10th. she's so good at and successful there was a price on her head and at the moment somebody betrayed her and her partner she had to leave france fire the underground railroad.

so she hikes over the these, gets the same and britain's saying she couldn't stay but she says number and i have to getback in the fight . she goes to london. where she trains as a secret agent and parachutes back to france. those to paris, where she becomes a member of the resistance that raises up the entire battery of circuits along the channel coast and head of a d-day landing. so from basically the moment this idea of guerrilla warfare in france takes root as the system of governmental strategy for taking on hitler on the day of an attack that nobody had yet named, women were part of the battleground . and women were there leading troops. making a difference and it's not like these were first and it matters because they were first m. indicate difference. on until this, 1944, a signal

goes down on the bbc to all of france is encoded signal, the french resistance didn't know what they were about to hear and it says that we've been dropping weapons. we've been dropping explosives. we've been treating you and teaching you how to use these. this is the night we need you to put all of that into action. they get the signal on the bbc and the night of june 5 hours yet before the allies arrived and they go to work. they blow up bridges, they blow up train lines. they dropped trees across roads. they take down power lines, they take down phonelines . when the alliesarrive at 6 am , june 6, 1944 normandy is isolated. you can't get there from anywhere else in france. there have been 950 across

roads and main bridges all over france so when hitler wants to get his reinforcements he can't. d-day wasn't a given. it wasnever obvious d-day was going to work . having time for the allies to get their critical supplies and for them to get their backup, get their supplies on theground . every moment, every hour changed the equation of that history. it took three weeks to reinforce the beaches. those were a critical three weeks and it all happened because the french resistance and it all happened because the allies armed the french resistance . the allies were able to arm the french resistance because women were kpart of that. you don't know about it because men writeworld history . until now. so with that in mind, this is a very fun book to write. because not only because it's

a great meaty story, there's no one worse on earth than a nazi and no better story than heroism you don't know about. but it's fun in lots of other respects. it's fun to research because these women were my age and they were every everyday ordinary women. i thought well, if they can do it shouldn't i at least try? so i jumped out of an airplane. i learned to shoot a gun. i went to boot camp because they had to go to a boot camp. i tried to learn morse code, tried to build a radio and went through much of the training they went through only to discover i would make a bad spy . it is not something everybody can do, not just, not only was i not fluent in french i had never spoken any french. the first thing i had to do was look moved to france and learn french . so it was a very fun book to

write, a very fun book to research . very fun to interview veterans and their families but it was also fun to write because you get you get to blow stuff up. so the bit ongoing to read you is about one of my characters. someone who worked with both andre and odette and her name is yvonne. she was 45. she was the first female sabotage agent and they didn't want to send her in to become a grandmother and they thought oh my goodness, are french teenagers, are they going to respect her at all or think theallies are sending some joke ? they must be in such a bad way to be sending grandmothers to train the troops when in fact she was there first and she was incredibly successful at her job . so full's work for parachute perceptions. the whole sky went dark but for the stars and as column

turned to windsor yvonne small party traveled to a village on the river share. petite, barely 5 foot two on her toes she's a student of yoga, a vegetarian whose weight hovered at 80 pounds. she was the only personwho could do the job the allies needed that night . yvonne hung suspended in a parachute harness, or rating lines dangling over relative while searching for the ground. flashlight beam slices through crowd and beyond her like there was nothing but a railway tunnel at night. no hint of light led in mfrom the openings on eitherside of the underpass . there were no noises either but for the steady drip of water somewhere. her hands were cold and sticky and smelled like almonds from the chemical residue of plastic explosive . her clothing was tattered and a pair of underwear she

lunched to run out every night. she looked bedraggled, but also somehow much younger than the year before. in the best possible sense. war took years off yvonne's life said her commanding officer. she looked 15 years younger and had found her needs. her torchlight one of the tracks below revealing the shadowy figure running across the france. there was a straight drop down a, no obstacle and explosives if it were lowered from the air traffic below. the path to the tracks was one of empty and elongated space. yvonne signaled to her man on the way that she had what she needed . a view of the acenter of the tunnel, the depth and rate of the tracks under the sloping hill. she was foisted aloft with precision and by virtue of the delicate stature and flexibility he was the only fl person who could go up through the ventilation shaft .la

she was also the only one who could perform the reconnaissance by education and authority who might lead the mission of french partisans to block the railway all she said i am the only one who has was especially trained. the sabotage party was far from the underground explosion when it began. it was a small flashlight like a bolt of lightning. the sparks blossomed into a blaze of black smoke filled the tunnel . the last breathe like an animal alternating between thebright light of stars board yellow bonfire . the flames grew and consumed the oxygen in the passageway. shockwavesricocheted against the arches, shatter the ball , boulders bricks and debris double downlittering the tracks . yvonne did not need to be near the village to followthe choreography of the e explosion . the blazes, the concussions, on the familiar symphony of elemental chaos roared like

