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Heavy bombing by the RAF and the U.S. Air Force was intended to cripple the Luftwaffe and interfere with German lines of communications in preparation for D-Day. After the landing of the allied expeditionary force in Normandy, further bombardments aimed to prevent the enemy from sending reinforcements, notably Panzer Divisions, to threaten the dangerously exposed beachheads. Chartres was an important railway junction. It also possessed an enemy airfield. On 26 May, 1944, allied bombs rained down upon Chartres. An American airplane, hit and disabled by German anti-aircraft fire, dropped its bombs in the town centre. Sixty or so_people were killed. The great cathedral of Chartres was spared, but the municipal library went up in flames. Years ago I heard rumours that the local German commander could not bear to allow the famous Chartres manuscripts to be taken away and hidden in a secure location out of town; so they were brought back. Whatever the truth of this story, a magnificent collection of some 1, 873 manuscripts remained housed in the library, 600 of which were parchment texts dating from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. Several of these medieval manuscripts were extremely precious; almost half were embellished with decorations or contained miniatures. Relatively few items out of this once very rich collection survived the war, unless...unless... some of these MSS. were spirited away at the very last moment... Or is this just a medievalist's fantasy? Gary Dickson University of Edinburgh %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%