In France, D-Day evokes both the joys of liberation and the pain of Normandy’s 20,000 civilian dead

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By JOHN LEICESTER (Associated Press)

CARENTAN-LES-MARAIS, France (AP) — Shortly after D-Day in 1944, the American soldiers heading out to more fighting against Adolf Hitler’s forces couldn’t help but notice the hungry French boy by the side of the road, hoping for handouts.

One by one, the men fished fragrant, brightly-colored spheres from their pockets and deposited them in Yves Marchais’ hands. The 6-year-old boy had never seen the strange fruits before, growing up in Nazi-occupied France, where food was rationed and terror was everywhere.

Thrilled with his bounty, the young Marchais counted them all — 35 — and dashed home for his first taste of oranges.

But also seared into survivors’ memories in Normandy are massive Allied bombing raids that pulverized towns, villages and the cities of Caen, Rouen and Le Havre, burying victims and turning skies fire-red.

The 80th anniversary this week of the June 6, 1944, Allied invasion on D-Day that punched through Hitler’s western defenses and helped precipitate Nazi Germany’s surrender 11 months later brings mixed emotions for French survivors of the Battle of Normandy. They remain eternally grateful for their liberation but cannot forget its steep cost in French lives.

Marchais remembers his family’s house in Carentan, Normandy, shaking during bombardments that sounded “like thunder” and how his mother stunned him by gulping down a bottle of strong Normandy cider when they were sheltering in their basement, declaring as she finished it: “That’s another one that the Germans won’t drink!”

“The Americans, for us, were gods,” Marchais, now 86, recalled. “Whatever they do in the world, they will always be gods to me.”

RUINED NORMANDY TOWNS COUNT THEIR DEAD

Some 20,000 Normandy civilians were killed in the invasion and as Allied forces fought their way inland, sometimes field-by-field through the leafy Normandy countryside that helped conceal German defenders. Only in late August of 1944 did they reach Paris.

Allied casualties in the Normandy campaign were also appalling, with 73,000 troops killed and 153,000 wounded.

Allied bombing was aimed at stopping Hitler from sending reinforcements and at prying his troops out of the “Atlantic Wall” of coastal defenses and other strongpoints that German occupation forces had built with forced labor.

The list of Normandy towns left ruined and counting their dead grew with the Allied advances: Argentan, Aunay-sur-Odon, Condé-sur-Noireau, Coutances, Falaise, Flers, Lisieux, Vimoutiers, Vire and others. Leaflets scattered by Allied planes urged civilians to “LEAVE IMMEDIATELY! YOU DON’T HAVE A MINUTE TO LOSE!” but often missed their targets.

Some Normans were furious. Writing before being liberated, a woman in the bombarded port city of Cherbourg described Allied pilots as “bandits and assassins” in a June 4, 1944, letter to her husband who was being held prisoner in Germany.

“My dear Henri, it’s shameful to massacre the civilian population as the supposed Allies are doing,” reads the letter, which historians Michel Boivin and Bernard Garnier published in their 1994 study of civilian victims in Normandy’s Manche region.

“We are in danger everywhere.”

NORMAN LOSSES ‘SWEPT UNDER THE CARPET’

French President Emmanuel Macron paid homage to civilian victims in commemorations on Wednesday in Saint-Lo, recalling how the Normandy town became emblematic of losses from Allied bombing when it was razed on June 6 and 7, 1944. The death toll was 352, according to Boivin and Garnier’s study. Playwright Samuel Beckett dubbed Saint-Lo “The Capital of the Ruins” after working there with the Irish Red Cross.

Macron said Saint-Lo was “a necessary target” because Allied bombers were aiming to prevent German reinforcements from reaching the invasion beaches and described it as “a martyred town sacrificed to liberate France.”

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Those killed in Saint-Lo included Marguerite Lecarpentier’s older brother, Henri. She was 6 at the time. Henri was 19 and he’d been helping another man pull a teenage girl out from under debris when the town was bombarded again. All three were killed. Marguerite’s father later identified her brother’s body “because of his shoes, which were new,” she said.

When her family subsequently fled Saint-Lo, they crossed through what was left of the town.

“It was terrible because there was rubble everywhere,” Lecarpentier recalled. Her mother waved a white handkerchief as they walked, “because the planes were constantly flying overhead” and “so we’d be recognized as civilians.”

