Uniformed American soldiers spill out of the bars and cafes around 6 June Square, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.
Phil Collins’ voice blares from the speakers, and American flags fly from chimneys, windows, overhead wires and even the neck of a golden retriever trotting alongside its owner.
Is this really France?
“This is the 53rd state,” said local deputy mayor Philip Nekrasov, walking through a square marked by Roman milestones and medieval churches as U.S. paratroopers in maroon berets played soccer with local youths. “This is where Americans come from.”
This is Sainte-Mère-Église, a small town in northwest Normandy with just one main street. Amid cow pastures and towering hedgerows, the town and surrounding area is home to about 3,000 inhabitants.
Hundreds of U.S. paratroopers landed nearby in the early hours of June 6, 1944. Four hours later, before the world’s largest fleet arrived on the nearby Normandy beaches, a soldier lowered the Nazi flag and hoisted the American flag over City Hall.
“This was the first town to be liberated on the Western Front,” reads two marble plaques in front of the building, one in French, the other in English.
That story of liberation is now deeply ingrained in the town’s identity.
While most villages across Normandy hold annual commemorations of the Normandy landings, the tiny village of Sainte-Mère-Eglise will be marking the occasion with six parades, 10 ceremonies, 11 concerts and a parachute drop by active duty US paratroopers.
Statues, plaques and history panels are dotted around every street corner, with names like D-Day, Bistrot 44 and Hair’born Salon. A mannequin of John Steele, the American paratrooper immortalized in the 1962 film “The Longest Day,” dangles from the church steeple with an inflated parachute, just as he did on June 6, 1944.
At first glance, the town seems too unashamedly American for a country that prizes self-criticism and understatement.
But stick around for a while and the deep, sincere and enthrallingly beautiful relationship between the town and the American paratroopers becomes clear.
“There’s a sense of welcome here that you don’t find anywhere else in the region,” said photographer Jacques Vilain, who has documented the village’s celebrations for 25 years and is the driving force behind the recently published bilingual book “Ste.-Mère-Église: We Will Remember Them.”
He noted that the town’s first Normandy Day celebrations were small and took place while the war was still raging in Europe. On the first anniversary, Maj. Gen. James Gavin, then commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, flew 30 soldiers from Germany for the ceremony.
Just after midnight on June 6, 1944, low-flying planes roared over Sainte-Mère-Église and the surrounding area. Thousands of parachutes shot out from the planes and flew into the sky like confetti.
One of the parachutes fell straight into a trench dug in the backyard where Georgette Fleiss was huddled with her parents and a neighbor. Clinging to the trench was Cliff Morgan, whom Ms. Fleiss calls “our American.”
“To me he represented something special: liberation,” said Fleiss, now 96.
Fliess recalled how a German soldier who was billeted at their home suddenly came into view, aiming his rifle at the trench. Fliess’ father jumped up and begged the soldier not to shoot. Miraculously, he agreed.
Soon after, the Germans realized the Americans had taken the town and surrendered to Morgan, who Fliess said was unusually calm, handing out chewing gum, chocolates and cigarettes. He curled up on his parachute for a short nap before heading off into battle at dawn.
“We gave him a warm kiss and left,” Fleiss said. “A friendship was born.”
As one of the first places to be liberated, Sainte-Mère-Église quickly became the first place for the burial of American soldiers killed in action: 13,800 bodies were interred in three fields that were turned into cemeteries around the village. Local men dug the graves.
“It was a small village of 1,300 people,” said Marc Lefebvre, who served as mayor for 30 years before stepping down in 2014. “When people saw the coffins loaded onto the trucks, they saw the cost of sacrifice. It was a big shock.”
One of the graves was that of Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the eldest son of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who died of a heart attack five weeks after landing on Utah Beach.
The mayor’s wife, Simone Renaud, was photographed by a Life magazine photographer placing flowers at the mayor’s grave.
The response from grieving mothers in the United States was immediate: hundreds of them wrote to Renaud, pleading with her to visit their sons’ graves and send them photos. She obliged.
Henri-Jean Renaud, 89, recently leafed through a carefully catalogued album of letters he handwrote to his mother 80 years ago.
Some of the women later came to visit the graves themselves, had dinner with the Renauds and sometimes stayed over at their home. “I still keep in touch with families who had children my age,” Ms. Renaud said.
He said he still visits certain soldiers’ graves “every once in a while, just to say hello.”
A few years later, American veterans began making pilgrimages to Sainte-Mère-Église for the annual commemoration of the Normandy landings.
The town had just one hotel, which was later renamed in Steele’s honor, so Renaud, who died in 1988, founded the Friends of American Veterans, which many local residents joined and hosted visitors in their homes.
Volunteers drove around all afternoon, helping veterans find the exact spots of the fields, marshes and trees where they first landed.
“For most of them, it was their first loss, their first intense emotion, their first death of a friend, their first injury,” Renaud said. “Those are things that stay with them for the rest of their lives. So they were always trying to find that beginning.”
By 1984, Ms. Freyss was teaching Greek and Latin at a high school in Alençon, about 140 miles away. On June 6 of that year, she was watching TV when the screen showed an American soldier returning to Saint-Mère-Église. He was stockier, wearing a baseball cap instead of a helmet, but he had the same laid-back attitude. She jumped in her car and sped back to her childhood town.
“That was my American life,” she said. “We fell into each other’s arms.”
Today, 80 years later, few veterans remain, and their successors gather in the town square to honor and remember Steele and his fellow World War II paratroopers as veritable gods.
They were joined by thousands of re-enactors, tourists and French citizens who came to pay their respects.
“It’s overwhelming,” said Jonathan Smith, 43, who was there to celebrate his retirement after 18 1/2 years with the 82nd Airborne Division. “I couldn’t even take 10 steps this morning before kids were stopping me to take pictures and shake my hand.”
The local tourism board expects one million people to visit the town over the 10 days of commemorations and celebrations this year.
Among them are the children and grandchildren of the Americans who commanded on D-Day, from General Roosevelt Jr. to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.
“I feel like I need to come out here and be a part of this,” said Chloe Gavin, General Gavin’s daughter, who used to return regularly before his death.
On a recent evening, a local family hosted more than 200 American soldiers for dinner in their home.
Opposite City Hall, where a framed image of an American flag raised by soldiers in 1944 hangs on the wall, three generations of the Auvray family sat in a garden with three US paratroopers from Puerto Rico. André Auvray, the family patriarch, recounted his memories of the Normandy landings.
She was nine months pregnant and living on a horse farm outside the city that had been taken over by a battalion of German soldiers who, she said, had left for Cherbourg, France, just days before the Allied landings, convinced the Allies were going to attack.
“We were so lucky,” said Auvray, now 97 and with 13 grandchildren. “It would have been bloody.”
Three American paratroopers landed in her yard.
An American military hospital was soon built next door, and her farm became a clinic and a temporary shelter for civilians fleeing the fighting that followed the German attempt to retake Sainte-Mère-Église. They fed 120 people for a month. She gave birth to her son, Michel-Yves, in a camp bed because her own bed had been given to the wounded.
Michelle Eve is almost 80 years old.
Auvray described missiles exploding nearby, his growing fears that the Germans would retake the town, and his gratitude that they did not.
“We’ve been through hardships together,” she said of the American soldiers and French residents, “and that’s why we have such a precious relationship.”
