This seems to be all around France at slightly different dates - I saw Paris 25 August, anyway today Antibes it’s the 24th. And it seems despite storm warnings the fireworks will happen tonight unlike Thursday when cancelled for orange storm alert - not a drop fell at the appointed hour. Still, can’t be too careful eh…
So some pictures of an obviously formal ceremony - do others have ceremonies? (You’re spared the music because no videos can be uploaded )
Ours was last week, the 21st. But then we’re in Normandy now so the town was liberated a ong the first ones. But Le Havre just up the road didn’t get liberated until September.
Your map made me want to learn more about what happened locally and as far as I can gather, the Resistance took possession of our neighbourhood around 11 July, but a month later the Nazis returned, a bloody firefight ensued with many casualties on both sides before eventually the Germans fled back to Rodez.
A close neighbour to us received a knock on the door one day. A man apologised for disturbing them and asked if he might come in. He explained that in the war he was a pilot, shot down and helped to escape by the resistance. This house was a safe house where he rested before being helped over the Pyrennees.
I believe Le Havre, along with other port towns that had been heavily fortified, was declared a “Festung” or fortress by Adolf Hitler and the German troops in it told to hold out at all costs.
So the Allies tended to bypass such places until much later in the campaign.
I’ve posted this before I think, but there is a monument to the Resistance at Chasseneuil-sur-Bonnieure in Charente which doesn’t seem to be all that well-known…
I wonder why they don’t make anything of it here then. Could be seen as divisive maybe? I do know that there were families in the village that were split by those who took advantage of the Free Zone and were even involved with the Milice, and those who were with the Resistance. There is a memorial of a clash in which a teenage Resistant was killed on the border between Dordogne and Charente in a fight with a combined German and Melice force.
I once mentioned the subject to a friend who was well informed about village history and he brushed it aside saying ‘it is all forgotten now’.
But apparently not completely, I was once in the village bar, there was just the barman. Patrick, born and brought up here with his parents who I knew well, and 2 older men of the village. The latter were having a spirited argument about something which I could not follow but Patrick was smiling and enjoying the show between the 2 old boys.
Then things got a bit more heated and one fairly spat in the other’s face one word, ‘Milicien’.
The atmosphere changed on the instant as Patrick stopped smiling, came round the bar and shouted ‘right that’s it, enough, stop.’ An uneasy silence then followed and I was too shocked to ask any questions but the incident came back in memory from time to time.
I guess it probably will until those who lived through WW2 are all gone.
Memories of such things can last a long time - as they should really, although the hatreds don’t need to be passed down the generations.
I remember having a meal in a taverna in Heraklion, Crete in the 70s where there was a party of Germans at the next table, sitting in blissful ignorance under an engraving of a band of heroic Greek andartes bayonetting German paratroopers…
Regards WW2 I think it is helpful that now some of us talk about fighting Nazis rather than Germans, at least some of the time. Looks like seeking to differentiate between then and now.
True, I have mentioned many times in the past that so often, on street names and others here in France, that the referral to Nazis rather than Germans is prevalent and I do approve.
There can’t be many, or even any, Germans now alive who bear any responsibility for the actions of the Nazis, I feel the same way about modern Europeans being somehow responsible for slavery. If that were true British people should be lauded for being one of the first to ban it. I don’t expect credit personally for causing it or ending it.
)
