Since the big D-Day bash in June, when President Barack Obama honored the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landings, the commemorations have been either very local or just forgotten. This week we were reminded that D-Day didn’t mean the end of the fighting in France in 1944; Paris was liberated by its own Resistance fighters, with big help over the horizon by the US Army, of course.
In Brittany, where we stayed for most of August, the fighting was still going on 65 years ago. The Brest “Pocket” would not be reduced until mid-September, and other German redoubts – especially the submarine bases of Lorient and St. Nazaire – would hold out until the surrender of Germany in May 1945.
Our little market town of Chateaulin, on the Nantes-Brest Canal, was liberated by French partisans when the German garrison left in early August. That American armored vehicle in the photo above left (courtesy Le Doaré Archives) tooling along the Canal looks like it’s being piloted by Free French forces.
Other partisans in the “maquis” didn’t have it so easy. Upriver (this section of the Canal is formed by the river Aulne), you can visit a recent memorial to fighters (mostly Breton, but also Belgian and Soviet) killed in an ambush in spring 1944 when their position was divulged to the Germans. It’s hard to imagine today, as you soak up the sun on an idyllic island in the river, that the place saw bloody reprisals in your parents’ or grandparents’ time.
On the way back to Brussels, overnight in Falaise, of WW II "Pocket" or "Gap" fame, "the decisive engagement in the Battle of Normandy," according to Wikipedia. Another August 1944 anniversary.