Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 6, 1994 TAG: 9406060011
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIERVILLE-SUR-MER LENGTH: Medium
Veterans of the 29th Infantry Division, in their fifth day of touring the sites of their World War II battles, are being warmly received by the French wherever they go.
As the buses carrying the veterans snake their way along the sometimes very narrow French roads they are greeted by friendly waves at every crossroads and driveway. French, American, British and Canadian flags hang from many second-story windows and fence posts along the route.
At the farm hamlet of Carrefour, where ancient stone houses sit tight against a crossroads surrounded by farm fields, several dozen residents joined the veterans as they dedicated a monument to 139 soldiers of the 29th Division's 115th Regiment who were killed, wounded or captured in a chance meeting with the Germans on June 9, 1944, three days after D-Day.
Once again, as it has several times this week, "Taps" as played by a lone bugler has echoed over the Norman countryside for the American dead of World War II.
After the ceremony at Carrefour, the veterans milled with residents who thanked them, sometimes with big glasses of Normandy's famous cider and apple brandy.
One Frenchman, Alex Lissillour, grabbed Denzil Dees of Urbana, Ill., and gave him a big hug. Dees fought with Charlottesville's former National Guard company in the 29th Division's 116th Regiment.
Lissillour then explained with the help of an interpreter that the scar under his left eye was put there in 1943 by a Nazi SS trooper while he, as a 12-year-old, tried to defend his mother.
Sunday morning, some of the veterans attended a nondenominational service at Saint Lo's 500-year-old cathedral, one of the few buildings to survive the bombing and shelling of the city in July 1944.
Many of the ancient stained-glass windows of the cathedral were taken down before the bombing and saved from destruction. The front of the building had to be rebuilt, however, and its giant stone interior columns bear the marks of shrapnel.
Booming organ music at the start of Sunday's service and a performance by a symphony orchestra at its end provided a chilling reflection of what the bombing must have sounded like.
On a bulletin board in the back of the cathedral was a message in English: "Dear friends from overseas, we are grateful to you all for what you did for us 50 years ago."
Two retired Catholic priests who were young soldiers on Omaha Beach helped arrange and conduct the service. Pierre Yves Ruff, a minister of the Reformed French Church, delivered the message in English, saying that the memory of U.S. veterans remains alive for the French because they bore witness to the word of the Lord by opposing Hitler.
Sunday night, the veterans bused to Omaha Beach and the town of Vierville. Another plaque was dedicated at the National Guard monument there, where the units of the 29th Division came ashore on D-Day to suffer disastrous losses to German fire. The monument itself sits atop a concrete German bunker for an 88 mm artillery piece aimed down the beach.
Out in the English Channel, a few hundred yards off the beach, roughly a dozen big warships gathered for the D-Day 50th anniversary commemoration ceremonies planned for today.
Dozens of generals were at the ceremony and other dignitaries, including Gov. Donald Schaefer of Maryland and Gen. Gordon Sullivan, U.S. Army chief of staff.
"Today is a soldiers' day," Sullivan told the veterans and the present-day servicemen at the event. "Feel good about yourselves wherever you're from."
The veterans standing there had summoned the courage to change the world, he said.
by CNB