The D-Day landings and the Battle of Normandy
“With war, its procession of unrest and horrors, I was shown humanity as it truly was, at times better or worse than it seemed to be”, young Marcelle Hamelle from La Manche wrote at the end of WWII. On August 25, 1944, the sixth Airborne Division liberated the town of Honfleur. The liberation of this picturesque harbour marked the end of a tedious four-year German occupation for the entire Lower Normandy.
Octeville, in the north of the Manche department, is where Marcelle Hamel was born in 1916. She began working as a schoolteacher in Neuville-au-Plain, close to Sainte-Mère-Église, on the 1st April 1940. After eight years she returned to her native land of North Cotentin, close to Cherbourg.
Julien Le Bas was 20 in 1944 and lived in Saint-Lô. He wrote this account fifty-five years later.
Louis Pesnel was born in 1922. He was still at school when the war started. When the Germans arrived in Normandy in 1940 the young man went back to his family’s in Montfarville. He then worked at sea with his father, and in the fields with his mother. The first part of this testimony is the result of an inquiry conducted in 1995 about the STO.
Jean Roger vient de fêter ses 18 ans quand éclate la Seconde Guerre mondiale. En 1944, le jeune agent des contributions habite Saint-Lô. C’est en 1984 qu’il écrit ses souvenirs de cette période.
In 1979, Madame Lecoffre related her experience of the D-Day landing. Evicted from her house by the Germans in May 1944, she and her fiancé found out that the Allied operations were underway thanks to stock-breeders from Sainte-Mère Eglise they had met at a fair in Valognes. After telling the Germans that they would be defeated, the young woman was arrested and sent to the prison in
Blanche Néel writes these few pages in the year following the liberation of Normandy. "The Angel of the Prison" is a title we chose simply taking a few words from Blanche Néel’s account.