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Albert Guérisse
Major General Count Albert-Marie Edmond Guérisse (5 April 1911 – 26 March 1989) was a Belgian Resistance member who organized French and Belgian escape routes for downed Allied pilots during World War II under the alias of Patrick Albert "Pat" O'Leary, purportedly the name of a peace-time Canadian friend. His escape line was dubbed the Pat O'Leary Line. Biography Guérisse was born in Brussels, and qualified in medicine at the Université Libre de Bruxelles before joining the Belgian Army. Guérisse was Médecin-Capitaine with a Belgian cavalry regiment during their eighteen-day campaign in May 1940. He managed to escape to England through Dunkirk. At Gibraltar, he joined the crew of a former French merchant ship, ''Rhin'', which had been renamed to serve in the Mediterranean on clandestine missions. He secured entry into the British Royal Navy and was commissioned as Lieutenant Commander Patrick Albert O'Leary RNVR of French-Canadian origin. The "Canadian" identity atte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brussels
Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest), is a region of Belgium comprising 19 municipalities, including the City of Brussels, which is the capital of Belgium. The Brussels-Capital Region is located in the central portion of the country and is a part of both the French Community of Belgium and the Flemish Community, but is separate from the Flemish Region (within which it forms an enclave) and the Walloon Region. Brussels is the most densely populated region in Belgium, and although it has the highest GDP per capita, it has the lowest available income per household. The Brussels Region covers , a relatively small area compared to the two other regions, and has a population of over 1.2 million. The five times larger metropolitan area of Brusse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Special Operations Executive
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret British World War II organisation. It was officially formed on 22 July 1940 under Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton, from the amalgamation of three existing secret organisations. Its purpose was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe (and later, also in occupied Southeast Asia) against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements. Few people were aware of SOE's existence. Those who were part of it or liaised with it were sometimes referred to as the "Baker Street Irregulars", after the location of its London headquarters. It was also known as "Churchill's Secret Army" or the "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare". Its various branches, and sometimes the organisation as a whole, were concealed for security purposes behind names such as the "Joint Technical Board" or the "Inter-Service Research Bureau", or fictitious branches of the Air Ministry, Admiralty or War Office. SOE operated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harold Cole
Harold Cole (24 January 1906 – 8 January 1946), also known as Harry Cole, Paul Cole, and many other aliases, was a petty criminal, a confidence man, a British soldier, an operative of the Pat O'Leary escape line, and an agent of Nazi Germany. In 1940 and 1941 he helped many British soldiers escape France after its surrender to Nazi Germany in World War II. He became a double agent for the Germans in December 1941 (or possibly earlier) and betrayed to the Gestapo 150 escape line workers and members of the French Resistance, of whom about 50 were executed or died in German concentration camps. Gestapo is used here as a collective noun for the various German security organizations. Cole has been described as "the worst traitor of the war." He deceived both the British and the Germans and escaped from prison on several occasions. He survived the war, but was killed while resisting arrest by French police in Paris in January 1946. Early life Cole was born in London and grew up i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Concentration Camp
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement ''after'' having been convicted of some crime. Use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities. The word ''internment'' is also occasionally used to describe a neutral country's practice of detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war, under the Hague Convention of 1907. Interned persons may be held in prisons or in facilities known as internment camps (also known as concentration camps). The term ''concentration camp'' originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mauzac, Haute-Garonne
Mauzac (; oc, Mausac) is a commune in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern France. Geography The village lies on the middle banks of the Garonne river. The commune is bordered by four other communes: Le Fauga to the north, Beaumont-sur-Lèze to the east, Montaut to the south, and finally by Noé to the west. Population See also *Communes of the Haute-Garonne department The following is a list of the 586 communes of the French department of Haute-Garonne. The communes cooperate in the following intercommunalities (as of 2020):Communes of Haute-Garonne {{HauteGaronne-geo-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nancy Wake
