Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of French civilians killed by a British and American carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose.
At lunchtime in the small Normandy town of Évrecy, men gather in the tabac-café-bar to wager on the next harness race through the PMU betting network. With coffee or beer in hand, they focus on the screen; a young barmaid mops the floor. Up the road toward Caen, the tall, imposing church, dating from the thirteenth century but heavily damaged during World War II, has been rebuilt, apart from a vault and a turret extending from the north wall. Every other building in town is modern.
In the early morning of June 15, 1944, Évrecy—along with nearby Aunay-sur-Odon—was targeted by 223 Lancaster and 100 Halifax heavy bombers plus 14 Mosquito light bombers from Britain’s Royal Air Force as part of the campaign to liberate France that began with the Allied invasion on June 6. At Évrecy the headquarters of the Wehrmacht’s Twelfth Panzer Division was destroyed, and 130 out of 430 civilians were killed, the highest proportion in any community during the Battle of Normandy. At Aunay, where there was no military target, 200 civilians were killed—more than a tenth of the population.
“There were sixteen of us, in a farmer’s barn,” recalls Jaqueline de La Fuente, now ninety-two. They were in Évrecy as refugees from Caen, after a British bombing raid on June 6 destroyed their house and its surrounding neighborhood:
We spent some days sheltering in
a cellar, then left in the exodus,
hoping to find safety in the villages.
The road was so frightening—
planes above us. And when
we got there: more bombing. On
the night of June 15, more planes:
at first distant, then closer, right
above the barn. We ran across a
field to foxholes and trenches that
had been dug for shelter. But the
planes were faster than us, low and
loud—then the bombs fell. There
was such noise and confusion that
I still have nightmares and cannot
believe it was real—a horror
of explosions and pain.
She was wounded in the forehead
and right leg by shrapnel, but her father
and three of her four older sisters—Micheline,
a nurse; Carmen, a hairdresser;
and Marie- Thérèse, a seamstress—
were killed. Separated from the rest
of her family, she was taken back to
ruined Caen for emergency surgery.
Only later was she reconnected with
her mother by the Red Cross.
This June 6 world leaders, thousands
of tourists, and some families
of liberating troops will gather for the
eightieth anniversary of D- Day. It will
be either the last major commemoration
attended by veterans of the war
or the first without any. But few will
know the darkest part of D- Day’s story:
the slaughter of French civilians by a
British and American carpet- bombing
campaign considered by historians and
even some of its commanders to have
been of little or no military purpose.
During the three months that followed
D- Day, nearly 18,000 French
civilians were killed by British and
American bombers—nearly two
fifths of at least 51,380 killed by Allied
bombing during the war. That is low
compared with the 420,000
Germans estimated to have been killed by
Allied bombs, but roughly equivalent to
the 60,000 British civilians killed in the
Blitz. (The same number of Italian civilians
were also killed by Allied bombing,
two thirds of them after the armistice
was signed in September 1943.)
Yet while the Blitz is a cult in British
historical memory, these French
victims of Allied bombs were almost
invisible for five decades after D- Day
and have occupied a marginalized corner
of the war’s history in the years
since. They are absent not only from
official British and American accounts
but from French ones, too—it was considered
ungrateful to offend the liberators,
and the Norman economy is
significantly reliant on D- Day tourism.
Visitors come to hear about victory,
not a massacre of innocents by their
own air forces.
One of the first books to recount the
Allied bombing was Julien Guillemard’s
L’Enfer du Havre, 1940–1944
(The Hell of Le Havre, 1940–1944; 1948),
which concludes with a vivid account
of the carpet- bombing of Le Havre in
September 1944, after the rest of Normandy,
and even Paris, had been liberated.
Its final chapter is entitled “La
Ville Assassinée” (The Murdered City).
“What are they doing, these allies!”
Guillemard fumes. In 1977 Eddy Florentin,
who also survived the bombing,
published another account, Le Havre
44: À feu et à sang (Le Havre 44: Fire
and Blood), the last line of which reads:
“But what liberation of Le Havre?”
Yet the bewildered anger in these
books vanished from view until the
1980s, when two initiatives converged.
