For those who are possessed of the misapprehension that the French don’t appreciate what America did for them sixty five years ago yesterday, this article by Le Figaro’s Philippe Labro expresses the tremendous gratitude that continues to be felt for the bloody sacrifice made by thousands of Americans who lost their lives along the beaches of Normandy in the name of an ideal: ‘Freedom!’
For Le Figaro, Philippe Labro writes in part:
They knew nothing, or nearly nothing. They were unaware of all these small towns with enigmatic names: Colleville, Vierville, Arromanches, Grandcamp, Sainte-Honorine, Poupeville. They were hardly aware of the existence of this region, whose name was, however, relatively easy to pronounce: Normandie, with a ‘y’ in their native language, the only one they knew how to speak it, since they weren’t bilingual. They were the GIs, the American soldiers, come from elsewhere to liberate a somewhere about which no one had taught them much in school. France. Europe. A continent occupied by a force that had been identified to them as “Nazi.” And they had seven and a half seconds of survival ahead of them (but this last item, they didn’t yet know) …
“No one had told them that it would be like this. The first hours and the first waves of assault were terrible, catastrophic, disastrous, confused, petrifying, indescribable in their horror, and those who succeeded in crossing that fateful barrier of seven and a half seconds owed it as much to chance as to unconsciousness, to hazard as to bravery, to will as to the mania for victory. All heroes. They belonged to the ‘Greatest Generation,’ historians from all shores would say much later, this immense and anonymous line of Americans without rank, incapable of pronouncing a phrase of French or the name of any village in Normandy. The only word that brought them to this point, to these seven seconds of death or survival, was spelled freedom. Freedom! How could we ever forget them?”
By Philippe Labro
Translated By Mary Kenney
June 5, 2009
France – Le Figaro – Original Article (French)
Philippe Labro pays homage to the American soldiers who, at risk to their lives, landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944. They knew nothing of France, yet in their thousands they died to defend an ideal: freedom.
They knew nothing, or nearly nothing. They were unaware of all these small towns with enigmatic names: Colleville, Vierville, Arromanches, Grandcamp, Sainte-Honorine, Poupeville. They were hardly aware of the existence of this region, whose name was, however, relatively easy to pronounce: Normandie, with a “y” in their native language, the only one they knew how to speak it, since they weren’t bilingual. They were the GIs, the American soldiers, come from elsewhere to liberate a somewhere about which no one had taught them much in school. France. Europe. A continent occupied by a force that had been identified to them as “Nazi.” And they had seven and a half seconds of survival ahead of them (but this last item, they didn’t yet know).
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