POILLÉ-SUR-VÈGRE, France — It was 75 years ago on the Fourth of July, while most residents of this western French village were in church giving thanks for the harvest, that an American B-17 heavy bomber, part of a formation targeting strategic sites of the German war machine in nearby Le Mans, was hit and crash-landed in an inferno on a field just up the road.
Of the 10 GIs in its crew, nine perished. That left the tail gunner, who had escaped the fuel-fed fire only by tumbling, unconscious, from an opening torn in the fuselage. He awoke just in time to pull the rip cord on his parachute.
Few, if any, of those at worship that Sunday in 1943 are still alive. The tail gunner himself, David Butcher, who was taken in hand by a Resistance network after his parachute landing, and reunited with his family in St. Louis after eight months of furtive moves and hiding places and a hike across the snowbound Pyrenees to Spain, died in 2004. According to his dying wish, his ashes were returned here and sprinkled on the field of the crash, so he could at last be with his buddies. Those who came to his aid and were denounced soon afterward, French men and women, were sent to concentration camps; some endured torture and met an early death. Still, families had survived, and several from those of Butcher and his French rescuers were present at a commemorative ceremony last Saturday.
It was hard to shake off a sense of bewildered foreboding that the ceremony could really be taking place within the same week and on the same continent as an ideological assault on NATO — founded with American leadership to protect Europe from drawing the world into another such war — by no less a person than the president of the United States.
Signs of the harvest were everywhere around us, as they are each summer. Memory, too, is a kind of crop, in that it requires cultivation, and the memory of this incident and these young Americans — steadfastly cultivated through this annual gathering and the placing of a wreath at a monument erected in their honor — bore fruit once again over the weekend. On significant anniversaries like this one, small groups of pilgrims have taken to showing up from across the Atlantic and across the United States, eager to connect — to honor the grandfather or uncle or brother they have sorely missed all these years, or the great-grandfather or great-uncle whose heroism they learned about as they grew up.
These pilgrimages didn’t really start to happen until the Internet became widespread and people began exploiting its usefulness as a tool of retrieval and reconnection. The 60th anniversary ceremony 15 years ago marked the beginnings of the effort. On that occasion, and on others every few summers since, families of the comrades-in-arms fatefully assembled in that Flying Fortress on that American Independence Day in ’43 have traveled here from Texas, Georgia, Utah, California, Washington, Oregon, Missouri and Indiana.
George W. Bush was president the year the first ones arrived. France had refused to take part in the allied invasion of Iraq that was undertaken, on evidence later discredited, in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Many Americans were in high dudgeon, some even going so far as to flirt with the idea of rechristening the french fry.
Given the degeneration in the level of American political discourse since the days of the Bush administration, I hope I can be forgiven for looking back on the “freedom fry” fracas as quaintly anodyne. Then, as now, I was acting as interpreter of the mayor’s speech for the few Americans present, and of speeches any of them wanted to make for the many French attendees. (Back in the 1990s, when my husband and I were working in Paris, we bought a small vacation place here; we have since remained part-time villagers.)
There was discomfort to spare that day in 2003, among both nationalities. It was briefly addressed, with shakes of the head and the like. Then it was buried in the emotion brought forth by the poignancy of the occasion. The Americans, just now considering how impossible it would be for the French to forget, when they had to survive the war every single day for six years, were overcome by the gratitude they saw in their hosts’ eyes.
This time, with the NATO summit unfolding as its foundational values were called into question by President Trump — who will meet privately with Russian President Vladimir Putin despite U.S. assessments that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election — I found myself nervously longing for the oh-so-simple days of President Bush.
There is a lot of anger in the United States these days, and it is often vociferously expressed, via social-media megaphones that had not become popular even as recently as 15 years ago. What would people’s views be? What would their speeches consist of? Exactly what sentiments might I be asked to convey to the polite, respectful crowd that had come out to honor a group of fallen soldiers and a haunting collective memory?
The mayor, Danièle Ploncard, set the tone. She was mayor at the time of the 60th anniversary, too. She was also a wartime baby, who grew up in a generation marked by wartime suffering and deprivation.
“They were between 22 and 27 years old,” she said of the GIs. “Four of them were married. They had engaged to combat the extremism that was destroying Europe. Did they even know the problems, the history of this war that had started in 1939?”
“France and Germany reconciled, and have become the pillars of the European structure,” she continued. “But peace is always fragile when we observe the rise of populisms and extremisms, of nationalisms and of all the excesses that they engender.
“Of course one should be proud of one’s country, but above all one should not close oneself off from others — others who have lost everything, even their own identity, the land of their birth.”
And then, in terms distinctively at variance with the Trump administration’s current posture toward Europe, it was left to the St. Louis tail gunner’s step-grandson, Curt Kehoe, and granddaughter, Sarah Blackwood, with their families standing alongside them in the crowd under a blinding afternoon sun, to remind us all of the torch that their grandpa had always proudly carried for the people of this area — people who had risked, and in some cases lost, their lives in order to protect him. Not because there was any requirement, but because it was the right thing to do.
