Andrew “Gerry” Hodges grew up knowing his dad was a hero. Andrew Gerow Hodges Sr. would tell him stories of his time in France negotiating the release of prisoners of war during World War II from the Nazis.
But it wasn’t until Andrew Jr., a Mountain Brook resident, wrote a book on his dad, which was released this fall, that he fully understood his story.
“You put all the stories together and you see all these tremendous dramas unfold,” he said. “It made me appreciate how much my father went through and how many times he was out there alone.”
Andrew Jr.’s book, Behind Nazi Lines: My Father’s Heroic Quest to Save 149 World War II POWs, is now available on Amazon and from Alabama Booksmith and major book retailers. Denise George, a biographer who knew Andrew Sr., coauthored the book, pairing her expertise shaping drama with words with Andrew Jr.’s experience as a writer and psychiatrist specializing in trauma.
Andrew Jr. had met many of the people who became characters in his book, many of them at a POW reunion held at Samford University in 2002.
“They each had a story,” Andrew Jr. said. “A lot of them were still suffering from PTSD all those years later. They told me things they wouldn’t tell other people because they knew my dad and they knew what I did.”
But the book of course still required extensive interviews and research, many that he conducted with his mother to learn her side of the stories.
His father’s story begins and ends in Alabama. He grew up poor in South Alabama and attended Howard College (now Samford University) on a football scholarship. Because of a shoulder injury from football, he was ineligible to serve in the military but wanted to find some way to join the war effort. So in 1944 he joined the American Red Cross and before long had left behind his wife, Mary Louise, and 2-year-old son, Andrew Jr., to enter occupied France unarmed alone in a jeep, repeatedly risking his life on a mission to negotiate with Germans to release POWs. At the time hundreds of Allied soldiers were living in brutal conditions in prisoner-of-war camps in the area.
“It’s an interesting story because it’s about what one person can do at any given moment in time. [The Germans] admired him greatly for his courage,” Andrew Jr. said. “He had worked in a small store to support his family, and he learned to deal with people and negotiate with people. [In France] he would take supplies and coats to the prisoners, eventually proposing a POW exchange. He took German officers tobacco they couldn’t get. He was charming but he was tough. At one point the Germans wanted five elite German POWs for one difficult Allied POW. My father immediately got up to walk away calling their bluff and got his man in a one-for-one swap.”
As he works to promote the book, Andrew Jr. hopes he will see his father’s story as a movie one day too.
“There is a need today for great heroes that fought the great World War,” he said. “We all need good role models who show us the way, and this generation, the Greatest Generation, had some stories to tell.”