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Summer 1944

Author: 
LE BAS Julien
Text collected by Etienne Marie-Orléach
Critical edition and notes Etienne Marie-Orléach
Translation Jean-Louis Beaufrère, Gilles Carré and Celeste Cantor-Stephens

Julien Le Bas was 20 in 1944 and lived in Saint-Lô. He wrote this account fifty-five years later.

PRELIMINARY REMARK

Apart from a few German bombs which had fallen on the village of Villeneuve, on the road to Torigni-sur-Vire, in 1940, and two incendiary bombs which destroyed two houses on the rue de la Marne in 1941 or 1942, for us, the war then only meant Allied squadrons flying to and fro over our heads on mission flights.

THE LANDING

As the Landing took place on our beaches we were suddenly in the front line and Saint-Lô became a prime military target1.

We were listening to a strange drum-roll-like sound coming from the coast of the Calvados département on the evening of June 5th when we were subjected to the first serious alert.

It must have been around midnight and the Anti Aircraft batteries dotted around the town started shooting at a plane which became visible only at the moment when it was hit and caught fire right above the theatre and crashed close to a farm, not far from the bridge of Gourfaleur.

A farm on fire from which a mother and her children were saved by the skin of their teeth, and the charred bodies of the airplane men, now no bigger than children's: such were the first sights of horror of a battle which held many more in store.

June 6th was to be a very eventful day. Agneaux power station and railway station were dive-bombed by fighter-bombers. From the rue Valvire where I worked I witnessed this air attack at very close quarters. The planes were swooping down towards the station, dropping their bombs above our heads and at the same time were under fire from the anti-aircraft batteries set up on the girls' lycée on the road to Carentan. The railway station and its yards had now become unusable.

In the afternoon the first American prisoners arrived at the Feldkommandantur2: parachutists from the Sainte-Mère-Église area, sturdy guys with burnt-cork faces in outfits that looked quite new to us.

Joy and anxiety were already there in turns: would the Landing be successful? What was the next step? What would happen to us?

Wasn’t this war of liberation that we were hoping for so dearly reserved for the North of France, England's doorstep? No, Lower-Normandy had been chosen.

Around 7.30pm, at my parents’ café, a German soldier who was a WWI veteran gulped down his usual Calvados, the local apple brandy, and on his way out he said: “Américains boom boom, grand malheur”, meaning the bombings were a tragedy. There was only half an hour to go before hell broke out.

The bombings

We were going to sit down for dinner at about 8 pm when my attention was caught by the humming of planes. In a few seconds the whole family was outside scanning the sky. Before long we saw two formations of flying fortresses coming from the east, flying over tall beech trees, at a very high altitude. Two white flares were released by the leading plane and immediately the bombs were dropped.

At first they were only little black spots but they were growing bigger and bigger before our very eyes as they fell sideways towards the town centre, making a ghastly racket. I was petrified. I could not take my eyes away from this thundering mass and stood there despite my father’s orders and the most basic rules of safety. There was a horrible din followed by a cloud of dust so thick that from the end of the rue du 80ème it was impossible to make out the town3.

Aghast, people were running in all directions, looking for lit-up areas and howling their despair, unable to realize how disastrous it had all been.

The news came that a family in the neighborhood had been walled up in a concrete trench, while another family had been wiped out by a bomb falling in the middle of their dining room. Everywhere there were wounded people and prisoners, dead or alive, under the rubble. Some houses were on fire. In a few seconds, a peaceful town had been partly destroyed.

It was no longer a time for joy and hope, but for despair and destruction. The war was here, cruel, appalling and horribly ugly.

The bombing started again, relentlessly, at about 10 or 11 pm. It was a terrible night. Wherever you tried to find shelter, there was no safety. It is impossible to describe the distress that tormented us; death was everywhere and only luck could save us from the worst.

After the 8 o’clock bombing we left our house and sought refuge on the farm of La Ferronnière, in one of the outhouses already sheltering some refugees who had left Cherbourg a few months before. Thinking my mother and other relatives who had escaped the first bombing were now safe, I went in search of other relations of whom we had no news. Contrary to our expectations, the farm had almost been a fatal place to shelter during the second bombing. According to their own account: “The walls seemed to split open, the floor was shaking under our feet, the whole building might have fallen down at any moment”. Once the bombing had come to an end we left this farm and sought shelter in some sunken lanes.

