The memory of blood dripping from trucks loaded with the mangled bodies of US soldiers arriving at a nearby war cemetery from the battlefield in 1945 still gives 91-year-old Marcel Schmetz nightmares.
It also instilled a lifelong sense of gratitude for the young soldiers from the US and around the world who gave their lives fighting to end World War II. Schmetz even built a museum at his home in the Belgian Ardennes to honor their sacrifice.
“If the Americans hadn’t come, we wouldn’t be here,” the Belgian retiree said.
Photo: AP
That same spirit also pervades Normandy in northern France, where the allied forces landed on June 6, 1944, a day that became the tipping point of the war.
ETERNAL GRATITUDE
In Normandy, Marie-Pascale Legrand is still taking care of the ailing Charles Shay, a 100-year-old American who stormed the bloodied beaches on that fateful “D-Day” as a teenager and fought to help liberate Europe for many more months.
“Gratitude for me means that I am eternally indebted, because I can live free today,” Legrand said.
It would take almost another year of fierce fighting before Germany would surrender on May 8, 1945. Commemorations and festivities are planned for the 80th anniversary across much of the continent for what has become known as Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day.
FRAYING BONDS
Ever since, for generation upon generation in the nations west of the “Iron Curtain” that sliced Europe in two, it became a day to confirm and reconfirm what were long seen as the unbreakable bonds with the US as the two stood united against Soviet Eastern Europe.
No more. Over the past several months, the rhetoric from Washington has become increasingly feisty.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has questioned the vestiges of the decades-old alliance and slapped trade sanctions on the 27-nation EU and the UK. Trump has insisted that the EU trade bloc was there to “screw” the US from the start.
The wartime allies are now involved in a trade war.
“After all that has happened, it is bound to leave scars,” Ghent University European studies professor Hendrik Vos said.
HONORING THE FALLEN
Yet deep in the green hills and Ardennes woods where the Battle of the Bulge was fought and Schmetz lives, just as along the windswept bluffs of Legrand’s Normandy, the ties endure — isolated from the tremors of geopolitics.
“For all those that criticize the Americans, we can only say that for us, they were all good,” Schmetz said. “We should never forget that.”
After watching the horrors of the dead soldiers at the nearby Henri-Chapelle cemetery as an 11-year-old, Schmetz vowed he would do something in their honor and gathered war memorabilia.
A car mechanic with a big warehouse, he immediately started to turn it into the “Remember Museum 39-45” once he retired more than three decades ago.
For the treasure trove of military artifacts, what truly stands out is a long bench in the kitchen where US veterans, their children and their grandchildren come and sit and talk about what happened, and the bonds uniting continent, memories all meticulously kept by his wife Mathilde, to pass on to new visitors and new generations of schoolkids.
Shay, who is now bedridden in Normandy, was part of the 1st Infantry Division and came through the Ardennes region before heading to Germany. He started making visits to the D-Day beaches about two decades ago.
He became increasingly sick over the years, and Legrand took him in to her home in 2018.
REAGAN’S IMPACT
The moment everything changed for Legrand was listening to then-US president Ronald Reagan in 1984 speaking on a Normandy bluff of the sacrifice and heroism of American soldiers.
Barely in her 20s, she realized that “their blood is in our soil and we have to show gratitude. We have to do something. I didn’t know what at the time, but I knew I would do something to show it.”
She had long volunteered to help Allied veterans before she met Shay. He was lonely, sick and frail when she took him in and began caring for him at her Normandy home.
“It is a strong symbol, which takes on a new dimension in this day and age,” she said, referring to the tumultuous trans-Atlantic relations that have put the bonds between allies that Trump called “unbreakable” only six years ago, under extreme pressure.
Central in Trump’s criticism of European NATO allies is that they have happily hunkered far too long under US military supremacy since World War II and should start paying much more of their own way in the alliance. He has done so in such terms that many Europeans sincerely fear the break-up of the trans-Atlantic bonds that were a core of global politics for almost a century.
“The naive belief that the Americans will, by definition, always be an ally — once and for all, that is gone,” Vos said. It also raises a moral question for Europeans now.
“Are we doomed to be eternally grateful?” Vos asked.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
RSS