It all began in the late summer of 1940, soon after the Germans' spectacularly successful campaign in France, when a heavy antiaircraft battery were stationed on the outskirts of D., a town some fifty miles southwest of Paris. The immediate result was a series of fatalities, all officially recorded as accidental deaths. They occurred at a time when the national necessity for war had started to gain widespread acceptance, a time when murder itself was considered quite normal and referred to in current parlance by other, more agreeable names. Even today, there are many who even now would describe what happened as "only human," if not legally and morally objectionable. And yet, even at that early stage, there did exist a few individuals who regarded the so-called exigencies of war as a blatant personal challenge. It soon dawned on them that, under prevailing rules, their only course was to murder the murderers - or at least one of them. Murder was duly done, and "Case D." resulted. This book seeks to reconstruct its background.