John Morris and the French Resistance

Royal Air Force bomber pilot, John Morris from Cambridge, New Zealand, describes Lucienne Vouzelaud, one of the French Resistance workers who helped him to safety after his plane was shot down in France.

Transcript

Lucienne was a very strong person. She spoke some English or good English really, but she tended to negate the idea. She said she didn’t speak English, but in fact she did. She was a very able person, very strong personality; she had these two little boys and she was still prepared to take tremendous risks for the likes of me. And I discovered after the war that she had something like 40 airmen through her house, mostly Americans, and been in grave danger all the time.  But she survived … And so the two of us got on our bikes, she’d got two bikes.

You and Lucienne?

Yes. And she was taking me on to somebody else, now I forget where to, but the big thing was that we're riding on the road and came round a corner, and here are a lot of German soldiers right across the road, and they were obviously digging defences or doing something like that. Well, it was too late to turn round, and quick as a look she fell off her bike, she fell off deliberately and fell so that she got grazed, you know, and all of these young German soldiers rushed to help her because she was a really attractive young woman, and I just rode on so nobody sort of noticed me. And after a while when I got about 100 yards up the road, I turned round, and I thought, God, I’d better go back, and she was lying on the ground at this stage, and she saw me and saw what I was doing, and as soon as she saw me starting to come back, she jumped up, you know, and made a sudden recovery and jumped on her bike to join me and off we went. So lucky really.

And the Germans just let her go?

They were all astonished I suppose, but it’s amazing what an attractive young woman can get away with.

Royal Air Force bomber pilot, John Morris (right).

John Morris in 2005