One was the construction of the Caen
Memorial, which opened in 1988. The
other came when survivors studying in
a program for mature students at the
Inter-Age University at Caen wanted
their voices heard. The connection between
the two was the historian Jean
Quellien, who was asked by the Caen
Memorial and Caen University to lead
the Center for Quantitative Historical
Research on the university campus.
Quellien and his team of researchers
counted and named the dead in five
huge volumes published between 1994
and 1997: 4,158 in Upper Normandy
and 13,632 in Lower Normandy, a confirmed
total of 17,790, plus the missing,
who went unnamed.
The bombing of French civilians
accounted for a few pages of Antony
Beevor’s best seller D- Day: The Battle
for Normandy (2009). Beevor encountered
hostility for suggesting that
bombing Caen was “very close to a war
crime.” By then another British historian,
Andrew Knapp at the University
of Reading, was working specifically
on the Allied bombing of France. He
and Claudia Baldoli wrote the first account
in English of the Allied bombing
of France and Italy, Forgotten Blitzes:
France and Italy Under Allied Air Attack,
1940–1945 (2012), which Knapp
followed up with a longer book in
French, Les Français sous les bombes
alliées, 1940–1945 (France Under the
Allied Bombs, 1940–1945; 2014).
But apart from Beevor’s, these books
did not reach a wide readership; they
are missing from bookshops in Normandy
and even from the Caen Memorial’s
shop. Of Quellien’s many volumes,
only one—Les Civils dans la bataille
de Normandie (Civilians in the Battle
of Normandy, 2014), written with
Françoise Passera—was available there
when we visited, alongside hundreds of
other titles on Allied military victory,
plus D- Day souvenirs and merchandise.
French presidential silence on
the bombing was baffling, starting
with that of Charles de Gaulle. “His
memoirs give an idea of how damaged
France was, but none that the
British and Americans did it. To my
knowledge, he never protested,” says
Knapp. “De Gaulle never came to the
D- Day beaches or commemorations,”
says Stéphane Grimaldi, the director
of the Caen Memorial, “or paid tribute
to his compatriots killed by bombing.”
Finally, in 2014, at Grimaldi’s urging,
President François Hollande referred
to civilian casualties in his
speech commemorating the seventieth
anniversary of D- Day. President
Emmanuel Macron is expected to pay
tribute to the dead in a speech this
year at Saint- Lô, though reportedly
not at the beach commemorations.
But when the rhetoric resounds this
June 6, how many speakers will echo
the words of Jean Quellien?
Hundreds of men, women and children
never got to see the end of
that historic day; which dawned
in hope, and ended in consternation
and tears. In total, raids by the
US Air Force left a thousand dead
and very many wounded. Aerial
photographs reported in Britain
showed the destruction—but it
was judged insufficient. They had
to do it again! . . . The combined
bombardments of the June 6 and
night of June 6–7 cost the lives
of about three thousand civilians.
No American or British leader has ever
made reference, let alone paid homage,
to the French dead on any public
occasion.
The bombing of Norman cities,
towns, and villages was initially
part of the Allies’ Transportation Plan
to destroy German rail and road connections.
Churchill had reservations
about the strategy, as did even the
head of RAF Bomber Command, Air
Marshal Arthur Harris, infamous for
his enthusiasm for carpet- bombing,
and his American counterpart General
Carl Spaatz. But President Franklin
D. Roosevelt vetoed all objections.
“However regrettable the attendant
loss of civilian lives is,” he directed
on May 11, 1944, “I am not prepared
to impose . . . any restriction on military
action.” From D- Day onward, says
Knapp, “the politicians had washed
their hands of whatever carnage, warranted
or not, the military leaders were
prepared to unleash.”
The doctrine of “carpet” or “area”
bombing was not new. Britain had
bombed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan
and what was then British India,
where the keen young Harris had
served in the RAF. The Italian military
theorist General Giulio Douhet
had foreseen during the 1920s that
the winner of the next “frightful” war
would be the combatant best able to
bomb civilians from the air. By early
1944 the RAF had 863 Sterling, Halifax,
and Lancaster heavy bombers at
its disposal. The American Eighth Air
Force was formidably equipped with
a fleet of B- 17 Flying Fortresses and
B- 24 Liberators. But area bombing was
supposed to be directed against enemy
populations, not civilians of allied nations
yearning to be liberated.
