(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . D-Day through French Eyes [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-06 According to Roberts, nearly 3000 Normans were killed on D-Day and the next day. Before the victory in Normandy in August, almost 20,000 civilians died and many more became refugees. The Allied bombing of industrial areas, railways and roads unintentionally destroyed population centers, while Caen and the ports of Le Havre and Cherbourg were deliberate targets. Roberts quotes war correspondent Andy Rooney: On June 6, 2014, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, an excerpt in Harpers Magazine introduced me to D-Day Through French Eyes which my local library eventually obtained. With its eye-witness reports from French archives and publications, the book offers a valuable perspective on the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the following days. I wrote this for D-Day June 6, 2015 and reposted it for a subsequent D-Day. Now for the 80th anniversary when the surviving GI’s attending ceremonies in France are centenarians, here’s another repost of my review of D-Day Through French Eyes by Mary Louise Roberts. Every family had lost someone. It was true that they were being freed, but at the cost of the total destruction of everything they had. One of the first memoirs in the book is by a young teacher who observed paratroopers landing on the night of June 5th. Living near the coast in a small village, Marcelle Hamel-Hateau heard an unusual number of planes overhead late in the evening; then from her bedroom window she saw parachutes dropping onto the fields "like big black umbrellas." Outside, she met an American paratrooper whose mother had been born in France. He told her in excellent French that the invasion had begun and thousands of paratroopers were landing in the countryside that night. In her classroom they studied his maps, noting how far he was from his targets and how he could reach them. At 11:20 p.m. he looked at his watch and said in English: “The days to come are going to be terrible. Good luck, mademoiselle, thank you, I will not forget you for the rest of my life." Marcelle recalls that just after he left: the horizon in the direction of the sea lights up as if reflecting an immense fire over the ocean. The black silhouettes of airplanes arrive through the clouds and turn around in the sky. One of them passes just above our little school; parachutes open and float down like a mass of bubbles in the clear night....In a few moments, the sky is nothing more than an immense ballet of parachutes....In the fields all around us, big black planes slide silently toward the earth....These are the first groups of gliders. Our parachutist had been part of a group of scouts sent to signal the descent and landing zones. A 15-year-old girl watching from an attic window near the sea also saw the sudden blaze of light as "beams of the searchlights probed the night, sweeping the sky toward us, crossing as if to search each other." Lights on planes "sparkled white and red," and she found the scene both terrifying and beautiful. Roberts reports that hardly anyone landed where planned. Some planes flew as low as 400-500 feet, almost too low for the parachutes to have time to open. A 16-year-old youth recalled: "To this day I remember this paratrooper's face as he prepared to jump and was stunned to find himself so low." Another youth recalled a paratrooper who fell into a row of peas in his garden and one who burst into the house, saying in broken French: "Okay, don't be afraid, it's the landings!" Then he gave cigarettes and chewing gum to everyone. "On the 5th of June, 1944," wrote the youth, "we were all smoking an Old Gold, our first American cigarette, and also sizing up chewing gum, a kind of candy that was unknown to us, but which this man took out of his many pockets." After the American left, the father's first reaction was: "Well, well, he speaks French." A Norman who witnessed the naval landings on June 6th said the water was covered "as far as the eye could see" with cargo ships, barges, and all kinds and sizes of landing craft. Roberts calls it the largest fleet in history, with 5000-plus vessels (mostly British and American, but also Canadian, French, Polish, Dutch, and Norwegian) including six battleships. Several accounts of the landings were written by members of the Resistance, such as this youth: On the sixth of June around 5 a.m., I am awakened by an enormous boom, a sort of cannon firing without end - a ceaseless storm....they are arriving!...Our humiliation was coming to an end. Yes, it was the most beautiful day of my life. The prisoners, the rations, the sirens, the bombs, the Gestapo, Hitler and his team of gangsters...order was going to be rapidly restored. The hour of revenge had sounded. A young woman, awakened by "a constant roar," recognized that "finally it was the landings." She thought immediately about the maps which her father had drawn showing German machine guns on minor roads: "Ah, if only the maps got through to London." She had hidden the maps inside the covers of her Latin book to pass them on via the Resistance network. Throughout the fierce battles for control of Normandy, ordinary people did what they could to help. Despite great risk to themselves and their families, they fed and hid the Allied soldiers, pilots, and paratroopers who appeared at their farmhouses and in their towns; they cared for the wounded, and ever after remembered the dead. One wrote: "I will never forget seeing this soldier who died for us, who had come on our soil, in Normandy, to fight for the lives of others and paid for it with his life." Many of the Normans whose memoirs are preserved were children or teenagers in 1944. They remembered the large helmets of the paratroopers whose faces were smeared with black, and the soldiers who gave them chocolate and chewing gum. They recalled that the American soldiers were very tall, very big men who liked to throw balls to each other and catch them with "big gloves." One 12-year-old had thought the soldiers very "cool" but was puzzled by them: we could not figure out why they threw balls at each other endlessly, or why they would want to use those ridiculously big gloves. Strange soldiers. Right in the middle of a campaign, they had time to play. The language barrier is often mentioned in the book. Very few GIs spoke French, and Normans who had studied English in school could not comprehend the fast speech of the Americans. One memoirist wrote that as a high school student he knew Shakespeare and had received many prizes for his English, but even though he could construct a few sentences for the Americans, he didn't understand one word of their answers. According to Roberts, the Allied plan was to liberate Normandy in three weeks, but for nearly three months the countryside was a battlefield. Picturesque church steeples became sniper posts. Barns hid stockpiles of ammunition. Hedgerows sheltered artillery. As their fields became battlefields, tens of thousands of Normans took to the road, migrating all over France. The refugees moved south and east, usually in groups of twenty to thirty; they dug trenches near hedgerows for shelter and covered them with sticks; they hid in churches, caves, mines, and medieval castles. A few had horse-drawn carts and bicycles, but most walked; some pushed wheelbarrows and baby carriages. When they returned after the Allied victory in Normandy in August, most refugees found their homes in ruins. If a home was still standing, it had no roof or windows. In the unusually cold winter of 1944-45, a newspaper in Caen, the capital of Lower Normandy, called Christmas the saddest time we have ever known. Because we still live in a world in flames, in a murdered France, in a ravaged region. No more houses, no more roofs over our head, and grief everywhere around us. Later would come reconstruction, as can be seen in pictures of ruins as they looked in 1944 and the same areas now. ************* The excerpt in Harpers Magazine which introduced me to D-Day Through French Eyes is titled Army of Shadows by Marcelle Hamel-Hateau. The full account appears on pages 9-10 of the book. Most other quoted material about the D-Day events can be found on pages 23-39. Andy Rooney's quote is on p. 69, and the Caen newspaper on p. 185. While preparing this review, I found supplementary information about the invasion of Normandy; details about the use of gliders in war; an official source in France for the 1946 census, which recorded 2,270,708 people living in Lower and Upper Normandy two years after D-Day; and five excellent maps. One of these, a very useful day-by-day animation of the Allied invasion from June 6 through August 21, traces the "roughly 10 weeks of brutal fighting over a small but fateful corner of northwest France." In addition, there is this stunning commentary from Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes in 2001: www.cbsnews.com/… He landed on Utah Beach on the fourth day after D-Day. (fast forward through the beginning advertisement.) --------------------- The review first posted in 2015 can be seen here. Comments from the readers about what their fathers and uncles did on June 6, 1944 are worth reading. A later repost is here, with more interesting comments from readers. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/6/2245036/-D-Day-through-French-Eyes?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/