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 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.
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.
And what interested you in joining the Air National Guard and why specifically the Guard as opposed to another branch of the service.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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?
Oh?
I just loved that aircraft.
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. It's why it's still around. It's why it's still being made.
And then the C five, I know, it's a lot bigger, So talk about what that plane was like to deal with.
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 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 are overnight. So it was quite a culture change.
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.
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 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 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
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 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 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.
Walk us through your duties as a flight engineer.
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 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, 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. 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.
Did you ever come under fire?
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 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.
At that time.
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.
What's that like the first time people are shooting at you.
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 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 on it and you think what could have happened.
Thinking about those particular planes, they're not known for their elusiveness, So is there any sort of evasive action taken?
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.
Is there any particular incident that stays with you as perhaps being the most intense enemy fire or the.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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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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,
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.
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, 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.
So the way I set up.
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. 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 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 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, 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 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.
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, 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.
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 resistance was amateurs going up against the best trained police force in the world, the Gestapo.
But they did have.
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 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 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 transmissions and things on the radio, was just absolutely fascinating.
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
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. 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.
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 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 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. 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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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.
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.
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 Dragoon and everything else that followed thereafter.
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 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. 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 to Normandy in about three days, but because of the harassment and u impeding operations of the resistance, it took them two weeks.
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.
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 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.
And at that point they weren't even broadcasting cryptically, they were literally just saying get in their way. Exactly.
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 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 a coded message that means blow that bridge tonight. Just fascinating stuff that they did.
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
of being subversives. Talk about that with the s S and the Gestapo, and just the terror that they inflicted wherever they happened.
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.
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. But yeah, the SS pretty much wiped out a village full of civilians to take revenge.
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?
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
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 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 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 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, I put him on a novel.
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.
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 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 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 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 his memoir of flying photo recon missions for the French Air Force during the Battle of France in nineteen forty.
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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, just try not to talk for twenty four hours.
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.
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 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 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.
So It's just an.
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, 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 may not have won at Yorktown had it not been for French assistance. So a sharp salute to the French.
Lastly, what are you most proud of your own service?
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 to be a part of all that.
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 for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter dot org.
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