EGN NEWS DESK
American troopers in uniforms spill out from the bars and cafes throughout June 6 Square, ingesting beer and smoking cigarettes.
Phil Collins blares from loudspeakers. American flags flutter from chimneys and home windows, on overhead traces and even from across the neck of a golden retriever trotting by along with her proprietor.
Is this actually France?
“This is the 53rd state,” Philippe Nekrassoff, an area deputy mayor, mentioned as he made his means throughout the sq., with its Roman milestone and medieval church, whereas U.S. paratroopers carrying maroon berets performed soccer with a bunch of native youngsters. “Americans are at house right here.”
Here is Ste.-Mère-Église, a slip of a city in northwest Normandy with one essential avenue. About 3,000 residents dwell within the city and its surrounding area, with its fields of cows and towering hedges.
Hundreds of U.S. paratroopers landed within the rapid space within the early hours of June 6, 1944. Four hours later — even earlier than the world’s largest armada arrived to the close by Normandy seashores — a type of troopers hauled down the Nazi flag and hoisted an American one up over metropolis corridor.
“This was the primary city to be liberated on the western entrance,” learn two marble plaques, one in French and one in English, in entrance of the constructing.
The story of that liberation is now deeply threaded into the city’s identification.
While most villages throughout Normandy maintain annual D-Day commemorations, little Ste.-Mère-Église hosts six parades, 10 ceremonies, 11 live shows and a parachute bounce by present U.S. paratroopers.
Statues, plaques and historic panels dot many avenue corners. Shops have names like D-Day, Bistrot 44 and Hair’born salon. There’s a model of John Steele, the American paratrooper immortalized within the 1962 movie “The Longest Day,” hanging from the church steeple as he did on June 6, 1944, his parachute billowing.
At first blush, the city appears, effectively, too unabashedly and in-your-face American for a rustic that revels in self-criticism and understatement.
But stick round a bit, and the city reveals a relationship with U.S. paratroopers that’s deep, honest and disarmingly stunning.
“There is a way of welcome right here that’s nothing like anything within the area,” mentioned Jacques Villain, a photographer who has documented the village’s celebration for 25 years and was the driving drive behind the just-published bilingual e book “Ste.-Mère-Église: We Will Remember Them.”
The city’s first D-Day commemoration was small and occurred even whereas the conflict in Europe was nonetheless raging, he identified. On the primary anniversary, Maj. Gen. James Gavin, by then the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, despatched 30 troopers again from Germany for the ceremonies.
Just after midnight on June 6, 1944, wave after wave of low-flying airplanes roared over Ste.-Mère-Église and the encompassing space. Spilling from them have been hundreds of parachutes, flitting throughout the sky like confetti.
One parachute floated proper down right into a trench dug in Georgette Flais’ yard, the place she was huddled along with her mother and father and a neighbor. Attached to it was Cliff Maughan. Ms. Flais refers to him as “our American.”
“He represented, for me, one thing extraordinary — liberation,” mentioned Ms. Flais, now 96.
She recalled how the German soldier billeted in her home burst into view, his rifle pointed into the ditch. Ms. Flais’ father jumped up and begged the German to not shoot. Miraculously, he agreed.
Soon after, the German soldier realized the Americans had taken the city and surrendered to Mr. Maughan, who Ms. Flais described as preternaturally calm, handing out chewing gum, chocolate and cigarettes. He curled up on his parachute for a fast nap earlier than heading out at daybreak to battle.
“We kissed him warmly goodbye,” Ms. Flais mentioned. “A friendship was born.”
As the primary place to be liberated, Ste.-Mère-Église shortly grew to become the place the place fallen American troopers have been first buried — 13,800 in three fields turned cemeteries across the village. Local males dug the graves.
“It was just a bit village of 1,300 inhabitants,” mentioned Marc Lefèvre, the city’s mayor for 30 years who left workplace in 2014. “They have been witness to the worth of sacrifice, with all these vehicles of coffins. That left a huge effect.”
One of the graves was for Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who died of a coronary heart assault 5 weeks after touchdown on Utah Beach. He was the eldest son of Theodore Roosevelt, the previous U.S. president.
