Welcome to another trench chats on the old front line podcast, and I'm really pleased this week to be joined by Caitlin DeAngelis who is just

about to publish a really interesting new book that covers an aspect of the Great War, covers

that point where the Great War meets the Second World War, the even greater war in some respects,

called The Caretakers, Wargraves Gardners and the Secret Battle to Rescue Allied Airmen in World War II.

So thanks for joining us, Caitlin.

I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

So, I mean, this is quite an unusual book on many levels because, I mean, you know, there are a lot of books published on the Great War, and even on the Second World War, probably even more currently.

But very rarely do we come across something where this is kind of genuinely new research on something that no one has written about before.

So what brought you to this subject?

Well, I've always been really interested in cemeteries.

I did my doctoral work on cemeteries in the 17th and 18th centuries,

and it's just always been something that has been interesting to me.

So during the centenary, I was in France, I was going to ceremonies at the different cemeteries, and I was at Vimy Ridge,

and I saw they had on the wall one of the pictures of Hitler visiting Vimy Ridge in June 1940,

and that made me think, huh, oh yeah, all of these places were here during the Second World War.

I wonder what happened. And I wonder what happened to the people who were here taking

care of them. So I started reading. I started going into the CWGC archives and just went from there.

And the story of these guys kind of starts with really the outcome of the Great War,

isn't it? With the creation of these permanent cemeteries across France and Flanders,

and I guess the kind of creation of a workforce to maintain them and look after them.

Right, yeah. So these are all First World War ex-servicemen who stay in France, or some of them

go back to the UK or Canada and then come back to France

...