My father belonged to the Civil Defence Force4. When the second bombing started he was trying, with the help of a few neighbours, to help a family out of a trench; this was in vain as they weren’t able to lift the thick concrete slab over them. He laid down along an embankment and soon felt a weight on his back: it was only his hunting dog lying on him as if to protect him.

Still looking for my missing relatives I was not far from the Five Lanes when the third bombing began. As soon as the first bombs started falling I threw myself on the ground. When I stood up again, I realised I had been lying in a prickly bush – I had not even felt the prick of the thorns. I got back to the family at La Ferronnière, and we spent the rest of the night in some sunken lanes. The sky was set ablaze by the many fires. We curled up, numb with cold, silent, worn out by emotions and tormented by dread. Despite all this, I huddled up against an embankment after the third attack and slept until the small hours of the morning.

The Exodus5

Sainte-Suzanne-sur-Vire

We left Saint-Lô early in the morning, followed sunken lanes and arrived at the Coispel farm in Sainte-Suzanne-sur-Vire. We were to stay for about a month. We often walked back to Saint-Lô, to the railway station and the wagons which had been burst-open and from which we gathered some foodstuffs originally sent for the occupation troops. To get back to Saint-Lô we had to retrace our footsteps along the lanes taken during our exodus. We were dumbfounded to realize that all the places where we had briefly stopped during the night had since been bombed: women’s intuition or their extreme fright had pushed us further and further into the countryside, and saved our lives.

The countryside around the town was literally pitted with bomb craters. The town was just a smoking pile of rubble. Amid this scene of desolation I met M. Lavalley and his family. He joyfully accepted the bottle of Byrrh6 I had just salvaged from my parents’ cellar. I kept another one to celebrate my twentieth birthday on the 9th of June.

We stayed in that farm for about ten days together with a section of German parachutists7 who fought in the vicinity of Saint-Lô. After a few days’ rest they would go back to the front where a fierce battle was raging. From a farm which was close to the road to Torigni, we could see the American artillery firing on the Soulaire woods. The shooting was so heavy that it was no surprise to see the few survivors come back in tattered uniforms which the women in our group were told to wash at the farm’s washing-place. An unpleasant task, as they were covered in blood and often even had scraps of flesh on them.

One morning, back from the front, they improvised a ceremony in front of two corpses lying on the ground and covered with a piece of canvas. One was that of their lieutenant whose head had been torn off, and we saw these tough fellows pay homage to their chief (a man we had met in the previous days) with tears brimming in their eyes. The survivors left for good one evening and a few days later our village was shelled for the first time by the Americans.

The decision was taken to go south and, together with Léon, we borrowed our hosts’ bicycles and rode to Percy so as to prepare the next step of our evacuation. We were riding on a small road to avoid machine-gun attacks when a German sentry stopped us at a crossing outside Moyon. He asked to see our papers and I held out my national athlete card, striped in blue, white and red. After asking us about our destination and the purpose of our trek he strongly advised us to take the Saint-Lô – Villedieu road. When we arrived in Percy we learned that the Resistance network of Postal Telephone and Telegraph workers of Beaucoudray had been arrested8.

We had been lucky to come across a German soldier who could speak proper French and had acted with kindness and goodwill.

On our way back along this important road which at first we had wanted to avoid, we threw ourselves into a ditch when we saw a German vehicle explode when it was hit by very accurate fire. The rest of our trip back to the farm was uneventful.

Percy

As the fighting was getting closer and closer to where we were, we decided to leave the farm and set off to Percy via La Chapelle-sur-Vire and Tessy-sur-Vire with our overloaded wheelbarrows. We spent the next night in a house about two kilometres from Tessy. The usual occupants of the house, preferring to sleep in the countryside, had entrusted it to us for the night. After a good rest on some straw bales, we got back on the road to Percy where we stayed for about two weeks.

