The Night of the Full Moon , livre ebook

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121 pages

English

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This novel is set in the southern French town of Montauban, during the last six months of 1944. It is a love story between a young girl,Yvette ,and her farmer boyfriend Pascal. It is a story of a family caught up in the shadow of a monster, the German Das Reich 2nd SS armoured division and the background of the D-Day invasion.The full moons of joy and sadness combine in triumph and tragedy for both soldiers and civilians alike.
It tells of the difficulties of communication across the rugged landscape of the Correze, Cevennes and Auvergne; everybody battling with hunger, courage and determination to survive on slender threads of hope.
Above all it recounts the harsh times and lives of normal people in the face of love, and daily chances of death.
It reflects the guilt still felt today in France about Vichy and how could their own people behave with so much more cruelty than the the Germans.
It draws on real life characters of the maquis, SOE, the Das Reich, two German soldiers and Pascal who become separated only to meet again via unusual circumstances.

Sujets

Hunger

La Faim

Full Moon

Novel

Death

Fiction

Informations

Publié par	AuthorHouse UK
Date de parution	17 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781728375823
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE NIGHT OF THE FULL MOON

A novel set against a WW2 BACKGROUND

GERALD GLYN WOOLLEY

AuthorHouse™ UK
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403 USA
www.authorhouse.co.uk
Phone: UK TFN: 0800 0148641 (Toll Free inside the UK)
UK Local: (02) 0369 56322 (+44 20 3695 6322 from outside the UK)

© 2022 Gerald Glyn Woolley. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/17/2022

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7581-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-7283-7582-3 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

T his story is set in the first six months of June 1944 in a small town in the south of France.
While the background structure is loosely based on General Lammerding of the second SS panzer division ( Das Reich ), the notable French resistance fighter Andre Malraux, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster (leader of the French section of Special Operations Executive) and Violet Szabo, (British agent) all other names are purely imaginary.
This is a novel that depicts the personal lives of the villagers of Montauban and how they were caught up in one of the most terrifying events that traumatised France following the German occupation of 1940. The liberation of France wasn’t a well-ordered sequence of events. It was a tale of factional conflicts, vicious vengeance, and reprisals – not always justified – and near anarchy in places, alongside the jubilation of freedom from occupation.
Feelings still run deep and people who lived through those times down there still don’t want to talk about them. Accusations that x or y was a collaborator during the war are still muttered behind hands. There is still much guilt today in France especially about Vichy and its role in condemning so many French men and women to deportation and death. We have learned that society is only skin deep and that everyone is capable of turning on his neighbour.
As with most novels, dates and narratives have been stretched to accommodate the story line but it remains a novel, a work of fiction of human relationships, choices and fateful decisions that we today never had to face but that lead to supreme sacrifices always in the belief that personal will can triumph over evil.

