Preface

Four black horse-drawn carriages led the funeral cortège to the cemetery under leaden skies and light snow.Each bore the coffin of an unidentified flyer recovered from the wreckage of a Royal Air Force bomber.Several hundred Dutch townspeople and a platoon of German soldiers followed.The pastor who conducted the funeral service at Lichtenvoorde General Cemetery declared that the four unknown men had fallen for a cause they knew was just.His eulogy would soon be rewarded with a term in concentration camp.A few men surreptitiously recorded these events on film, at risk of their own arrest.In this second winter of the occupation, the airplane that had dropped from the sky was a harbinger of help from afar.The funeral, which the townspeople had insisted on organizing, was their first act of collective defiance.Active resistance, notably by assisting downed Allied airmen to evade capture, would follow.One of those coffins contained the body of Flight-Sgt.Joseph Alfred Jacobson of Westmount, Quebec.He was the sole Canadian of the bomber crew that had crashed short of its target at Münster on 28 January 1942.He had had no doubts about the justice of the cause for which he fought.He had taken his copy of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man on his fatal flight.Joey, as his family and friends called him, was a privileged and ambitious son, a university graduate, and an accomplished athlete.He was the only Jew on McGill University's 1938 league championship football team.In June 1940, he left behind a bright and secure future to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).Like many new recruits, he wanted to become a pilot, but he was selected for air observer training -navigating a bomber aircraft to the target and bombing it.That seemed like office work compared to flying the aircraft, but it was office work of the most dangerous kind.Even before he left Canada, Joey was convinced that he would be engaging in a mortal struggle for civilization: a total war in which there could be no partial or limited victory.When he arrived in England in May 1941, the British Empire stood alone against Germany, the depth of American x

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