Pop's War

My father, Major Cyrus E. Manierre Jr., a West Point graduate, was selected to be one of the "Jeds" to parachute into Occupied France, train and assist the local Resistance forces (The Maquis). Operation Jedburgh was a clandestine operation during World War II in which two and three- man teams of operatives of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), theU.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Free French Bureau central de renseignements et d'action ("Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations") and the Dutch and Belgian armies in exile were dropped by parachute into occupied France, the Netherlands and Belgium. The objective of the Jedburgh teams was to assist allied forces who invaded France on 6 June 1944 with guerrilla warfare, sabotage and leading local resistance forces in actions against the Germans. This book is his story, a compilation of his Jedburgh "After Action Report", his initial writings, letters from various other Jeds, and many recollections of others found through searching many websites. His story is unique - through a miraculous series of events he avoided execution at the hands of the Gestapo and was instead sent to a Luftwaffe prison camp where of all impossible fortune he met up with his brother who had recently been captured and sent to that same prison camp after his B-24 was blown out of the sky. Illustrated, including several photographs by French photographer Andre Gamet taken in Occupied France