Photo Archive News

Book: The Children Who Fought Hitler

Author James Fox began a long and distinguished career with the Magnum Photos as Editor in Chief in New York and Paris in 1966. - click cover for detail and shop.

Few people know that Ypres, centre of First World War remembrance, was once home to a thriving British community that played a heroic role in the Second World War. This expatriate outpost grew around the British ex-servicemen who cared for the war memorials and cemeteries of ‘Flanders Fields’. Many married local women and their children grew up multi-lingual, but attended their own school and were intensely proud to be British.

In the wake of the Great War, hundreds of British servicemen relocated to the decimated city of Ypres. There they lived as caretakers over the military graveyards which stood as monuments to the thousands of British servicemen killed on foreign soil who could never return home. The men’s children were educated at the British Memorial School, where they were instilled with their fathers’ patriotic spirit and were exposed to the cultural heritage and language of their largely European mothers. This unusual blend of European knowledge and a fierce sense of Britishness put them in a unique position and prepared them for the incredible challenges they were to face with the arrival of the second great war of the 20th century.

In 1940, as the community faced the threat of Germany’s brutal advance through Europe, the children who had been brought up both to respect and treasure the land of their heritage, and to love the country in which they had been raised, were forced to fight back against this threat using any means necessary.

Armed with local knowledge, bi-lingual ability and old fashioned British grit, the children employed their skills to combat Hitler and the Third Reich, in an attempt to reclaim their adopted homeland. Through resistance operations and espionage these young men and women exhibited unparalleled heroism, playing a crucial, yet tragically often overlooked, role in the winning of the Second World War.

James Fox was born in 1935 and was once one of the youngest pupils at the British Memorial School when it was evacuated in May 1940. After serving in the RAF with SHAPE in Paris he worked for NATO and in 1966 began a long and distinguished career with the Magnum Photos as Editor in Chief in New York and Paris.

Sue Elliott is the author of the bestselling social history of adoption, Love Child. She lives in west London.

To order your copy of "Children Who Fought Hitler" at the special price of £14.99 including p&p (RRP £20.00), please call 01584 871333 and quote "Children Who Fought Hitler", or order online at www.great-reads.co.uk or by post at "Children Who Fought Hitler Book Offer", MAH, PO Box 151, Ludlow, SY8 9BE. Offer is subject to availability.

Posted by Will Carleton
Email this page to a friend