COURTESY : MONTAUBAN INFORMATION CENTRE
Montauban Town Square
CONTENTS
Preface

Chapter 1 Soe England
Chapter 2 Montauban
Chapter 3 Pascal’s night -time adventure
Chapter 4 Cooling off
Chapter 5 Mission Briefing
Chapter 6 Two eggs on my plate
Chapter 7 Broken eggs
Chapter 8 No compromise
Chapter 9 Thorough search
Chapter 10 Sibling jealousy
Chapter 11 Rabbit girl
Chapter 12 Das Reich arrives
Chapter 13 Theresa intervenes
Chapter 14 Birthday
Chapter 15 Round up
Chapter 16 Bed bugs
Chapter 17 Paradise for Das Reich
Chapter 18 We are your friends
Chapter 19 Piano lessons
Chapter 20 Spitfire attack
Chapter 21 Sylvie’s practical advice
Chapter 22 You always remember the first
Chapter 23 Happy families
Chapter 24 Yvette and Wolfie Picnic
Chapter 25 Starvation now the enemy
Chapter 26 L e Débarquement
Chapter 27 Invitation to lunch
Chapter 28 Enough to eat
Chapter 29 Farmhouse supper
Chapter 30 Les sanglots longs, Des violons, De l’automne
Chapter 31 Claude and Jenny escape another search party
Chapter 32 Raid on the Pharmacy
Chapter 33 Terri’s secrets and a trap
Chapter 34 Mama can I love two men?
Chapter 35 Axle bearings
Chapter 36 A new friend comes with Wolfie
Chapter 37 Am I just a bit of fun?
Chapter 38 Difficult questions
Chapter 39 News of Pascal
Chapter 40 You have to dream
Chapter 41 Betrayed
Chapter 42 A little baby boy for France
Chapter 43 Into the fire
Chapter 44 The news is out
Chapter 45 Sylvie no more
Chapter 46 The sabotage
Chapter 47 Exciting news
Chapter 48 Mosquito recsue
Chapter 49 Mission impossible
Chapter 50 The march to Normandy begins and Terri has trouble brewing
Chapter 51 Escape to the country
Chapter 52 Salvation
Chapter 53 Two Months Later
Chapter 54 Sunday October 1St 1944 The Full Moon Of Love Arises Again -99% Illuination
Aftermath
PREFACE
E verybody knows that the sun shines on the moon to illuminate it. When the moon is dark, the Moon is “new”, and the side of the Moon facing Earth is not illuminated by the Sun. As the Moon waxes (the amount of illuminated surface as seen from Earth is increasing), the lunar phases progress through new moon, crescent moon, first-quarter moon, and full moon. The Moon is then said to wane as it passes back to new moon.
Around each new moon and full moon, the sun, Earth, and moon arrange themselves more or less along a line in space. Then the pull on the tides increases, because the gravity of the sun reinforces the moon’s gravity. Thus, at new moon or full moon, the tide’s range is at its maximum. This is the spring tide: the highest (and lowest) tide. Spring tides are not named for the season. This is spring in the sense of jump, burst forth, rise. So, spring tides bring the most extreme high and low tides every month, and they always happen – every month – around full and new moon.
This was the crucial reason why the Normandy landings had to go on June 6 when the high tide was at its maximum. As an Allied cross-channel invasion loomed in 1944, Rommel, convinced that it would come at high tide, installed millions of steel cement, and wooden obstacles on the possible invasion beaches, positioned so they would be under water by mid-tide. But the Allies first observed Rommel’s obstacles from the air in mid-February 1944. “Thereafter they seemed to grow like mushrooms … until by May there was an obstacle on every two or three yards of front.” The obstacles came in a variety of shapes and sizes some with explosive mines on them. The Allies would certainly have liked to land at high tide, as Rommel expected, so their troops would have less beach to cross under fire. But the underwater obstacles changed that. The Allied planners now decided that initial landings must be soon after low tide so that demolition teams could blow up enough obstacles to open corridors through which the following landing craft could navigate to the beach. The tide also had to be rising, because the landing craft had to unload troops and then depart without danger of being stranded by a receding tide. There were also nontidal constraints. For secrecy, Allied forces had to cross the English Channel in darkness. But naval artillery needed about an hour of daylight to bombard the coast before the landings. Therefore, low tide had to coincide with first light, with the landings to begin one hour after. Airborne drops had to take place the night before, because the paratroopers had to land in darkness. But they also needed to see their targets, so there had to be a late-rising Moon. Only three days in June 1944 met all those requirements for “D-Day,” the invasion date: 5, 6, and 7 June.
A 6-meter (18feet) tidal range meant that water would rise at a rate of at least a meter per hour from 05:23 low tide with the beach and obstacles exposed to high tide at 10:12 am—perhaps rising even faster due to shallow-water effects. The times of low water and the speed of the tidal rise had to be known rather precisely, or there might not be enough time for the demolition teams to blow up a sufficient number of beach obstacles. Also, the low-water times were different at each of the five landing beaches (from west to east, they were code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword). Between Utah and Sword, separated by about 100 km, the difference was more than an hour. So, H-Hour, the landing time on each beach, would have to be staggered according to the tide predictions and night of a 100% full moon

IMAGE 3 COURTESY OF CAEN HISTORY MUSEUM
MAP OF BEACHES. To show problems of tides

NIGHT OF THE FULL MOON
La Nuit de la Pleine `lune
ONE
Panic
“W here is the saboteur” asked the German Officer pointing his Luger 9mm pistol at Yvette’s head. She could see the lightening zig zag flashes on the mans’ lapel tunic and the skull and crossbones insignia on his cap. This was the SS officer in charge of traffic movements for the Das Reich division in Montauban. The trembling schoolgirl smiled at him “We are just out for a cycling ride and know nothing about saboteurs or trains. He looked at her friend Terri who was older but much prettier even than Yvette with long blond hair done in pig tails making her look much younger than she was. “If you don’t tell me then ten men from the town will be shot” “Even if we knew them and told you then you would probably shoot them anyway,” said Terri. The SS officer glowered and summoned a soldier over and s