1010 cans crushed at once and lingering longafter . she knew it all too well. she had been home on the night of april 15, 1941 in london with herman boring had limited the blitz. in that one night of precision bombing the bomb damaged st. paul's cathedral, the admiralty, and the national gallery. not the command called it a bombing. declaring we shall go out and bomb rebuilding in britain marked with three stars. they also destroyed yvonne and working-class fellow. near victoria station on k way to parachute minds andthree i was if bombs went off . and the blast took out an entire territory. the store home was leveled. it was the house where she hadraised a daughter through

adulthood and watched a marriage crumble , studied confucian philosophy and practice meditation. whereshe had played boarding house mom to a haphazard collection of bohemians and coops. and it was substantially gone. feelings collapsed on the floors , chimneys severedfrom their surroundings. gas mains exploded, sewage flooded up from pipes .ay at daybreak the neighborhood smelled of charred would and decay. her large edwardian house was declared uninhabitable . everyone survived. except the family cat. it was this t,yvonne said of her cats untimely demise for than anything else which made me somehow determine to fight back. and she did. so with that background i am certain you will have

questions for me and if not i will prompt you. >> please. >> the women in the book of the 38 women only one of his still alive. she is 98 and she is extremely unwell and private. she's in the book however so i got this story almost at the very edge of living memory. there were 438 agents parachuted into france when i started writing there were three alive. there are now otwo. i got to interview one.,so there was a sense of sadness in that this incredible story had passed from memory but it was also an incredible sense of discovery because we don't get access to their files until their dead so i get to be the first historian in some respects to witness the back story. when the commanders thought, what was going on around them.

there are extremely interesting people, i got to know their families many of them but when you have that extra protection you also feel a personal connection. if you feel the desire to tell the stories they want to tell and that they think is important to tell and all that matters is you bend in the direction of hagiography which i didn't want to do. i wanted to tell a story as a journalist and historian and storyteller could do and without feeling obligated i wanted to honor them i also wanted to be to judge and believe that i did. so i did get a chance to talk to people who had lived through this but i didn't attempt to talk to my people. yes, maria. >> this is a very good question.were the women's better than men. the importance diplomatic

answer is everybody that did this was amazing. they went into enemy territory without any of the protections of soldiers and were incredibly brave. they were also incredibly human and many of them made mistakes and the women didn't make more mistakes or different mistakes than men did . they had a higher success rate. a third of the women were captured and killed and half of the men were captured and killed but there were so many more men but it's not a good sample comparison they had aspects that men didn't have allies didn't realize at first. i think the allies would have hired women sooner had they understood how much they were giving up by not hiring women . war always there are more women in occupied territories than there are men. men getcaptured, men get killed . it's in fact an incredibly female place. with on the home front or what's left of the home and in france in particular the armistice wasn't a peace

treaty. and a peace treaty everybody exchanges their soldiers and you have negotiated settlements. the armistice was just kind of applause and hitler kept the french army in jail throughout the war. they were in germany for four or five years which then, there really the entire french army was in prison. there were many many more women in france and there were men. there was also forced labor, construction, sleep work men were shipped off to germany wto build weapons for the war. which meant that sending a man into enemy territory was a pretty obvious move . you could see them, here's a 30-year-old able-bodied man who is not war, isn't in prison and is in a factory. ndthat's kind of an obvious hell. send a woman in and they look like every other person. so there was kind of a natural demographic advantage

. also because the work they were doing was clandestine and the work they were doing was recruited to discovered that women were significantly better than men at four hours say that women have advantage of being women which was a lot of caretaking. to say suspected frenchman, some teenager was about to be shipped off to germany don't go. live in the woods . we will send guns to you and train you u for the day the allies come back. it took a lot of coaxing and controlling and listening to their concerns to get them to do that, to organize them and women are bread from the cradle with comparing and it was a skill men had to learn. so once the allies realize that required a great deal of compassion and caretaking and caretaking at the most basic level. france wasserving . the calories for the french were lower than anywhere else

