Alex Kershaw - Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Familys Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris

A SHELL EXPLODED. Fragments of shrapnel hit a young soldier. He fell to the ground. Before long, nurses with East Coast prep school accents, volunteers at the American Hospital of Paris, helped the young man into a makeshift operating theater. The emergency surgery was in the elegant ballroom of a casino in Fontainebleau, forty miles south of Paris. A tall man with thick dark hair, blue eyes, bushy brows, large but nimble hands, and a boxers face was soon at the shattered young mans side. His name was Dr. Sumner Jackson, a fifty-six-year-old American and the chief surgeon of the American Hospital of Paris.

Sumner began to examine the young mans leg and decided there was only one thing for it. It would have to go. He needed a saw. It would be no easy operation given the poor light in the casino. A few minutes later, the boy lay in agony on a roulette table as Sumner prepared to remove his leg, carefully cutting off the flow of blood through his arteries. If Sumner made a mistake, the boy could bleed to death.

Sumner took a scalpel and sliced across the boys muscles, revealing the underlying bone. With an oscillating saw he cut through the bone and filed down the rough edges before delicately laying muscle and skin flaps over the stump. It was painstaking work that took great care and concentration in the dim light, and Sumner took intense pride in his expertise. A superb combat surgeon, arguably the finest of his generation, he had vast experience, having spent much of the last war trying to repair shattered young bodies. In 1916 he had volunteered for Britains Royal Army Medical Corps and had arrived in Flanders with other Americans who had defied U.S. president Woodrow Wilsons call for neutrality. He was assigned to a surgery near the Somme battlefield, where over ninety percent of those who went over the top and attacked German positions ended up being killed or wounded.

Sumner had operated on hundreds of young men whose limbs had been torn asunder by shellfire. Twenty-five years later, he was once again doing his best to save lives, but there was something particularly unnerving about the nature of mens wounds in this new war. It only took one German 88mm shell to kills dozens of troops if caught out in the open. Hitlers modern weapons were designed to rip humans to small pieces of flying flesh, to turn them to hamburger.

Sumner completed the amputation, ensuring that the boys leg was carefully bandaged. There was no time to rest. Dozens of other gravely wounded men lay waiting their turn. Sumner was working sometimes deep into the nightoften beside a fellow American doctor named Dr. Charles Bovesawing, cutting, stitching, trying to save as many soldiers and civilians as they could. The casinos corridors were filled with emergency surgical cases, patients begging for water or lying in grim silence, resigned to death. Whenever Sumner straightened his back and took a drink of coffee or water, he could see yet more who had been laid out on the baccarat tables, waiting to suffer the saw. There were as many urgent cases awaiting Sumner when he returned to his base, the American Hospital of Paris, reputedly the best equipped in Europe, where he had worked since 1925. He made the journey back and forth in a white ambulance, sometimes driven by an upper-class young American volunteer, through the working-class outskirts of Paris and then to the leafy streets of upscale Neuilly-sur-Seine.