Posted on 06/07/2024 6:23:00 AM PDT by Miami Rebel
American soldiers in uniforms spill out from the bars and cafes all around June 6 Square, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.
Is this really France?
“This is the 53rd state,” Philippe Nekrassoff, a local deputy mayor, said as he made his way across the square, with its Roman milestone and medieval church, while U.S. paratroopers wearing maroon berets played soccer with a group of local teenagers. “Americans are at home here.”
Here is Ste.-Mère-Église, a slip of a town in northwest Normandy with one main street. About 3,000 residents live in the town and its surrounding region, with its fields of cows and towering hedges.
Hundreds of U.S. paratroopers landed in the immediate area in the early hours of June 6, 1944. Four hours later — even before the world’s largest armada arrived to the nearby Normandy beaches — one of those soldiers hauled down the Nazi flag and hoisted an American one up over city hall.
“This was the first town to be liberated on the western front,” read two marble plaques, one in French and one in English, in front of the building.
The story of that liberation is now deeply threaded into the town’s identity.
Statues, plaques and historical panels dot many street corners. Shops have names like D-Day, Bistrot 44 and Hair’born salon. There’s a mannequin of John Steele, the American paratrooper immortalized in the 1962 film “The Longest Day,” hanging from the church steeple as he did on June 6, 1944, his parachute billowing.
“There is a sense of welcome here that’s nothing like anything else in the region,” said Jacques Villain, a photographer who has documented the village’s celebration for 25 years and was the driving force behind the just-published bilingual book “Ste.-Mère-Église: We Will Remember Them.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That's the late Bill Bray and the late John Woodthorpe with Mme Gondrée on the seventieth anniversary. The Bénouville Bridge was known to Allied planners as the Pegasus Bridge, after the winged horse on the shoulder badge of British paratroopers. But since 1944 it has been called the Pegasus Bridge in France, too. And in the eight decades since June 6th no D-Day veteran has ever had to pay for his drink at the Café Gondrée.
Awesome
Germans say something akin to that, as well, when referring to either Germany as a whole, or some part of it. I always correct them ("You mean '51st state'), but they are at least well-intentioned. It's meant as a compliment.
Regards,
In the Catholic Church the stained glass windows had been blown out. The locals replaced them with stained glass images of US paratroopers coming down from heaven
The sad irony being St Mere Eglise means “Holy Mother Church,” that is, not a specific building, that’s one of the names of the Catholic Church. The descendants of the men who fought and died that day turned their back on faith and freedom
Hello?
It’s amazing.
My dad talked about how the French were so grateful that every GI was given not a glass, but a whole bottle of wine when they served the liberating forces a special meal.
The Paratroop Company that is featured in "Band of Brothers" fought its first major battle at Ste.-Mère-Église, which is part of the Cotentin Peninsula, which was the extreme right (west) flank of the Normandy invasion.
The location did not highlight on the map I posted.
The Cotentin Peninsula is the little three sided jut of land that points directly north at England.
In World War II, it would have been the 49th State.
Bugger off troll.
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