Doctor to the Resistance
By Hal W. Vaughan
Brassey's Inc.

As dramatic and suspenseful as any novel by Alan Furst or Robert Wilson, Doctor to the Resistance is the remarkable and ultimately tragic story of a surgeon at the American Hospital in Paris who, along with his wife and son, played a courageous and significant role in the French resistance.

Born in Maine, Dr. Sumner ("Jack")W. Jackson signed up in 1916 as a volunteer doctor with the British Army battling in northern France. He soon married Toquette, a beautiful French Red Cross nurse he met during the Battle of the Somme. When the war ended, Jack obtained a post at the American Hospital, where he quickly became the favorite physician of such "Lost Generation" celebrities as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Their charmed life would prove short-lived. Although Jack, Toquette and their 12-year-old son Phillip ("Pete") could have fled to America when the Nazis invaded France, the couple decided to stay on to do what they could to prevent the hospital from being taken over by the Nazis. Soon after, they joined Goélette, a Gaullist resistance organization, hiding and treating wounded Allied flyers and resistance fighters in the hospital and using it as a front for resistance activities under the nose of its Vichyite director. Only 15, Pete undertook a dangerous mission to penetrate the German sub base at Saint-Nazaire to photograph and report back on the damage done by Allied bombings. Toquette helped smuggle plans for the V-1 rocket to England. But in 1944 just before the Americans liberated Paris, the family was betrayed, arrested by Vichy police, and turned over to the Gestapo, who deported all three of them to German concentration camps. Just a week before the war ended, Jack and Pete were transferred to prison ships docked in Lübeck. Believing the ships contained escaping Nazi troops, the RAF bombed the fleet of ships on very day Hitler committed suicide. Although Pete escaped, Dr. Jackson and thousands of other prisoners were killed. Toquette also survived the war.

Hal Vaughan is an American journalist and documentary film producer based in Paris. Before he became a journalist, Vaughan was a U.S. Foreign Service officer. He also serves as a consultant to the American Hospital of Paris, His 60,000-word book is based on recently declassified records of the French Resistance, family letters and diaries, and numerous interviews with Phillip Jackson.

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