Publishers Weekly
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Madeline Pauliac, the intrepid leader of the Blue Squadron, a task force of nurses who in the final year of WWII crisscrossed newly liberated Europe in search of French citizens freed from Nazi camps, takes center stage in this evocative debut history from her nephew. As a medical doctor, Pauliac had run a refugee orphanage in Paris during the war (the basis for the 2016 film Les Innocentes) while working secretly for the Resistance; she was eventually made a doctor-lieutenant in the French Army. In 1944, de Gaulle commissioned her to find French citizens who had been caught in the Nazi camp system, and she took command of the Blue Squadron—11 young women with a few ambulances. After scouring American-occupied Germany, the group made a more fraught crossing into Soviet-occupied territory and the U.S.S.R. (where some POWs had been relocated). Conditions on the Soviet side were more grueling due to scarce resources and Soviet suspicion of the French, who they viewed as Nazi collaborators. The women faced threats of rape and had to rely on their wits and wiles to reclaim French citizens. Pauliac, who cuts a dashing figure in Maynial’s reverent account, returned to Poland in 1946 to found a care home for nuns who had been raped and impregnated by Soviet soldiers. She died in Poland that year, in a car accident during her honeymoon. Readers will be engrossed by this stylishly written and winsome portrait in fortitude. (Feb.)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

In this intriguing work of retrieved WWII history, the nephew of a French female army physician examines his aunt’s remarkable life and suspicious death. He never met his mother’s sister, Madeleine Pauliac, who died in a car crash in Soviet-occupied Poland in 1946, before he was born. But Maynial thoroughly reports her 34 years, especially the two leading up to her death. He notes a 2020 Der Spiegel article revealing that the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) started monitoring Pauliac in April 1945. After all, she witnessed murders, pillage, and rapes by Red Army troops and might report the atrocities and make them public. Was her 1946 death an accident? Likely not. Translated from the French, Maynial's account of his aunt's life includes the history of France's courageous Blue Squadron, women nurses and ambulance drivers sent to the front to rescue French troops and civilians. Maynial notes that French women didn’t get to vote until 1944. The dramatic, too-little-known story of courageous Pauliac and the valiant band of sisters reaffirms the horrors of war and the unstoppable power of remarkable women.

Library Journal
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Screenwriter and film executive Maynial pays homage to his aunt, Madeleine Pauliac, and 12 other women for their efforts during the last days of World War II and its immediate aftermath in France. In the last months of the war, Charles de Gaulle, the French military commander and statesman, asked Pauliac and 12 Red Cross volunteer nurses and ambulance drivers to rescue French service members and civilians who had been captured, injured, or stranded. They agreed to the request, came to be known as the Blue Squadron, and drove all over Europe on rescue missions. They also helped a group of nuns who had been raped and impregnated by Russian soldiers. When the assignment ended, the Blue Squadron had completed 200 rescue missions and repatriated 1,000 French people. After that, Pauliac headed up a project to work in Poland, where she died in 1946. VERDICT Using archival records, stories from Maynial's family, and an interview with the last surviving nurse from the Blue Squadron, this book delivers a gripping, affectionate account of these women's heroic work. Best for history, gender studies, and human-interest readers.—Jacqueline Parascandola