We settled in a small farmstead on the south hill and saw an aerial combat, a rare occurrence as German planes were almost totally absent from the skies. Our position on top of the hill allowed us to see, in the distance, an unusual number of planes suggesting an upcoming and important operation. (It was Operation Cobra9).

On the same day, a flight of planes bombed Villedieu railway station while another one targeted a farm in Percy, more precisely an ammunition depot which had been pointed out by the Resistance, as we learned later on. Our fear of bombings was still very real so we soon decided to break camp once more.

Should we go towards the sea or further south? We chose the latter solution.

Villedieu

We were back on the roads, pushing our wheelbarrows along the smaller roads to Villedieu. We had to skirt the town and then arrived on the road to Sainte-Cécile. We were then spotted by allied planes which without further ado started nosediving down on our group. Panic was at its worst and the ditch was taken by storm, each one of us protecting themselves as best as possible. We only avoided the fire of the machine-guns when one of us who had kept a cool head stood in the middle of the road and waved his shirt. The planes then raised their noses and disappeared, to the immense relief of us all.

Chérence-le-Héron

Tired by all the emotions as well as by the walking, we decided to spend the night in Chérence. The mayor allowed us to settle in the village hall. He refused to provide us with straw so we had to try to sleep on the floor of the stage. We had been used to the absence of comfort since June 6th so everyone tried to get some rest.

It was then that other refugees, who came from the area of marshlands arrived at our vast dormitory. Their hay carts were so loaded that you would have thought they were moving out altogether. They made so little noise that we had to raise our voices and risk a fight10. They were not nearly as tired as we were since they had travelled on their carts.

We went to sleep late and slept badly because of the lack of comfort, and we were woken early in the morning by the noise of planes: they used the church spires as points of reference to keep watch on crossings and roads where they fired at anything that moved. We saw a breathtaking ballet of planes firing volley after volley of machine gun bullets on German vehicles and on the soldiers who had recklessly gotten out of them.

We took advantage of a respite to resume our trip towards the south.

Saint-Nicolas-des-Bois

We went to the château where a shelter had been set up with Father Burnel at its head, a priest from Saint-Lô we knew very well. The shelter had already welcome many fellow citizens.

It was impossible for us to stay there, but we did stave off our hunger before resuming our walk on small roads to Brécey where we arrived late in the afternoon.

Brécey

The people in charge of the shelter11 let us know that we had not been expected there and that we should go to Brécey.

But some footballer friends took it on themselves to help us get food vouchers and somewhere to stay at Mme Guédon’s. She very kindly offered us the rooms on the first floor which were all available. But we chose the cow-shed which had the benefit of offering an easy escape if need be. The fear of bombings remained very intense.

The next thing that happened was when Gaston and Charles, who were in the village centre to restock needed supplies, were taken by surprise by a volley of shells from the east, which meant it could only be from the Germans. The Allied forces being close to Brécey, it was probably a case of mistaken fire!

Our baker got news of the fighting through his radio which was hidden in a nook in his bakehouse. This explains how we had some information about the ongoing battle, but we knew nothing of the German setup in the local area.

The news that the Americans were arriving in the village spread like wildfire – but it was only a patrol, in fact.

I was talking with Gaston in the garden when we were taken by surprise by a volley of shots which whistled past our ears before we instinctively hid behind a granite post, but the danger had already passed.

We were looking forward to seeing the Allied troops so we decided, with Yvette, to walk to Brécey, at about half a kilometre from where we were staying. We had hardly gone one hundred metres when we came face to face with a German platoon. They asked us to show them the road to Saint-Hilaire and after answering we hurried back to where we came from and stayed there until the end of the day.

The baker had heard on the radio of the German counter-attack on Mortain12 whose aim was to isolate the Allied tanks which, after taking Avranches, had now captured the bridge of Pontaubault.

Having now been under American control for several days, Brécey could become a prime target with the aim of stopping the lines of tanks hurrying to Saint-Hiliaire. In that case, we risked finding ourselves in the middle of the battle.

Mme Guédon’s property was situated on the bank of the Sée river, between the road bridges of Saint-Hilaire and Ducey. A landing strip had been built in record time for light planes whose mission it would be to provide information to the artillery. That strip was so short that one day one of the planes ended up in the river.