The cathedral city of Rouen bore
the opening salvo, beginning on April
19, 1944, when the outlying suburb of
Sotteville- lès- Rouen was bombed and
over 850 civilians were killed. Knapp
found documents showing that Churchill
wanted commanders to ensure
that French civilian victims of the
Transportation Plan not exceed 10,000
and asked Air Chief Marshal Arthur
Tedder to keep him informed of “the
score.” On May 23 Tedder reported
6,062 dead, leaving what he called a
“Credit Balance Remaining” of 3,938
civilians who could still permissibly
be killed.
With D- Day, the main onslaught
began. In The Bombing War: Europe,
1939–1945 (2013), the historian Richard
Overy writes that
the weight of attack that could now
be employed by the bomber commands
was out of all proportion
to the nature of the ground threat
and on balance did little to speed
up the course of the campaign.
Quellien’s Le Calvados dans la guerre,
1939–1945 (Calvados During the War,
1939–1945; 2019) calls the bombing
“the programmed destruction” of Norman
communities: “The raids launched
from the morning of June 6 were imprecise,
and had no [military] impact.”
The British bombed low by night, the
Americans from on high by day. In Le
Havre 85 percent of buildings were
destroyed, in Saint- Lô 77 percent, in
Lisieux 75 percent, in Caen 73 percent,
and in Rouen 42 percent. Destruction
in many villages was even worse.
Quellien received us twice at his
home in Feuguerolles- Bully, near Caen.
“The justification was military,” he
reflected.
The Allies wanted, rightly, to destroy
the German enemy. There
was concern: “We don’t want to
bomb our friends,” the British and
Americans told one another. But
reservations were put aside, and
they did it anyway. The discussions
only demonstrate that they knew
exactly what they were doing.
However, Quellien said,there was silence on the matter
for forty years. We started work
during an atmosphere of taboo,
even hostility. There had been
some immediate disbelief: “Why
did you do this to us?” People
could not believe what had happened.
But then they did not talk
about it openly, not even people
who had suffered. The atmosphere
was: “What are you saying? It was
liberation, not bombardment.” The
important thing was D- Day, and
that’s all that mattered. The Germans
were gone, and if you asked,
“But who killed us?” no one would
answer.
The hurt was always there, though, said
Quellien. “In private, Normans pointed
a finger at the British and Americans,
but only within the home.” The silence,
he said, was partly due to “diplomatic
difficulty” during the cold war:
“Do not offend our liberators, who
are also our Atlantic allies.” A difficulty
arose between our true
history and the interests of our
politicians and international allies.
So only much later did we do,
shall we say, “the accounts,” and
when our work appeared, it was
not well received.
Passera, who has worked closely
with Quellien, explained that “what
interests me is not military history
but intimate history, the everyday experience
of citizens during wartime.”
As their book Les Normands dans la
guerre: Le temps des épreuves, 1939–
1945 (The Normans During the War:
The Time of Trials, 1939–1945; 2021)
shows, she is concerned with “everyday
life in the ruins. Thousands of people
trying to live in the rubble of their
destroyed houses, or other extreme
conditions.” A related, almost untold
story is the exodus of people in flight
from bombing. “Survivors fled their
towns en masse, heading for surrounding
villages,” she told us. “We estimate
one hundred thousand” after the first
night of bombs, “welcomed by peasants
and farmers.” Passera and Quellien
recount how “a certain social life”
was forged, with newborn babies living
“the first weeks of their lives in apple
baskets and vegetable crates” beneath
the bombers.
Yet all this was buried history.
“When the D- Day industry began
during the 1950s,” said Passera,
no one talked about people killedby the Allies, or the lives of survivors.
. . . The idea of D- Day commemoration
was pilgrimage: at
first families and veterans came,
rightly, to visit their dead in the
cemeteries. And after them came
the tourist business. The local
population was thus obliged to
transfer its duty of memory to the
fallen British and Americans, and
thereby to the British and American
people. . . . The survivors had
a different history—a victim history
that was not glorious, and that
challenged the economic opportunities
of victory. . . . Resentment
built up. It became a conversation
around the kitchen table. Until
the early 1980s, when retired students
at the Inter- Age University
said: “Enough—we want the dead
counted, and our story told.”
