The Tower at Petite Vigne

It is the spring of 1943. American and British bombers pound Germany around the clock, disrupting her industry, smashing her transportation network, and driving her urban population underground. The Third Reich rightly interprets the aerial campaign as a prelude to the long-anticipated invasion of France.

That May an Organization Todt construction unit wheels into the cobblestone square of the ancient French village of Petite Vigne. Its laborers are to build a flak battery that will help counter the Allies’ growing might.

Now the conflict that Petite Vigne’s inhabitants had avoided for so long erupts into their quiet lives. Fault lines sunder the community: most people settle for an undeclared truce with the invaders; a handful opts to resist; and one becomes a collaborator. When an escaped French prisoner of war returns home to challenge the agent from London who comes to train volunteers for a D-Day attack on the flak site, matters come to a head.

The Germans’ situation is no less fraught with difficulty. The construction foreman sympathizes with the mayor’s high wire act of maintaining peace between the French and their conquerors. A series of incidents lead to the foreman being accused of letting the locals forget that they are subjects of the Reich. The opposition the foreman faces from his assistant, the commander of the flak battery, and a ruthless military policeman threaten to destroy him.

The Tower at Petite Vigne is a fast-paced, absorbing novel about the choices people make when they find themselves caught up in the confusion and chaos of war.