Still, Lecarpentier speaks without rancor of Allied bombing. “It was the price to pay,” she said.

“It can’t have been easy,” she added. “When one thinks that they landed on June 6 and that Saint-Lo was only liberated on July 18 and they lost enormous numbers of soldiers.”

University of Caen historian Françoise Passera, co-author of “The Normans in the War: The Time of Trials, 1939-1945,” says Normandy’s civilian casualties were overshadowed for decades by the exploits of Allied soldiers in combat and their sacrifices.

Although towns held remembrances locally, she noted that it wasn’t until 2014 that a French president — Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande — paid national homage to Normandy’s civilian dead.

Until then, because France had been bombed by its liberators, “this was not a subject that could be raised very easily by French authorities,” Passera said.

“Civilian victims were swept under the carpet somewhat to not offend the Americans,” she said. “And to not offend the British.”

But for Normans, D-Day and its aftermath were “a bit of a confusion of feelings,” she said. “We cried with joy because we were freed, but we also cried because the dead were all around us.”

The last WWII vets converge on Normandy for D-Day and fallen friends and to cement their legacy

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By JOHN LEICESTER, SYLVIE CORBET and DANICA KIRKA (Associated Press)

OMAHA BEACH, France (AP) — Under their feet, the sands of Omaha Beach, and in their rheumy eyes, tears that inevitably flowed from being on the revered shoreline in Normandy, France, where so many American young men were cut down 80 years ago on D-Day.

Veterans of World War II, many of them centenarians and likely returning to France for one last time, pilgrimaged Tuesday to what was the bloodiest of five Allied landing beaches on June 6, 1944. They remembered fallen friends. They relived horrors they experienced in combat. They blessed their good fortune for surviving. And they mourned those who paid the ultimate price.

They also bore a message for generations behind them, who owe them so much: Don’t forget what we did.

“They probably wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t be successful,” said Llilburn “Bill” Wall, who flew bombers in WWII and will celebrate his 101st birthday this week as world leaders gather in France to pay homage to the D-Day generation.

As decades pass, D-Day anniversaries in Normandy have become increasingly fun-fair like, clogging the region’s leafy roads with WWII-era fans dressed in the uniforms and driving restored vehicles of the time. But the presence of an ever-dwindling number of veterans keeps the commemorations real, inevitably raising questions about whether the memories, pathos and lessons of WWII will fade when they are gone.

“There are things worth fighting for. Although I wish there was another way to do it than to try to kill each other. But sometimes you’re called upon to do something and you just do it. You know? That’s it. These people looked death in the face and just kept right on coming,” said Walter Stitt, who turns 100 in July and fought in tanks — surviving the destruction of three.

“All those young men that never had a chance to go home and find a love of their life and hold their children in their arms,” he said on Omaha, wiping away a tear.

On the bluffs above Omaha, at the Normandy American Cemetery with 9,387 immaculately tended graves, 100-year-old Bob Gibson paid tribute to comrades who fell on D-Day, when he landed on the other, less-bloody American landing beach, code-named Utah.

“You don’t want other people to go through the same thing,” he said. “Because I’ve seen a lot of these boys that never even made the beach, believe me. And we were all 18, 19 years old.”

“I’m glad I made it. The old boy upstairs took care of me,” he said, gesturing skyward.

Across the Normandy coast where the largest-ever land, sea and air armada punctured Adolf Hitler’s defenses in western Europe on D-Day and helped precipitate his downfall 11 months later, Allied veterans are the VVIPs of this week’s 80th anniversary celebrations.

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More veterans were on their way Tuesday, traveling by ferry from southern England across the English Channel that 23,000 Allied airborne troops flew over to drop on D-Day into Normandy and which more than 132,000 others crossed aboard thousands of ships that stretched as far as eyes could see, landing on Utah and Omaha and three other code-named beaches: Gold, Juno and Sword.

“It looked like you could walk across the Channel using boats as stepping stones,” recalled 100-year-old Robert Pedigo, who was a nose gunner aboard a B-24 bomber that flew over the landing beaches on D-Day to pound German forces from the air. He was part of the veteran group that visited Omaha on Tuesday, brought to France for the 80th anniversary by American Airlines.

Back at base on D-Day night, he was told the Allies had suffered thousands of casualties.