Simone Renaud, the mayor’s spouse, was captured laying flowers on his tomb by a Life journal photographer.
The response from grieving moms within the United States was rapid. Hundreds despatched Ms. Renaud letters, pleading for her to go to their son’s graves and ship again photographs. She complied.
Henri-Jean Renaud, 89, lately flipped by way of albums of rigorously sorted letters to his mom, written in longhand, from 80 years in the past.
Some of the ladies later came visiting the graves themselves. They ate dinner with the Renauds and typically stayed of their house. “I’m nonetheless in contact with a household that had a child my age,” Mr. Renaud mentioned.
He nonetheless visits the grave of 1 soldier “occasionally, to say somewhat hi there to him,” he mentioned.
Years later, American veterans started to make pilgrimages to Ste.-Mère-Église for its annual D-Day commemorations.
The city had just one resort, since renamed after Mr. Steele. So Ms. Renaud, who died in 1988, fashioned the Friends of American Veterans affiliation, and plenty of locals joined and hosted the guests of their houses.
Volunteers spent afternoons driving round, making an attempt to assist the veterans discover the precise spot in a subject or marsh or tree the place they first landed.
“For most of them, it was there they’d their first losses, their first highly effective feelings, the primary pal killed, the primary wounded,” Mr. Renaud mentioned. “Those are issues that mark you for all times. So they have been at all times looking for that starting.”
By 1984, Ms. Flais was educating Greek and Latin in a highschool in Alençon, about 140 miles away. On June 6 of that yr, she was watching tv when she noticed on the display an American soldier who had come again to Ste.-Mère-Église. He was broader, and wore a baseball hat as an alternative of a helmet. But he had that very same laid-back demeanor. She jumped within the automotive and rushed again to her childhood city.
“It was my American,” she mentioned. “We fell into each other’s arms.”
Today, 80 years later, there are few veterans left. Their successors now crowd the city sq., the place Mr. Steele and his fellow World War II parachutists are celebrated and remembered as veritable gods.
They are joined by the hundreds of re-enactment lovers, vacationers and French residents who come to pay their respects.
“It’s overwhelming,” mentioned Jonathan Smith, 43, whose journey right here was a retirement current after 18 and a half years of service with the 82nd Airborne Division. “I didn’t make it 10 paces this morning with out children stopping me to ask for a photograph and shake my hand.”
The native tourism workplace is anticipating a million folks to come back into city over the ten days of commemorations and celebrations this yr.
Among them are the kids and grandchildren of the Americans who have been in cost on D-Day, from General Roosevelt Jr. to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander in chief of the Allied forces.
“I discover I must be right here and be part of it,” mentioned Chloe Gavin, the daughter of General Gavin, who himself got here again repeatedly earlier than he died.
On a latest night time, native households welcomed extra 200 American troopers into their houses for dinner.
Across the road from metropolis corridor, the place the American flag that troopers hung up in 1944 now hangs framed on a wall, three generations of the Auvray household sat of their backyard with three U.S. paratroopers from Puerto Rico. The household matriarch, Andrée Auvray, regaled them along with her reminiscences of D-Day.
She was 9 months pregnant and dwelling on a horse farm simply exterior city that had been requisitioned by a battalion of troopers with the German military. Just days earlier than the Allies’ touchdown, the troopers departed for Cherbourg, France, satisfied the Allies would assault there, she mentioned.
“We have been so fortunate,” mentioned Ms. Auvray, now 97 and a great-grandmother of 13. “It would have been a blood bathtub.”
Three American paratroopers landed in her backyard.
An American navy hospital was shortly erected subsequent door. Her farm grew to become the well being clinic and a brief house for civilians, fleeing the battle that ensued after German troops tried to retake Ste.-Mère-Église. They fed 120 folks for a month. She gave start to her son, Michel-Yves, on a camp mattress as a result of her mattress had been given to the injured.
Michel-Yves will flip 80 quickly.
Ms. Auvray described the missiles exploding close by, the gnawing worry that the Germans would retake the city and her gratitude that they didn’t.
“We lived by way of such anguish collectively,” she mentioned of the American troopers and French residents. “That’s why we have now such a treasured relationship.”