At Allassac, in the Vézère valley of
south- central France, Simonne Leterreux
lives in a nursing home near her
daughter Sophie Collet. Now ninety,
Leterreux lost her mother in 1940 at
the age of six in the Norman town of
Lisieux, just as the war began. Lisieux
was later destroyed, but by then Simonne
and two of her elder sisters,
Denise and Genviève, had been placed
by their father at a convent boarding
school in Caen run by “the good sisters”
of St. Vincent- de- Paul, where
Simonne stayed throughout the Nazi
occupation. Then came the night of
June 6, 1944, when
although we saw nothing, we heard
the planes overhead, and the terrible
noise around, of bombs falling.
The noise was continuous; we were
right underneath the planes. The good sisters told us to lean against
the walls for protection.
The school was not hit, and the nuns
arranged for the children to join the
exodus from Caen to hide in a quarry
at May- sur- Orne about nine miles
away. “As we walked in line,” remembered
Leterreux,
we saw everything around us in
ruins. A bomb had hit a butcher’s
store in the rue d’Auge, and the
flesh of the victims was mixed in
with the meat—it was impossible
to distinguish which was which. Everything
was bombed, everything
destroyed, and we walked through
the rubble and corpses of those who
had not survived—covering the
ground, dead and some wounded.
The children hid for forty days in
the quarry while the battle for Caen
raged. When they went back to town
after liberation, “and we told people
we had been in the quarries all that
time, they said it was not possible. I
told them, ‘If you were born stupid,
you’ll die stupid!’” Leterreux repeated
that phrase many times, laughing. “Si
tu nais con, tu meurs con!”
How did Leterreux feel about the
liberators bombing them? “We didn’t
know who it was! We were bombed by
the British, later the Americans, but the
good sisters said nothing about that.
We learned long afterward who did it.
For months we knew nothing about
who did this. It was liberation, but that
is not the same thing as being bombed
by your friends.”
Some two thousand civilians were
killed in the bombing of Caen, during
a battle that lasted five weeks longer
than the British general Bernard
Montgomery had planned. Passera and
Quellien, in Les Civils dans la bataille
de Normandie, cite the account of Bernard
Michel, who watched “the mass
of planes flying toward Caen” with his
friend Jean, from the village of Venoix.
To our stupefaction, we watched
them unleash the bombs, in great
clusters. I was stunned. It’s not
possible, we told ourselves. Jean
knew I was an Anglophile, and said,
“Now look what your friends are
doing!”
Stéphane Grimaldi became director
of the Caen Memorial in 2005. “We
conducted a major survey,” he said,
and found that one in three respondents
had someone in their
extended family who had been
killed or wounded by bombing.
For the vast majority, the Battle
of Normandy was “extremely important”—
this is our history.
But, he cautioned,]it’s a question of how we structure
memory of the battle. Official
memory on one level, and domestic
memory on another; public heroic
memory versus victim memory
behind closed curtains. Heroic
memory became official memory;
there were only heroes, and
the full story was considered embarrassing
because it was a tragic
history, not a heroic one. But there
comes a point when society has to
question itself and people want to
understand what really happened.
Two things occurred: First came an
effort to secure official public mention,
at least, of civilian victims. In 2014
Grimaldi was at the beachhead site of
Arromanches, planning the seventiethanniversary
commemorations with the
historian Jean- Pierre Azéma and advising
President Hollande, to whom he
said, “There’s no public acknowledgment
of what happened to the civilians.”
Grimaldi recalled that “Hollande
reacted, and paid tribute to civilian
victims in his speech. I hoped that this
would begin to change the perception.”
Second, also on Grimaldi’s initiative,
was the opening in 2016 of a museum
and memorial to civilian victims in the
Norman town of Falaise. “But when
I initially raised this,” Grimaldi said,
“I was called a revisionist!—yes, the
same word used for deniers of the Holocaust—
by officials from the state
and region.”
Falaise was bombed to rubble by the
Allies, in part by incendiary phosphorous
bombs; the “Falaise pocket” was
held by the Germans until August 16.
The museum is the definitive public
record, in exhibits and videotaped testimony
of how Norman civilians lived
under both the German occupation
and Allied bombing. The testimony is
searing. Pierre Savary, then a student,
recalls losing both parents, four brothers,
and a sister to bombs falling on
his home in Lisieux: “We were trapped
under rubble. I remember the cries and
moans of the people. I was amazed to
be alive, but I lost everybody else.”
