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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
French

DES HÉROS ORDINAIRES

Maurin Picard

Thirteen veterans - French, American, German, English or Polish - of the Second World War tell their story for
the first time. The book gives an identity to the mass of anonymous combatants, by depicting the heroic commitment of men who claim to be ordinary.
The veterans who give their testimony in this book – men who served in a submarine, a Panzer regiment or a Swordfish squadron – were all actors in a crucial phase of World War II. Included are the Frenchman Léon Gautier, who landed in June 1944 on the Normandy beaches; the American Dutch von Kirk, navigator of the
bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945; and tank battalion commander Al Irzyke, who led American forces through the Ardennes forest in December 1944.

By reaching out to them over a number of years, Maurin Picard earned the trust of these often uncommunicative heroes, until they agreed to tell him about their experience of the Second World War. He then inserted these eyewitness accounts into the description of each military operation, in order to provide context and go beyond the limits of the personal point of view. While revealing the diversity of situations, these stories dramatically illustrate the role men played in this technological war.

Journalist MAURIN PICARD is the New York-based US correspondent for the newspaper Le Figaro and an editor of the magazine Guerre et Histoire. Multilingual, he has taken an interest for many years in Second World War veterans of all nationalities.
Available products
Book

Published 2016-09-01 by Perrin

Comments

“They were American, French, English and they never imagined that one day they would be called upon to be heroes. In fact, how does heroism come to be ? Where does it come from ? A lesson in history and a fascinating adventure.”