in europe . it's a fertile place in the french just plundered it so france is starting recruiting farmers to fight for the resistance. they're getting food jobs. and so this became, they needed a lot of female training to do this job. i don't know if they were better work more naturally equipped and they taught the allies that in fact this was a very important part of the job that was being plummeted on the ground. this was the first time at work there had ever been tried. so they were in the plant, they were in this entirely in guerrilla warfare. they discovered that this was animportant job and that women were really good at it . >> there's questions, yes. >> how did you come across this story in the first place? >> i'm a reporter and i had

been doing a lot of freelance work and i really wanted a book. i wanted to sink my teeth into along project. doing a lot of the sprints where you hit send and something comes to the paper the next day and i wanted the marathon again . in 2016 i knew that the us was looking at, exclusion for all, rules. as of january 1 in america a woman could be in any, role a man can be. there's no for being you so you to join the navy seals. and what is interesting is women in war is even more interesting. this book really began in hawaii where i go everywinter . and many of my friends there and the military but you know, my girlfriends are in the military and ethey supply

my preconceived notions of what women in male spaces are. but i think after the 80s there is this notion of female executives, what like ljunior male executives females in the army should be junior males in the army and that is so not who they are. they are incredibly feminine, incredibly credentialed. i don't go hiking with these men andwomen . they are mine blindly interesting people and all of that was an all-male space. while living extremely feminine lives. and women in wars are just being women in male spaces, this new story was coming up. and i was sitting in a hot tub in hawaii. i've sort of asked the question who's the very first woman in war. i thought i would find maybe a great. nonstory. more likely it isan

afghanistan or iraq story where i could point to the first female combatant . a few google searches and a little bit of digging in a library later it wasn't recent. it wasn't even vietnam recent. there were women in combat in the war two. it's this court of women in world war ii i didn't know about it and you didn't know about most of you and we didn't know because men haven't been telling this story. it was with that in mind i did a little bit of reading and i came up with what i thought was the sign of the story and i pitched it to my editor amanda cook bought it and a project began and then i started living in france. >> were there women in combat on the russian side? >> there were women in, on the russian side. 1942 marks the first moment on the russian side. it's happening on the western front behind enemy lines . in the last, there were never

categorized as combatants. the russians had no problem calling them. the russians have a very different i think in part because it's so large had a different approach. for them it was a numbers game. they were throwing bodies and hitler. we had many more of them, you had such a deep pocket, you have all of siberia to recruit from so it was one more forcethat had an overpowering force against it. although in russia , they had, there were was a force of women in the revolutionary , that was a bit of an organized force but again that's sort of not qualifies as combat because it's interstate arguing as opposed to these are the kind of differences that are minute but ultimately sort of adapt

to buy world war ii, by 1942 when women were being recruited they were being recruited hand over fist unless we didn't call them on soldiers and they did but 1942 marks this moment where suddenly women are conscripted on a mass scale the war is going on forever and it's mostly been lost. you need everybody you can get . >> they were treated in england?how did america do with recruiting women. >> it's a good question and i covered a lot of ground. we have a big notion. there are five systems tell, their intelligence agencies were sabotaged. and there were americans in this force. virginia hall access the first woman considered a member of that leave. she was a reporter and she was works for the new york post and by virtue of being american she could go into an occupied france. britain couldn't. british people were not allowed however as an american, america was not in

the war until 1941. she didn't declare war on occupied france until after hitler took it over so she could still get in and she was liaison. what other male agents came and she would get them clothing and housing. she got them ration stamps, them an undergrad into the underground railroad, she had one leg. her leg was named comfort so she's this one leg and american journalist . helping allies out of france and arming and training other agents. and she was american. there's another woman in the core whose name is what con whose mother was a cousin of marian baker eddie, an american so by citizenship standards she was not american in the process in

their legal sense but in our sense today she would be considered american and she too was a celebrated agent. her mother was indian t.so it actually has cast a pretty wide net. all the recruitment was in london and the standards commanders were british but the thing these entire coordinated, we couldn't have french passports. charles de gaullewasn't having any of it . he didn't like the idea of any frenchmen answering to an allied commander. >> ..

the sabotage agent i just read about, she was french born but married and italian. it means had a british passport because born in france but it was a phone but the french and yet they still had to be fully habituated french. >> what did the archives look like? was there an officer? >> excellent question. very bureaucratic onsi the brith side. you get a lot of summaries of conversations people are having, and you get their training files. under french site it's hard to find. the french whereas britain has a sort of let the sunshine in, everybody instead, the cold war is over, let a thousand flowers bloom, look at our archive. france is very much the opposite. it's hard to shake material out of france. they have yet to come to grips