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, (30 August 1912 – 7 August 2011), also known as Madame Fiocca and Nancy Fiocca, was a nurse and journalist who joined the French Resistance and later the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II, and briefly pursued a post-war career as an intelligence officer in the Air Ministry. The official historian of the SOE, M. R. D. Foot, said that "her irrepressible, infectious, high spirits were a joy to everyone who worked with her". Many stories about her World War II activities come from her autobiography, ''The White Mouse'', and are not verifiable from other sources. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Wake grew up in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. By the 1930s, Wake was living in Marseille with her French industrialist husband, Henri Fiocca, when the war broke out. After the fall of France to Nazi Germany in 1940, Wake became a courier for the Pat O'Leary escape network led by Ian Garrow and, later, Albert Guérisse. As a member o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pyrenees
The Pyrenees (; es, Pirineos ; french: Pyrénées ; ca, Pirineu ; eu, Pirinioak ; oc, Pirenèus ; an, Pirineus) is a mountain range straddling the border of France and Spain. It extends nearly from its union with the Cantabrian Mountains to Cap de Creus on the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean coast. It reaches a maximum altitude of at the peak of Aneto. For the most part, the main crest forms a divide between Spain and France, with the microstate of Andorra sandwiched in between. Historically, the Crown of Aragon and the Kingdom of Navarre extended on both sides of the mountain range. Etymology In Greek mythology, Pyrene (mythology), Pyrene is a princess who eponym, gave her name to the Pyrenees. The Greek historiography, Greek historian Herodotus says Pyrene is the name of a town in Celts, Celtic Europe. According to Silius Italicus, she was the virgin daughter of Bebryx, a king in Narbonensis, Mediterranean Gaul by whom the hero Hercules was given hospitality during his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ian Garrow
Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Grant Garrow DSO (24 August 1908 - 28 March 1976) was a British army officer with the Highland Light Infantry. He was the founder of the Pat O'Leary Line in Marseilles which helped Allied soldiers and airmen escape Nazi-occupied France. Early career Garrow attended the Glasgow Academy, where he rose to the rank of cadet sergeant in the academy's officer training corps. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 9th Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry in the Territorial Army on 21 May 1930. He was promoted to lieutenant on 21 May 1933 and entered active service on 9 June 1937. Second World War Following the surrender of the Highland 51st Division at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux on the Normandy coast on 12 June 1940, Garrow, then a lieutenant, managed to avoid being taken prisoner. On hearing that France had surrendered, Garrow and other British personnel tried unsuccessfully to escape to the Channel Islands. In August, after walking to Marseilles, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marseilles
Marseille ( , , ; also spelled in English as Marseilles; oc, Marselha ) is the prefecture of the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône and capital of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. Situated in the camargue region of southern France, it is located on the coast of the Gulf of Lion, part of the Mediterranean Sea, near the mouth of the Rhône river. Its inhabitants are called ''Marseillais''. Marseille is the second most populous city in France, with 870,731 inhabitants in 2019 (Jan. census) over a municipal territory of . Together with its suburbs and exurbs, the Marseille metropolitan area, which extends over , had a population of 1,873,270 at the Jan. 2019 census, the third most populated in France after those of Paris and Lyon. The cities of Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, and 90 suburban municipalities have formed since 2016 the Aix-Marseille-Provence Metropolis, an indirectly elected metropolitan authority now in charge of wider metropolitan issues, with a populatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nîmes
Nîmes ( , ; oc, Nimes ; Latin: ''Nemausus'') is the prefecture of the Gard department in the Occitanie region of Southern France. Located between the Mediterranean Sea and Cévennes, the commune of Nîmes has an estimated population of 148,561 (2019). Dubbed the most Roman city outside Italy, Nîmes has a rich history dating back to the Roman Empire when the city had a population of 50,000–60,000 and was the regional capital. Several famous monuments are in Nîmes, such as the Arena of Nîmes and the Maison Carrée. Because of this, Nîmes is often referred to as the " French Rome". Origins Nimes is situated where the alluvial plain of the Vistrenque River abuts the hills of Mont Duplan to the northeast, Montaury to the southwest, and to the west Mt. Cavalier and the knoll of Canteduc. Its name appears in inscriptions in Gaulish as ''dede matrebo Namausikabo'' ("he has given to the mothers of Nîmes") and "''toutios Namausatis''" ("citizen of Nîmes"). Nemausus was the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort
Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort (; oc, Sent Ipolit) is a commune in the Gard department, Occitania, southern France. The town has a silk museum and barracks. Population In literature A book titled 'Divided Loyalties' described life in the commune and the area during the Second World War as experienced by Janet Teissier du Cros and family. See also *Communes of the Gard department This is a list of the 351 communes of the Gard department of France. The communes cooperate in the following intercommunalities (as of 2020):Communes of Gard {{Gard-geo-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