Pressure for the Falaise museum
came, says its director, Emmanuel
Thiébot,
from the public. Things changed
because of the Inter- Age University,
and then Quellien’s work. But
the publications were scientific—
it takes a long time for research
to seep into the open, even though
the witnesses were still alive.
This is why the museum
puts the civilians at the heart
of the story. France was not an
enemy, yet we were subjected to
both strategic and psychological
bombing. And this is our challenge
here: to represent the French public
as grateful to our liberators, but
also as victims of countries that
liberated us.
As a result, he says, “when foreigners
do come, we’ve had Americans saying:
‘Did we do this?’ And we say, ‘Well, yes,
you did.’ And they’re almost in tears
sometimes—they have no idea.”
Much of the heaviest bombing by
the US Army Air Forces was of
the Manche département, whose capital,
Saint- Lô, was described by Samuel
Beckett in his essay “The Capital of the
Ruins,” based on his experiences there
as a volunteer for the Irish Red Cross.
The senior researcher for Manche on
Quellien’s original team was Michel
Boivin. In their first collection of testimony,
Villes normandes sous les bombes
(Juin 1944) (Norman Cities Under the
Bombs, June 1944), published in 1994,
they quote Jean Roger of Saint- Lô celebrating
at first as American bombers
flew overhead: “They’ve arrived! A
sentiment of intense joy augmented
by the long wait.” But then:
They’re bombing! . . . Are we dead?
Are we alive? Is this the end?. . . I
had the chance to cast an eye over
the town: horrible. Everything in
flames, an inferno . . . all ablaze,
cries for help.
“It was difficult to gather the information
we needed to establish the cost
of liberation,” said Boivin, who received
us at his home in Blainville- sur- Mer.
A lot of people had wanted to talk
but felt they shouldn’t. Including
. . . firemen who had hauled
bodies from rubble, and medics
treating the wounded. A nurse
treated a woman with a baby in her
arms: she was alive, but the child
was dead. I saw many people break
down in tears—it was as though
we had opened up their trauma. . . .
Officials said to us, “How dare you?”
It was considered anti- American to
talk about how many people were
killed in Saint- Lô.
(According to the definitive count, 352.)
Normandy is the most pro- American
and Anglophile corner of Europe. US
and British flags fly everywhere, and
cafés in Bayeux have window paintings
of British Tommies offering afternoon
tea. “Some seven million people,
mostly English- speaking, visit D- Day
sites each year,” said Grimaldi.
It’s essential to the regional economy.
So you construct a memory
that ignores the rest, a heroic story
that saturates the public space for
tourists to celebrate: thank you
England and America, with some
mention of Canadians, but almost
none of the Poles, and others.
Thiébot uses the term “memory
tourism”:
But like the commemorations, it is
limited to D- Day, not the Battle of
Normandy—a circuit of emblematic
locations to do with landings
and liberation, recounted as a successful
military operation with extraordinary
logistics, and sacrifice
by men in uniform. Nothing to do
with the civilian cost, no mention of
bombing. Everyone knows, but don’t
mention it in front of the tourists!
The British bombing of Le Havre
between September 5 and 11, 1944, took
the lives of some two thousand civilians,
while one report by an RAF officer
counted nine German dead. “One
cannot commemorate the liberation
of Le Havre as one might the other
towns,” said Mayor Antoine Rufenacht
on its sixtieth anniversary.
In Knapp’s recounting of the battle,
two men faced each other: Colonel
Hermann- Eberhard Wildermuth,
ordered by Hitler to defend Le Havre
to the last, and Lieutenant General Sir
John Crocker of British First Corps,
under pressure from what Knapp calls
“victory fever” to take it. Wildermuth
had urged an evacuation of civilians on
August 21, yet only 10,000 left, while
50,000 stayed.
For decades historians could not verify
Guillemard’s assertion in 1948 that
Crocker refused a further German proposal
to evacuate civilians before the
bombing; Guillemard reports citizens’
confusion at announcements that “the
evacuation is suspended.” Florentin
writes that “the conditions proposed by
the German commander to let civilians
leave on the 5th and 6th were rejected
by Lt. Gen. Crocker.” In Crocker’s family
papers, Knapp found a letter to his wife
that contained conclusive evidence:
[Wildermuth] requested an armistice
for two days to evacuate
the (large number) of civilians in
the place. It wasn’t an easy or a
nice decision to make but I had
to refuse as it was obviously to his
advantage to get rid of them—he
would gain time, have none to feed
and would get rid of the French
agents and active resisters.