“Overwhelming,” he recalled. Although his bombing mission that day proved to be among the “easiest” of 30 he flew over occupied France and Nazi Germany, “the emotional impact was the greatest.”

More than 4,400 Allied troops were killed on D-Day, including more than 2,500 Americans. The Allied toll grew appallingly in the Battle of Normandy that ensued, with 73,000 killed and 153,000 wounded.

Eight decades on, veterans are making more pleasant new memories to go with painful old ones.

Aboard the Mont St. Michel ferry carrying them Tuesday to France, about 20 British veterans gathered on deck and waved like rockstars to well-wishers who cheered them off.

A pipe band struck up a stirring rendition of “Brave Scotland.” Sailors stood at attention. Fireboats blasted their hoses in an arc. A military transport plane flew past twice.

RAF veteran Bernard Morgan, who worked in communications on D-Day, chuckled: “It was more pleasant coming today than it was 80 years ago.”

Danica Kirka reported from the Mont St. Michel ferry in the English Channel.

Relations between Moscow and Washington won’t change, no matter who wins the US election, Putin says

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By JAMES JORDAN and HARRIET MORRIS (Associated Press)

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that nothing will change in terms of Russia-U.S. relations regardless of whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump wins the American presidential election in November.

“We will work with any president the American people elect,” Putin said, responding to questions from international journalists on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

“I say absolutely sincerely, I wouldn’t say that we believe that after the election something will change on the Russian track in the American politics,” he added. “We don’t think so. We think nothing that serious will happen.”

Trump’s felony conviction at his hush money trial last week was the result of “political infighting,” Putin added.

The Russian leader faced questions for the first time since his inauguration to a fifth term from senior news leaders of international news agencies, including The Associated Press.

Putin has used the annual forum as a showcase for touting Russia’s development and seeking investors. While meetings with journalists were part of previous sessions, he has not taken questions from Western journalists at the St. Petersburg event since sending troops to Ukraine.

Last year, journalists from countries that Russia regards as unfriendly — including the U.S., the U.K. and the European Union — were not invited, and Western officials and investors also steered clear of the session after wide-ranging sanctions were imposed on Moscow over Ukraine.

Biden will mark D-Day anniversary in France as Western alliances face threats at home and abroad

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By CHRIS MEGERIAN and ZEKE MILLER (Associated Press)

PARIS (AP) — United States President Joe Biden will mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in France this week as he tries to demonstrate steadfast support for European security at a time when some allies fear Donald Trump threatens to upend American commitments if he wins another term in the White House.

The trip comes as the deadliest fighting on the continent since World War II continues in Ukraine and allied countries struggle to find ways to turn the tide against Russia, which has recently gained ground on the battlefield. It is also set against deepening cracks between the U.S. and many European allies over how to manage the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Biden arrived in Paris on Wednesday morning, and he was welcomed by French officials and an honor guard. On Thursday, he’ll visit hallowed ground near the beaches of Normandy, where rows of bone-white headstones mark the graves of U.S. soldiers who died to bring an end to World War II. He’ll also speak on Friday at Pointe du Hoc, a spot on the French coast where Army Rangers scaled seaside cliffs to overcome Nazi defenses.

White House National Security adviser Jake Sullivan said aboard Air Force One on the way to France that Biden will stress how the men on those cliffs “put the country ahead of themselves” and detail “the dangers of isolationism, and how, if we bow to dictators and fail to stand up to them, they keep going and ultimately America and the world pays a greater price.”

“Eighty years later, we see dictators once again attempting to challenge the order, attempting to march in Europe,” Sullivan said, “and that freedom-loving nations need to rally to stand against that, as we have.”

He also said Biden would be meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in France to discuss “how we can continue and deepen our support for Ukraine.”

On Saturday, Biden, along with his wife Jill, will be honored by French President Emmanuel Macron with a state visit, including a military parade in Paris and a banquet at the Élysée Palace, as well as business sessions where the leaders are to discuss strengthening their alliance, trade, and security cooperation for the upcoming Olympic games.

The two leaders also are expected to discuss the Middle East. Biden has invested geopolitical capital in brokering a ceasefire to the Israel-Hamas war that would see the release of hostages, even as he has maintained his staunch support for Israel and resisted European efforts to recognize a Palestinian state or investigate Israel over its handling of the war.

