Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 4, 1995 TAG: 9510040059
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BEDFORD LENGTH: Medium
In a night sky lit with artillery explosions, hundreds of American paratroopers cascaded like rain over the French countryside.
It was a "spectacle magnifique!" recalled Catherine, now a 58-year-old retired education professor from St. Lo in France.
The morning after the Americans landed, he saw some of them taken prisoner in the road, their arms raised over their heads, their faces still painted black with camouflage paint.
"They were prisoners, but we were happy because we knew it was the beginning of the end," he said. "They had come to deliver us, to rescue us."
Catherine and 51 of his countrymen from St. Lo, Vire and other small towns in the province of Normandy are in the Roanoke area this week, touring the hometowns of their liberators. With the help of D-Day veterans and volunteers, they're staying with local families at night and sightseeing by day.
Ranging in age from 27 to 80, the group includes doctors, teachers, politicians and retirees. Most are history buffs; many, like Catherine, have first-hand memories of World War II and the Battle of Normandy.
Monday, the group went to Staunton, the home of Maj. Thomas Howie, a football coach at Staunton Military Academy who died in the battle to free St. Lo from the Germans. A monument to Howie stands in St. Lo, which was a key Allied objective in the liberation of France.
Tuesday, they were in Bedford, which lost more men on D-Day than any other locality its size in America. Nineteen Bedford men died assaulting the Normandy beachhead.
The group visited the National Elks Home and was greeted by Bedford Mayor Mike Shelton. They snapped pictures of the hillside overlooking Bedford Elementary School, where the proposed National D-Day Memorial is to be built. And they took more shots of a monument to the D-Day fallen that was made from stone mined at the French village of Vierville sur Mer, near Normandy.
Other stops included the city/county museum, Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest summer retreat, and the Johnson Orchard near Thaxton, where the French guests sampled Virginia wines.
With the help of volunteer interpreters, the visitors were able to swap stories and talk history with veterans. "I should've studied up on my bombs and rifles" vocabulary, joked Wendy Gibson, a French teacher at Staunton River Middle School
For some of the American veterans who fought in France, this was their first opportunity to meet the residents of the towns they liberated - and vice versa.
Price Stanley of Bedford was a machine-gunner in Company H of Martinsville. He remembers riding on a transport truck through the bombed-out ghost town of St. Lo after it was freed.
"It was one demolished city, I can tell you now. I didn't see the first building standing ... we just kept on the move." He was later wounded by artillery fire near the town of Vire.
Roy Stevens, whose twin brother, Ray, was killed in a D-Day battle, remembers St. Lo as "about the worse place I ever been in." It was there that he tripped across a German booby trap. He was hit in the neck and shoulder by a "bouncing Betty" - an explosive shell packed with shrapnel.
To Catherine - who helped organize the visit of American veterans to France last year for the 50th anniversary of D-Day - the visit to Virginia brought back joyous memories of the American soldiers who brought his people freedom.
"I remember well the American soldiers," he said, as he recalled roaming the American camps as a child in search of food or candy. It was on one of these raids that he snagged his first cigarette from an American soldier - a Camel or a Chesterfield, he recalled with a laugh. "They were for my father, but I took one," he said.
A soldier also named Richard often would take him by the hand through camp and give him food to take home. It was there, Catherine said, that he ate his first pineapple and first tried the American delicacy peanut butter.
Returning from camp one day with a sack of food slung over his shoulder, Catherine was caught in the cross fire of American news photographers. He still wonders if that shot made into the papers here.
The battlefields near his home "were a great playground for a kid," he said. "I found weapons and all sorts of great stuff." After the war ended, he recalled, boys his age were drawing pictures of the American soldiers and their bombers in school. Later, they craved American movies.
"For people of my generation, the United States is a sort of model to strive for," he said.
"All our myths and dreams have American faces."
by CNB