with their collaboration in world war ii, and they only apologize for killing 76,000 jews, french jews, in the mid-'90s. so they are very behind on the sense of reconciliation. that makes it bureaucratically very difficult to work in france. and in america everything is online. you barely need to go anywhere. what it looks like is it's a lot of tight voices from the past retelling the story through these bits and pieces of information, patching it together. you can get a sense of people's personalities do these dispatches come to their interrogations, like one thing that struck me was not just the sexism of the anti-semitism in british government. really came across in these files. everyone iss dead so you can sot of be mad at them for being at the syndicate what is shocking is how much speaks to you through the page, that it is

just nobody had a problem with being a bureaucratic anti-semite. >> i have a question. >> okay. the first question is so these were the first women, in the west anyway,he and so as as t of what they did did the attitude shift towardsdi having women? and as a follow-up, you know, you're going to go talk to some people in congress. >> i hope so. the reason one right is not just to give you a lovely tonight on an airplane but also because you want to bring a story to light the deserves to be told and also maybe change some minds. these women did this extraordinary thing and the men

came back from the front and they were celebrated as heroes and women became symbols. it was secret, classified. most government still time what is going on in the secret situations but a third of these women ended up in the camps, and britain didn't tell people. they were very closed about what happens of the became these symbols for a country that was lying to itself. rather than celebrating them as heroes and game changers, they became a way that like britain felt flagellated for not being better in the war. it also happened was they were diminished almost immediately even when they were doing it, at the work considered clerical and secretarial and not as important as the men. they were careers. they were radio operators. the men were couriers and radio operators and celebrate as soldiers, and it were soldiers. britain didn't have a mechanism

for keeping women in the army. these women were doing combat roles and so they kind of like squeezed them in to their existing without recognizing that they deserved to occupy a full status as servicemembers. once the era of declassification came in, these women were in their \90{l1}s{l0}\'90{l1}s{l0}, if they survived fine, the greatest generation become something celebrate. we knew about their missions. at that moment they became the heroes they deserve to be but they had to survive about 65, 70 years after the war for that to be true. my hope is that once you -- i knew i wanted to tell a story about swimming in war and it was a story about women about women because i am one and i'd not read war histories with any great hunger up until this moment.

i recognized how mail they were in documents, and once i got what i was doing very much my editor amanda helping me ndunderstand this, it became fun to think about okay, if i cast a feminine lens of everything it changes our interpretation of the whole war. winston churchill stopped being this colonialist and aerialist bulldog. he becomes also a depressive alcoholic who likes to paint. that was true. he was always an oppressive alcoholic who likes to paint as well as an imperialist and man having been telling that story. we have been getting a one-sided view of the entire war when there were women at war and men have female side, men have emotional sides and it just wasn't being told. my hope is but as more women write about it, as more women are in war, that more will

change. i'm going to speak to congress and hope to change some of the attitudes. >> first of all thank you for writing about this fascinating and covering this important part of women's history. i'm curious about the process of writing in terms of how long it took for research and writing and was that separate? were you working like a day job while you're trying to write this book?m >> so extremely fortunate for two years solid this was my job and nothing else. it took me about a a year to research which included learning french, and thenno another yearo write. and then from final to this book being in your hand is not another year in which there's lot of admin. a lot of that was footnotes. it occupied my life for three years it was a year of research and a year of writing by and large and then a a year of ad. thank you. >> how did you learn french?

>> first i went to nice and a move to the beach and it took immersive french and an extremely fortunate because i family in paris and they let me live with them a lot so that i could get better into my work. >> other questions? >> when you started your there's something about the parachute which it didn't quite get. >> so she's hanging in a tunnel in a parachute harness when agents -- no, no. she wants to hang over the tunnel. she doesn't want to get to the ground. you have to pull her up. they have these parachute harnesses because that's how they're being dropped in. they just repurposed this and turn it into a climbing harness for so they could hang her over and she could look at the tunnel below andbe then they could pull her backk up. >> they didn't have helicopters. >> not at all. they were pulling her up hand

over fist. when the drop in in the drop them in from an airplane. it's just a bomber with a hole in the floor. this is the day before radar. radar is and then in the middle of the war. they can only fly in on a full moon, that's the only time it is light enough. you would get, you would be in the fuselage of a plane that is not built for you. it is built for bombs. they get you over the and they drop you an and you are about 800 feet over your target. it's not like today with the drop you a mile up. and a line parachute behind you and you hope it opens. you land and a moonlit field in the dark in france at night. when you are blowing up or railway tunnel if you're being dropped in from above you are just wearing theeo harness and someone is holding you.