One morning, a battery with four guns was set up in the meadow and started firing relentlessly in the direction of Mortain. Considering the intensity of the shooting, we were feeling really sorry for the people at the other end; we knew what it meant for them as we had been through the same plight in the middle of the night when we were at Sainte-Suzanne.

An antitank gun targeting the other end of the lane, ready to counter the slightest foray of enemy tanks, had taken position across from the entrance to our garden. This allowed us to keep the gun-crew company, as we wanted to ignore the danger. Our new friends threw themselves on the ground when a squadron of German fighters passed overhead. We were too slow to react and remained standing.

Late that afternoon, and in no time at all, all those people disappeared and never came back.

That night we were bombed by German planes. What were they looking for? The bridges, or the artillery battery? Although they used flares their failure was total as the bombs fell on the plain of the Sée valley. Once more we found shelter when the danger had already passed. The news of the failure of the counter-attack on Mortain spread like wildfire. All there was left to do was wildly applaud the reinforcements walking towards the south, and take advantage of the cigarettes, chocolate slabs and chewing gum packets they threw about as they walked past.

Back to Saint-LÔ

The Germans’ defeat in Mortain marked the end of the battle in the Manche department.

At last we seemed to have been liberated for good, and the time had come to think of going back to Saint-Lô. Some among us already knew that their homes had been destroyed during the June 6th bombings, but as we had left ours whole and intact we were wondering what condition we would find it in after the terrible battle which had taken place to regain control of the town.

We got back on August 20th. The trip back was much faster and quieter than the journey out.

An American let us get on board his empty GMC truck13 together with our wheelbarrows, because he was going back towards Cherbourg (the allied army’s supply base).

The area around Brécey and Villedieu had been completely spared, but such was not the case for the area between Percy and Saint-Lô. What an apocalyptic vision! Percy14 and Villebaudon15, in the final combat zone, had gone through an ordeal, a fierce battle had taken place in each of these villages which were easily defended as there were hills surrounding them. Many civilians fell victim in both of these villages.

As for Saint-Lô, first bombed on June 6th, the town had been submitted to land combat for a whole month and was virtually annihilated. We were thus relatively satisfied to find our house had only been 50 percent destroyed.

Our first task was to clear the rooms which looked as if they could be put to use, and to carry the rubble away. The windows were sealed off with tar paper for window panes. My father put his smithy back into working shape, picking up, here and there, pieces of sheet metal and other materials, including a few tools, which were scattered across the yard. This enabled him in no time to meet the demands of peasants whose horses had gone unshod since the beginning of our evacuation.

Despite the lack of comfort, we had a shelter and got through the very difficult winter of 1944-45. It was in that home which threatened ruin, open to winds, with no heating and no window panes that my mother had to recover twice from congestion of the lungs.

Observations

Although every day brought the names of new victims, usually well-known to us, we felt no particular emotion, we remained almost indifferent.

Was it because we had escaped death several times, which had left us so shocked that we could no longer feel compassion? We were alive, the rest seemed of secondary importance.

We had imagined that this liberation we had been waiting for for four years would be joyful, and were convinced that the inevitable landings would take place far from our beaches.

We were so little prepared to go through such an ordeal that we had never thought it would mean such an absolute massacre of civilians as well as of troops. All those people who had died or been wounded, often for life, all that massive destruction, were they - militarily speaking - essential? The question remains open fifty years later.

Life resumed little by little though, for we had to live for the next twenty years in a town that was being rebuilt. We remained shocked for a very long time, and can still remember things precisely, so precisely that this account was made from memory, without using written documents.

The families of Le Bas Léon, Le Bas Charles, Le Lévrier Gaston lived through this tragedy unscathed, fortune never abandoned them.

We pay a particular tribute to our cousin René whose force and courage were precious all along this dangerous undertaking.

