Liberators

Do you believe some people are heaven-sent?  After meeting many French angels in the last week, I’m a believer.

First, Dominique.  I told you about a little about him in my last email. We went to several “helpers”, young women (at the time) in Brittany who sheltered airmen in their houses at the great risk of torture and execution.  Dominique interviewed them in French.  I filmed.  These ladies already knew and trusted him as well, and so shared secrets and details that they would not have with anyone else.

Giving up his chance to vote in the French parliamentary elections, Dominique took me to Paris where we interviewed a man who had taken airmen on the train from Paris out to Brittany, including Robert Sweatt and five others on the train in March, 1944.

After our interview I followed Dominique to his home near Creil where I met his family.  Creil just happens to be where JG2 (the Richthofen squadron) was stationed when they went up in the air to shoot Robert and the others down.  JG2 was a very, very busy unit.  Of course the area is littered with planes they shot down which were never recovered.

At noon the next day, I had to go.  Three hours later I arrived south of Paris, to the place where Robert and Trouble, his plane, crashed.  After retracing his route while trying to escape the German cordon set up to ensnare him I gained a far better insight into the real miracle that allowed him to endure until he was spirited to a local farm.

Leaving one small village for another in the Orleans forest in the fading light, I arrived at the home of a local historian had been on the phone for days (really, FIVE whole days), arranging everything for my visit.  We had dinner at 10 pm, and he could barely sit down he was so excited to see me, showing me his research, giving me books he had written on the other planes that had crashed in his area on January 7, 1944.  His wife had made almost all the food we ate by hand, including a certain type of lemonade drink with grapes and other fruit, and had gone to a neighbor’s garden to pick fresh strawberries for dessert.

In the morning, we quickly got ready.  My historian friend had arranged a “little” ceremony at the memorial for one of the planes.  When we pulled about, about 20 cars were parked on the side of the road, with more pouring in all the time.  Two journalists started interviewing me.  Humbly, I told them I was just a researcher. To them it didn’t matter. I was American, and they would do anything to make sure I understood how grateful they are to the airmen who helped liberate them and their village.

The rain held off as some of the eyewitnesses to the crash explained what happened and how gruesomely some of the aviators had died.  Then I and the head of the local French-American association placed a beautiful bouquet of flowers on the memorial as ten flag holders stood at attention behind the memorial in a semi-circle.  I met the mayors of some of the nearby villages, and after they spoke, I was asked to say a few words.

In my schoolgirl French I thanked the people present from the bottom of my heart for remembering our boys, and for honoring them in this way. But how can words really convey how touching, how utterly moving such an effort by the local people was?

Afterwards, we tromped deep into the soaking woods to see where the B-24 had crashed here.  Then we went on to where some of those with parachutes had landed.  More memorials, more eyewitness accounts, a speech from the mayor, pictures for the journalists, and then onto the next little town, where yet another B-24 had crashed January 7 (JG2 shot down 5 in this area).  There we ventured even deeper into the woods, down country lanes and over rough ground to find the crash site.  Finally, at noon, about twenty of us ended up miles deep in the Orleans forest, over hunting trails on private land, at a memorial to a band of Maquis who had been encircled and wiped out by the Germans.  At the bottom of the plaque was the name of one aviator; an aviator lucky enough to bail out with a parachute, but unlucky enough to be caught in some trees and not found until 18 days later, dead.

Agonizingly, I could not get the thought of him hanging there out of my mind.

Again, I had to cut our visit painfully short in order to go on to Germany to interview a JG2 pilot.  I promised, however, over and over, that I would come back.  And I mean it.

I don’t at all deserve all the hospitality of these wonderful French people, to be the recipient of their gratitude towards the Americans.

To all my American WW2 veterans and friends who truly earned this honor and respect, my eternal gratitude.