Yet the ensuing devastation was not
inflicted on Wildermuth’s defenses.
Knapp cited Allied intelligence detailing
where Germans troops were positioned,
down to such particulars as a
horse exercise ground. “If you want to go
for German command and control, these
are the addresses,” he said, showing us
the original map. “The British had a reliable
repertoire of tactical targets, each
marked by a letter. It’s a pity they didn’t
use it.” At a meeting on September 3,
Crocker gave the coordinates, and
they weren’t the German targets. I
don’t understand why, given the information
he had, Crocker bombed
the parts of town he did. German
troops were already on the periphery,
and Crocker hit the city center.
It just doesn’t make sense.
In Le Havre on the night of September
5, 781 people were killed and 289
disappeared. The following night another
655 were killed, of whom 174 were
buried and asphyxiated, trapped in the
worksite of the future Jenner road tunnel;
seven survived, “using their fingertips
to try and clear the earth, a
pitiful struggle for life,” writes Guillemard.
By September 11, 9,790 tons of
bombs had killed 1,397 identified dead
and 139 unknown dead with 517 disappeared—
a total of 2,053 killed in
less than a week. Florentin describes
smoke, the smell of sulfur invades
the cellar . . .We’re suffocating. . .
In the darkness we collide with
each other. . .A head, with singed
hair and wild eyes, sometimes appears
in a crack, tortured voice imploring:
“Help! I’m burning! Get
me out of here!” But we can do
nothing for this dying man, already
perched on a pile of corpses, because
the road is also hell, a chaos
of smoking ruins between which
we stumble, people seeking refuge,
collapsing, one after the other.
On September 11 Crocker wrote to
Harris, “Nobody could have been given
a better start than we were by Bomber
Command. All ranks unanimous in their
praise of absolute accuracy of bombing
and timing on every occasion.” But even
Harris, whose name is synonymous with
mass slaughter of civilians from the air,
had regrets: Knapp found a telephone
message from Harris dated October
1944 in which he lamented that “many
French civilians were killed, and much
damage done which did not materially
help our army to take the port.” An RAF
public relations officer, the future playwright
and novelist R.F. Delderfield,
wrote in a report for the First Canadian
Army: “The bombing only killed
about 8 Germans and did not fall on
that quarter of the town where the Germans
were assembled.” Whatever the
calculation, said Quellien, “the British
knew perfectly well they were going to
massacre Le Havre.”
Le Havre was rebuilt so successfully,
to a design by the celebrated architect
Auguste Perret, that it is designated
a UNESCO World Heritage site.
But there was silence on the bombing
until very recently.
At the Tourneville fort, high above
the docks, some two hundred people
turned out in March for a lecture
organized by the Havre Center
for Historical Research and given by
an academic from the Université Le
Havre Normandie, Thomas Vaisset, on
the official management of corpses
and body parts after the bombing. The
detail was forensic, the audience enthralled.
The fort, completed in 1860,
was a headquarters for German occupying
troops, then briefly the British.
“When the English arrived,” said Le
Havre’s municipal archivist, Sylvie
Barot, in the audience, “they were
pleased to find the German cellar:
cognac, champagne, fine wine—and
took full advantage!”
Also present was the local historian
Claude Malon, who has written on Le
Havre’s economy during the occupation
and the fortunes made, especially
from building the Germans’ defensive
Atlantic Wall. Malon coined the unpopular
description of Le Havre as “Vichysur-
Seine” and posits what he calls a
“memory screen,” whereby the memory
of the bombing conveniently hides
that of collaboration.
Yet neither the conservative mayor
Pierre Courant (one of the very few to
govern a municipality both under the
occupation and after it) nor the Communists
who ran Le Havre from 1965
to 1995 officially commemorated the
bombing. Le Havre, says Barot, “was
urged to focus on reconstruction, present
and future.” An imposing solid granite
memorial to its World War I dead
(almost the only structure to survive
the bombing of the city center) rises in
the rebuilt Place du Générale de Gaulle.
