The Normandie-Niémen Epic – Free French on the Eastern Front 1942–1945

Fighting France, which in the darkest hours of the Occupation found its way back to victory, was also embodied by a small fighter squadron operating relentlessly in the skies of the Eastern Front. The Normandie squadron, which became the Normandie-Niémen regiment, is the most decorated of all time, yet remains little known in France.

Who still remembers the battles fought by this regiment against the Germans across the territories of Russia, Byelorussia, Lithuania and East Prussia? Who remembers the 99 pilots who served in its ranks? Their 869 aerial combats, their 273 confirmed victories and their individual fates? Who knows how they were trained? How they fought in often extreme climatic conditions?

The story of the Normandie-Niémen, before being a military epic, is a remarkable human adventure: a handful of French volunteers — pilots and mechanics, among the first to rally to General de Gaulle or later arrivals from North Africa — fighting against Nazism.

These men wrote together one of the finest chapters of the Second World War, right through to the end of the conflict in May 1945. Drawing on nearly one hundred photographs and archival documents, Stéphane Simonnet revisits the history of these fighters who — it bears repeating — constituted the only Allied force to come and fight alongside the Red Army against Nazism and for the liberation of Europe.