>> ic. >> no problem. >> having been quite the own when the war was over was about five when the war was over. it was fascinated by the resistance. first a film showed chinese young teenagers fighting japanese in one film i saw in south asia. did you review any films that showed women in this role in film? >> i tried to stay away from the fictionalized versions, things like charlotte gray, the sort of wonderful celebrations of these t want touse i didn't be affected by a fictionalized version of what was going on. i want to stick to what i was reading and getting for my interviews. but that said there are some excellent documentaries including the very famous

interview which is not just resistant members but collaborators and they a a comek and forth between people who feel very justified 20 years after the war for having collaborated with hitler and the people who are reliving their extremely difficult lives during the war, living as teenagers. when i say teenagers very young men. if you are oldug enough in 1840o fight the blitzkrieg you'd been conscripted and you were in a camp. as you got older after 1942 in france you are y conscripted for slave labor and you are sent to germany. so when they needed soldiers for the resistance they're going to parts of france, they are old people for a german war factory ember tool to fight in 1940, or they are kids are just coming up. so there is a lot of documentary evidence that i could look at

that was film but i didn't look at fiction. so b i'm not sure that answers your question but it certainly -- >> there's one show which showed a very heroic frenchwoman about d-day specifically and trying to get france readyor for d-day including waiting for the bbc road test to tell them tomorrow is the day. >> this is interesting, too. they needed to communicate inside enemy lines with london. and not get caught. you can send a letter and maybe that gets intercepted and it's also very slow. you have to go letter out via switzerland or spain only for lucky an airplane is dropping in to collect a diplomat, for instance, charles de gaulle got out at the very beginning of the war via airplane. you could get a letter out that way but in order to broadcast command to the country and give them battle orders you had to have like quicker dialogue than

letters via courier over mountains. so in london they would telegraph to the resistance and the resistance would telegraph back and he would agree upon certain code phrases that would then be broadcast into france on the bbc. it sounded like garbage. it sounded like fairy tale and nursery rhyme and poems and dirty jokes that you would hear your dirty joke, you know, and oh, that means bomb this church onon the 15th because that's what the nazis are holding up. we actually get a lot of those come down in pop culture like the eagle has landed, bomb germany on the 15th but like these phrases all came from the moment where the bbc is broadcasting into france every night. this is where charles de gaulle became charles de gaulle. he is in london not on the ground leading soldiers. he's in london broadcasting

every night telling france stop what you are doing. he's not a hero. the last war is over. he is in bed with hitler and you should not agree to just lie down. if you're working in a factory you should follow the factory floor, make the ball bearings the wrong size,e, slow work production, don't keep this war machine going. are a mom don't just raise your kids. feed a rebel, help us out. write newspapers and put them under doors. help and underground railroad. like, keep fighting. charles de gaulle nightly on the bbc arguing to the french that resistance matter. it was going to be the same the catheter. it was an amazingng project because he had no h reason to believe it was true. nobody knows their own future. you don't get to know how the

war ends. he just was certain with nothing.wi he really had nothing. he had a few officers with a people had stayed in france and britain after dunkirk. he was certain he is currently president of france after the war and he would get there by mobilizing people from the radio every night. and at the end of that program every single night you would get the nursery rhymes and the limericks and the dirty jokes and those with the orders for the french resistance. >> were you able to speak with some of the teenagers. >> is yes. what's great about the story in particular is across the board everyone wants to tell you there or experience. and i think it surprises me that everyone wants to say like i was five. my mother told me where she wasn't d-day. it was a story i had not heard before but she remembered. she remembered listening to the radio, she remembered anyone standing still. she remembered pearl harbor and these mysteries i had that her.

once you start working on a project like that it becomes like everyone needs to share. they all want to be part of this collective moment. it's been really exciting, very gratifying. >> is are going to be an exhibit at the d-day museum? >> i sure hope so. not been asked but there ought to be. the fact that there were women on the ground in normandy on d-day and no one was talking about it until now strikes me as one of the world's great omissions.re that's why i wrote this book. >> are you wearing a poppy? >> very much. yes, i am thank you. i think that might be a good time to start signing books, is that right? okay. excellent. well, thank you all for coming. [applause]

>> okay. >> thank you so much and thank you for all coming. we have the books available at the register for you and will have sarah of here to sign for you when you pick it up. if you could form a line along this i/o that would be terrific, and thank you again for coming out. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] booktv is providing "in depth" un-interrupted e of the national book festival featuring hundreds of nonfiction authors and guests. and on saturday booktv returns live and in person to the library of congress national book festival, all day long you will hear from and interact with guests and authors such as

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season two on the c-span a mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including buckeye broadband. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> buckeye broadband, , along wh these television companies, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> host: larry elder, you wrote in your book