Somewhere in France
10 July 1944
My darling Sminx,
Yesterday I sent eighty dollars to you through a personal transfer account via the U.S. Finance office. I have no need of the money over here and I would like you to have it. It will take about three weeks for it to get to you so you may receive this letter before you get the money. I hope you get it all right and I also hope that you received the fifty dollars money order which I sent to you sometime ago. Perhaps you will be able to save some of it or all of it and either put it in the savings account or buy war bonds with it.
* * *
Today we were issued our weekly PX rations which is free. We received a carton of cigarettes, 12 packages of life savers, four sticks of gum, 2 razor blades, soap and tooth paste. That is the most I have received so far.The weather has not improved. It is cold and raw and has been raining all day. It is like New England in a nor'easter only colder.
I have been talking to some of the local people here about conditions during the German occupation. The men worked for the Germans building fortifications and gun positions and were paid 50 francs a day. This was very little compared to the prices of articles. A pound of butter cost 80 francs here and in Paris it cost 500 francs. A pair of men's shoes with wooden soles cost 500 francs also. The Germans took everything of value such as wine, cognac, jewelry, etc. without paying for them. They drafted young Frenchmen, both men and women, and sent them to Germany to work. However, they apparently did not commit the atrocities they committed in Poland. The French refer to them as the Boche. I am enclosing a 2 franc note of the invasion money which you might be interested in. It looks more like a cigar coupon than money. We are also using the old French money which you remember from your trip over here. Each franc is worth approximately two cents.
Dearest, I love you more and miss you more each day. I hope and pray that it will be over soon and we can be together again.
Your loving husband,
Bill
We are now learning how Dad handled his pay, and the supplies he received on a weekly basis, quite a contrast to how the French lived under the Occupation. And he obviously was aware of that contrast. It impresses me that it was he who appeared to be initiating these conversations about their life under the Boche. Following up on these letters, I asked Ginette, our hostess at Au Bon Gite, where we've spent the last two nights, where she came from and whether her family suffered during the war. She told me that she had been born in Caen and was the child of a second marriage for her father. Since Caen was completely destroyed in the fighting, her father eventually took his family to Arromanche to live, a safe haven where there would be no more fighting and where there would be housing and food from the surrounding agricultural area . She does not recall this period as she was too young. I also asked her the meaning of "Boche" and she knew that it was a derogatory term for the Germans but did not know the source of the term. I just looked it up on Wikipedia and it apparently came to mean "German blockhead" or imbecile.
Ginette was serving us a breakfast of a boiled egg, croissons, local cheeses, French bread, juice and coffee, and Philippe, her husband, joined us after returning from walking their dog, Aura. I shared the copy of Dad's love letter in French with them and told them I believed that he had written it in this village. Ginette said it was too bad that we would not be there on June 6, the anniversary of D-Day, when there are lots of activities and the village is packed with veterans and their families. Ginette and Philippe are gracious hosts, inviting us into their home, giving us a homemade jar of strawberry jam because that is the jam that we ate the most of at breakfast, and then, after learning we were headed to the Arromanche 360 degree Theater, she wrote out a form that would get us a "slight deduction", with her thumb and index finger held very close together. We exchanged hugs and kisses (Sugar) and we were off to the theater in the village right above the coastal town of Arromanche.
Rick Steves writes in his guide to France about "the powerful film, Normandy's 100 Days. The screens surrounding you show archival footage and photographs of the endeavor to liberate Normandy.... The experience is as loud and slickly produced as anything at the D-Day beaches. It's more emotional and immersive than educational, and for that reason some prefer to see it at the end of their D-Day experience to sum up all they've seen." So that is what we sought to do, and it was a moving and powerful experience. The movie packs 5 years of European history into 15 or 20 minutes, starting with Hitler's invasion into France, showing clips of his harangues, and photos of him in Paris in front of the Eiffel Tower. Then we hear parts of speeches from Churchill and Roosevelt dedicating their efforts to the liberation of Europe and stemming the Nazi tide. We move quickly to the preparations for D-Day, and then films and photos of the actual invasion, starting with the night parachute jumps of hundreds of men behind the German lines, followed by the shelling from the ships offshore and the bombing from some of the 6,000 planes taking part in D-Day, and then the actual amphibious assault and the encouraging speech given by General Eisenhower before they embarked on the armada to cross the English Channel. The Allies won that day and spent the next 99 days fighting to evict the Germans from Normandy and completely destroying St. Lo and Caen in the process. The movie ends with the French and their Allies marching down the Champs-Elysees before the reviewing eyes of Charles de Gaulle. The surround sound and screens all around are challenging and put you right in the middle of it all, and most of us leave the theater wiping the tears from our cheeks.
We then set sail for Mont-Saint-Michel and arrived about 1 pm, just in time for lunch inside the walls of the famous island fortress, perhaps one of the most recognized sites in France, second perhaps to only the Eiffel Tower. We were unable to drive to the island, but had to park on the mainland, ride a shuttle bus to about 100 yards short of the island and then walk from there. The shuttle buses were interesting, each having two driving stations, one at each end. So when the bus arrived at its point of disembarkation, the driver just got out of the front of that bus, walked to the rear and took the driver's seat so that now became the front of the bus and headed back to its shuttle station after picking up a load of people. They did this as there is no room for the buses to turn around. We enjoyed our tour with the audio packs. It is almost dizzying to be dealing with a world of 72 years ago (D-Day) to go back to a world of more than 1300 years ago when the Archangel Michael came to the local bishop in a vision and the bishop interpreted the vision such that, in 706 AD(!) he built a seminary on the top of this hill on the small island in honor of St. Michael, the archangel gatekeeper of the gates of heaven. The abbey is still used for services and there are monks who still live and study there. The island is also fully stocked with trinkets, postcards, and other memorabilia, as well as restaurants, clothing stores, hotels, and whatever else you would see at a tourist destination.
Sugar and I are now in the Hotel Louvre in St. Malo, and once again we are thrust into the world of mid-1944 from All the Light We Cannot See, a Pulitzer prize winning book about a blind young French girl and a smart and talented young German boy tossed together by this world war. St. Malo is a walled city so we are also back in medieval times, when knights were leaving their castles to go out and fight for their respective liege lords. This constant crossing of epochs is foreign to us, but thrilling.
Dad's letter above is one of the last he wrote as an "excess officer" for soon thereafter he was assigned to Headquarters of the XIXth Army Corps Artillery, a part of the First U.S. Army. We see that although the Corps did not go in on D-Day, two of its officers went in on June 7, and the Corps became operational at noon on June 14 under the command of Major General George Corlett, and he immediately ordered his two divisions of infantry (the 29th and the 30th) to attack. After the third day of heavy fighting, the attack was halted as their positions were along the Vire River, a natural defensive position. On July 7th, the Corps attacked again and the 30th Inf Div established a bridgehead west of the Vire River, and were then joined by the 3d Armored Division. By July 16, these two divisions had wiped out the German salient in their sector. In the meantime, the 35th Inf Div had been attached to the Corps, and on July 11, it and the 29th Inf Div attacked the German lines with the important communications center of St. Lo as their objective. The battle raged for a week in hedgerow country with heavy casualties on both sides, and St. Lo, after having been completely destroyed by artillery and bombing raids, fell to the XIXth Corps on July 18. This is the situation when Dad would join their ranks as plans were being made for a full scale attack to break out of the Cherbourg Peninsula. We'll leave it there for now.
Bon soir from St. Malo.
Love, Nat
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