Under a War-Torn Sky

Although the plot and characters are fiction, the novel is firmly grounded in historical fact. About 26,000 US airmen from the Eighth Air Force (in which Henry serves in the novel) died in Europe during World War II. Of the US airmen who were downed but survived, it is estimated that more than 3,000 were assisted by the French Resistance and were able to return to Allied territory. The Resistance provided safe houses and organized escape lines. In doing so, these French civilians put their own lives at risk, and many were captured, imprisoned, or killed by the Germans.

Women played a significant role in the French Resistance, as the novel demonstrates through the figures of Madame Gaulloise, Pierre’s mother, and Claudette. Women supplied food, stored guns, and hid serviceman and Jewish civilians in their barns and attics. They also smuggled weapons and secret papers and acted as messengers, forming vital links in escape chains. L. M. Elliott notes in her “Afterword” that one young female who was code-named “Michou” helped 150 British and American airmen to escape by using a ruse that, in the novel, the girl on the train to Switzerland uses to help Henry: Bidding a passionate farewell to an airman she did not know to embarrass a German guard into not checking the man’s identification papers.