  • 1 In order to explain the strategic importance of Saint-Lô, let us mention here the account given by Bernard Henry, who lived not far from the town. He was gazing at a map when he remarked: “A sudden dreary realization shot through my mind. I saw that the town where I lived was like a spider clinging to the centre of its web – a web whose beams were the six roads which met there, six roads which might at any moment become of prime strategic importance […]. The town, and maybe many more, was going to pay a heavy price for the so-long-awaited liberation; it was going to die so other French cities could live on. This road junction had to disappear, to become a barrier, an obstacle to delay the German reinforcements hurrying up to the American foothold. The catastrophe that had taken place so suddenly at 8 o'clock was only a sinister warning. The worst was still to come…” (B. HENRY, Un ermite en exil, Paris, A. Fayard, 1947, p. 18).
  • 2 “Feldkommandantur” was the name of the headquarters of the German administration in each department. The FK 722 was in Saint-Lô (Manche), the FK 723 in Caen (Calvados) and the FK 916 in Alençon (Orne).
  • 3The rue du 80ème RIT, which still exists, was named after the 80th Régiment d’Infanterie Territorial. During WW1 it was a military formation, composed of men aged 34 to 49, considered too old to join a first line regiment.
  • 4 Civil defense is an organisation created during the war in order to protect civilians. After the landings, the civil defense services saw to the refugees, organized the withdrawal of civilians and provided food.
  • 5The bombings made thousands of the inhabitants of Lower-Normandy take to the roads. All along that summer, roads and lanes were taken by storm by civilians who left the battle grounds whether they were forced to or not. For a few days or a few weeks, they walked until they reached a safe zone. Sleeping in a cellar, in a shed or a cowshed became a normal thing. As for food, conditions were not better despite the “help” provided by the farmers that one met. On June 6th and 7th, many towns were laid to waste. The inhabitants, most of them taken by surprise, took the initiative to get away from the centre and go to the countryside. During that summer, another reason pushed civilians to take to the roads: the anxiety caused by the upcoming battles. The last reason is, the Germans ordered civilians to leave in order to have as much leeway as possible. As the Germans withdrew, more and more civilians were thus forced to go into exile. Most of the thousands of civilians who left their homes had no other choice. Whole families went, taking very few of their belongings with them even when they did have a horse-drawn cart. Many of them took the routes that had been defined beforehand by the authorities in Vichy. In the Manche department three routes were thus defined leading to the Ille-et-Villaine department in Brittany or the Mayenne department to the south of Lower Normandy. Julien Le Bas took the beginning of the latter route.
  • 6A popular wine based aperitif.
  • 7Sainte-Suzanne-sur-Vire, a few kilometres to the south of Saint-Lô, quickly became a defense location for the Germans, a real observation post allowing them to trace the movements of enemy troops. All these defense locations allowed the Germans to contain the Allied forces.
  • 8 This network which was mostly made up of postmen was set up at the end of 1940. At first they collected information on German defenses and the movements of troops but from June 5th, 1944, they started sabotaging, notably German phone installations. On June 14, 1944 the Germans arrested eleven members of this network. They were executed the next day.
  • 9Mired in the so-called « hedge wars », American strategists launched an operation in order to breach into the Germans’ defensive line. That operation, which started on July 25th, 1944, was codenamed Operation Cobra. Before that attack, the Allied forces launched their usual carpet bombing operation.
  • 10This phrase is ironical : in fact they were so noisy that …
  • 11This shelter was not actually in Brécey but close to the village.
  • 12The Germans had regrouped seven divisions, including four Panzer divisions, in Rancoudray, and launched a counter-offensive early on August 7th, 1944. The aim of Operation Lüttich (Lüttich is the German name for the city of Liège) was to break through into Avranches, thus cutting off the Americans who were advancing into Brittany. With the benefit of surprise and thanks to the fog, the Germans managed to recapture Mortain, but once the fog had disappeared the Allied bombers caused severe damage to the German lines and American reinforcements arrived.
  • 13 An American truck.
  • 14 During Operation Cobra the Germans tried to resist in Percy. They were surrounded. Battle raged from July 29th to August 2nd. After heavy artillery fire and aerial bombing the village was liberated, but it was a ruin.
  • 15In the Wake of Operation Cobra and in order to try and stop the Germans from getting reinforcements, the 2nd Armoured Division decided to capture Villebaudon. The town was under heavy artillery fire on July 27th and 28th, 1944.
Archive Number:
  • Numéro: TE593
  • Lieu: Mémorial de Caen
Photos illustrant le témoignage
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