Biden, a Democrat, is scheduled to return to the United States on Sunday, but before he leaves France he’s expected to stop at a cemetery where American soldiers who died in World War I are buried. Trump, a Republican, skipped plans to visit the same site during a 2018 trip to France, a decision that the White House blamed on weather at the time.

However, subsequent reporting found that Trump told aides he didn’t want to go because he viewed the dead soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” He has denied the comments, which Biden referenced during a fundraiser in Greenwich, Conn., on Monday.

“This guy does not deserve to be president,” Biden said.

Although foreign trips are ostensibly nonpartisan, Biden left no doubt that he sees a political connection between the D-Day anniversary and the election. The president described the invasion as “one of the most important moments in the history of defense of freedom and democracy.”

“I want to say as clearly as I can,” he added. “Democracy is literally on the ballot this year.”

Biden’s trip to France will be followed by another to Italy later this month for the annual Group of Seven summit, a rare doubleheader of international diplomacy in the middle of the presidential election season. Biden will skip a subsequent gathering in Switzerland, where leaders will be focused on the war in Ukraine, to attend a campaign fundraiser in Los Angeles with Hollywood stars. Vice President Kamala Harris will represent the United States instead.

Biden’s travels, plus the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Washington next month, aim to embody a vision of global American leadership that’s central to his political identity but faces renewed threat from Trump.

Although the two presidents are from the same generation — Biden, 81, was born one and a half years before D-Day; Trump, 77, was born two years after the invasion — they developed divergent views on Europe and American alliances over the years.

For Biden, U.S. ties to Europe are a cornerstone of stability and a source of strength. For Trump, they’re a drain on precious resources, and he’s expressed more affinity for autocratic leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine has upended the continent.

Even before voters decide which vision they prefer, cracks in Biden’s foreign policy foundation have emerged. It took months to secure additional military assistance for Ukraine due to GOP resistance, and the delay led to depleted ammunition reserves and Russian advances on the battlefield.

“All that happened with a die-hard Atlanticist and die-hard alliance supporter in the White House,” said Charles Kupchan, a Georgetown University professor who previously served as Europe director on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. “Europeans have no option but to ask how reliable the United States can be.”

Kupchan noted that “the bipartisan compact behind a steady and robust American internationalism has collapsed.”

Given the political complications at home, Kupchan said, Biden should be careful about drawing historical parallels between D-Day and Ukraine while he’s in France.

“I’m not sure that he wants to say that this is a moment like 1940 or 1941,” he said, especially since Biden has ruled out sending American troops to fight against the Russian invasion.

Like all of his international engagements, Biden’s trip will be shadowed by Trump’s potential return to the White House. The presumptive Republican candidate, who last week became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, has pledged to unravel American commitments to allies in Europe.

“It’s every conversation. Every conversation is, what will happen?” said Max Bergmann, who leads Europe research at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Bergmann, who was in the middle of a trip around the continent in the days before Biden arrived, said some European officials hope that a second Trump term would be no more damaging than his first, when he failed to follow through on some of his more extreme ideas. But he doubts Trump will be held in check without moderate members of his administration — such as former Defense Secretary James Mattis — who are unlikely to return.

“I’m not reassuring to them,” Bergmann said.

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Rachel Rizzo, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said there’s a “palpable sense of uncertainty” as the United States and Europe wrestle with populist movements that have proven durably popular.

“This is not an aberration, this is not an accident,” she said. “There are real grievances that citizens of both continents have, and they’re playing out in support of right-wing parties.”

In another complication for Biden, his trip is taking place at the same time that his son, Hunter, is standing trial in Delaware. The younger Biden is accused of lying while purchasing a gun by claiming that he was not a drug addict. He has pleaded not guilty.

The prosecution began presenting its case Tuesday, just days after Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a felony. Trump was found guilty in New York of making illegal hush money payments to an adult film actress who said they had sex. Trump denies the affair.

Paul Begala, a longtime Democratic strategist, said Biden is probably better off ignoring Trump while he’s in France.

“When you’re 81 years old, and three-fourths of the country thinks you’re too old, one of the things you have to do is to show strength,” he said. “That’s what he’s got to do over there. He’s got to show strength.”

Associated Press writers Sylvie Corbett in Paris and Fatima Hussein in Greenwich, Connecticut, contributed to this report.