Civilian victims of bombing are remembered
by Perret’s towering church of
St. Joseph, completed in 1958 and conceived
in their memory but not formally
dedicated until a ceremony and the affixing
of a small plaque in 2019.
After the war, “people either didn’t
know what happened to us or they
didn’t want to know,” said La Fuente.
When she was reunited with her
mother,
there was silence between us; she
cried all the time. Afterward she
was unable to speak about any of
this—if she had done so, she would
have wept for the rest of her life.
To lose your husband is much to
bear, but to also lose three children
is unbearable. She never forgave
the English; she couldn’t speak
of England. But she said almost
nothing.
Until her mother died in 1968, La
Fuente said, “she avoided driving
through Évrecy”—nine miles from
Caen—“and I still do.”
“They were our liberators, whatever,”
says Leterreux. “I rarely hear
anyone talk about ‘British bastards’ or
‘damned Americans,’” says Boivin. “In
almost all places, infantrymen were
greeted as liberators,” says Knapp,
apart from the extreme case of Le
Havre, where they were tolerated
at best. People risked their lives
to hide airmen who had been shot
down, and helped them escape,
even though moments beforehand,
those same airmen were dropping
bombs on those who rescued them.
Delderfield, in his report for the Canadian
army, noted that “the people
of Le Havre had previously been very
pro- British,” but now
some of them failed to respond to
a greeting and I felt that if they
had been certain I was RAF (I wore
a raincoat all the time) there might
have been some unpleasantness. . . .
They were glad to be liberated but
this was a terrible price to pay.
Even Guillemard concludes, “What
predominated among us was our ferocious,
implacable hatred of Hitler
and his gang.”
Throughout 2004 the Caen Memorial,
in partnership with Ouest France
newspaper, organized a remarkable
series of public hearings called “The
Vigils” across twenty- four bombed locations,
at which survivors told their
stories. Most, says Thiébot,
agreed that bombing was the price
to pay for liberation; it wasn’t a
discourse of vengeance, but they
wanted their voices heard, and
they wanted an answer to the question:
Why? You killed my family,
you destroyed my town—but did
you have to?
Knapp divides bombings of civilians
into three categories.
One: militarily useful with minimal
casualties. [He cites targeting
an aerospace factory in Limoges.]
Two: You can see the military justification,
but did it have to be done
with so much damage to people
and buildings? Three: Why do that?
Heavy civilian casualties for little
or no military gain.
Le Havre, he says, definitely fits into
category three, and after decades of
research on Normandy, he cannot cite
a single example in category one: “Too
many civilian casualties, every time.”
On the beachfront at Saint- Aubinsur-
Mer is a memorial to Canadian
soldiers who died landing there
and a panel with a picture of three
young ladies, one of whom is Paulette
Mériel, reportedly the first Norman
to shake hands with a liberating
soldier: a French- speaking Canadian
from the North Shore Regiment.
Mériel died on May 18, three months
after we interviewed her, aged one
hundred, at a care home in nearby
Douvres- la- Déliverande.
After a gripping account of the occupation,
with gossip about collaborators
and black marketers and Germans
threatening to shoot her for shrimping,
Mériel’s recollections reached D- Day:
We were young—we had heads full
of fog, more curious than afraid—
but we knew something special
was happening. My grandmother
was terrified—she thought the Canadians
were going to shoot her!
But our house was by the beach:
we went down and met them, and
they spoke to us in our language!
Then the bombs fell:
On the first day, our house was
completely destroyed—luckily no
one was there. A mix of sounds:
planes, bombs, artillery. We hid
in the dike, then the cellars—a
dozen of us. We ventured out by
night: the houses around us all destroyed.
It was misery, but we got
accustomed to it, sleeping on mattresses—
and the Germans were
gone at last.
Mériel’s family was not so lucky:
My sister had a farm, and her husband
and his brother were killed
by the bombing just after D- Day.
We were happy to be liberated, but
what followed was not so happy.
I’m not timid on the matter: they
liberated us, but we didn’t expect
to have to pay that price.
“The Normans,” she reflected,
lived many different D- Days. Different
experiences in different
places. There was a D- Day of liberation,
and then there was the
D- Day of losing our homes, and
all those thousands of our people.
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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