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    Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland
    Unavailable
    Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland
    Unavailable
    Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland
    Ebook407 pages6 hours

    Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland

    By Cathryn J. Prince

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Now available in paperback, Shot from the Sky uncovers one of the great, dark secrets of World War II: neutral Switzerland shot and forced down U.S. aircraft entering Swiss airspace and imprisoned the survivors in internment camps, detaining more than a thousand American flyers between 1943 and the war’s end. While conditions at the camps were adequate and humane for internees who obeyed their captors’ orders, the experience was far different for those who attempted to escape. They were held in special penitentiary camps in conditions as bad as those in some prisoner-of-war camps in Nazi Germany. Ironically, the Geneva Accords at the time did not apply to prisoners held in neutral countries, so better treatment could not be demanded. When the war ended in Europe, sixty-one Americans lay buried in a small village cemetery near Bern. Cathryn J. Prince, brings to light details of this little-known episode as she describes the events and examines the Swiss justification for their policy. She demonstrates that while the Swiss claimed they satisfied international law, they applied the law in a grossly unfair manner. No German airmen were interned, and the Nazi aircraft were allowed to refuel at Swiss airfields. The author draws on first-person accounts and unpublished sources, including interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving American prisoners, and documents held by the Swiss government and the U.S. Air Force.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaval Institute Press
    Release dateMar 15, 2016
    ISBN9781612513478
    Unavailable
    Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland
    Author

    Cathryn J. Prince

    Cathryn J. Prince is the author of A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science, for which she won the Connecticut Press Club's 2011 Book Award for non-fiction. She is also the author of Burn the Town and Sack the Banks: Confederates Attack Vermont! and Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland. She worked as a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Switzerland and in New York, where she covered the United Nations. Prince covers the Connecticut State House for Patch.com.

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    Reviews for Shot from the Sky

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      This book is well researched and the topic well documented. Prince accessed records in Switzerland and elsewhere to corroborate the details of the internment of hundreds of American airmen during WW2. The topic was not well understood until many years after the war -- not the least because both the American and Swiss governments did not wish for it to be. Her work and the firsthand testimony of those who were Swiss internees sheds light on the topic.