Sixty years after the allied landings that hastened the end of World War II, memories of those cataclysmic days in June still excite tears, anger, wonder -- and sometimes laughter -- among the people of Normandy.
On a February evening several hundred gathered to hear tales of a time that is now at the cusp of memory and history.
Told by old men, the stories spoke of hope and adventure -- but also of the darkness of war: of betrayal in the midst of victory, and of death in liberation.
Organized through the first half of this commemoration year in towns across Normandy, the 60th Anniversary Vigils came last week to the 11th century abbey that is the Hotel de Ville at Caen -- a place which suffered more than any other the violence of the 1944 campaign.
Though situated just a few kilometers from the beaches where the British, Canadian and US forces successfully landed on June 6, the old capital of William the Conqueror was not liberated till July 19. By then the city had been flattened and as many as 3,000 civilians killed by allied bombing.
"To our great misfortune, D-Day for us lasted a month and a half," said historian Claude Quetel, who introduced the evening of reminiscences. "We were caught between the allied hammer and the German anvil."
Seated in rows in the abbey's refectory beneath a mural of Duke William beating the English at Hastings, the audience of families, school-children, pensioners and professionals listened in passionate silence as the microphone was passed from hand to hand.
Charles Lepailleur was six and living in the coastal hamlet of Ver-sur-Mer. "In the night we heard strange noises. My father lay down and put his ear to the ground and then he looked at me and said, `It's started.' The next day the shells were passing right over the farm, so we left for Caen," he said.
In the town they also knew the longed-for day had come. But at half past one, Bertrand Beuron, then 16, recalled the moment when hope changed to despair.
"There was an incredible noise and we saw aeroplanes circling right above us. We could make out the markings and they weren't German. But then to our immense stupefaction we watched as the hatches opened, and the bombs tumbled out.
"It wasn't just stupefaction, it was incredulity. These were our friends. We had been waiting for them all this time. And now they were dropping bombs in an area where there weren't even any German troops. We could not understand it," Beuron said.
Moments of great pain were evoked, like the execution carried out on June 6 by the Gestapo of some 100 resistance prisoners held in the town jail.
"They killed them in groups of six or eight. They called them into the corridor, then down into the courtyard and then they shot them down like dogs. At lunch they stopped -- they had to dine with other Gestapo officers at Falaise -- and then they came back and started again at three," remembered Jacques Vico, himself a resistance member.
Christian Vauter was nine when his father, another resistance member, fled Caen after French police acting under Gestapo orders came to arrest him. He missed the bombing of the town because he was living on the run with his parents.
Bernard Dubois remembered how a relative was shot by the SS "at the place where the Festyland amusement park is now;" Henri Lacheve recalled flicking a V-for-Victory sign at a group of Canadian prisoners; and Bertrand Beuron broke the tension with an account of his first allied sighting.
"We were in a village outside Caen and some schoolboys said, `Come and look -- there's a bush moving all by itself!' So we peeked and it really was. Of course it was a vehicle covered in foliage. We shouted `Bravo Tommies' and a big man with a blackened face got off and said in a thick, thick accent: `Pas Tommies -- ici Canaaadiens Fraaancais!'" The refectory broke out laughing.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion