Don't call us cowards, say French

By CATHERINE FIELD

Nestling in emerald fields just 5km from Utah beach, Sainte-Mere-Eglise lies in what must be the most pro-American corner of France.

Here, before dawn on Tuesday 6 June 1944, the paratroopers of the United States 82nd Airborne Division dropped ahead of the Normandy landings which liberated France and helped to destroy Nazi Germany. Sainte-Mere-Eglise was the first French town to be freed on D-Day.

A mannequin in US uniform dangles from the church belfry, a reminder of paratrooper John Steele, whose parachute snagged on the steeple as he floated into town.

From here the Liberty Highway begins its long march to Bastogne in Belgium, with markers designating the rugged coastal road taken by the liberators.

All around, statues, military cemeteries, war museums and street names pour glory on the Americans' feat at arms.

Today, almost 60 years on, memories of the liberation are still fresh. Gratitude is profound and undimmed for the brave young men who freed France. And this appreciation has roots that go beyond the World War II generation.

For this reason, many people are dismayed, confused and increasingly resentful at the anti-French rhetoric that is pouring out of sections of the US media at France's refusal to join President George W. Bush's war on Iraq.

"I just can't believe what I am hearing," says Marianne Helloin-Vanura, a woman in her 40s, whose family was forced out of their farm by the Nazis. "We are grateful, we haven't forgotten what they did for us. However could they say this?"

Helloin-Vanura is a member of Les Fleurs de la Memoire, a voluntary organisation that nurtures recognition of the US liberators.

Each member of the group "adopts" one or several fallen American soldiers and regularly lays flowers at their graves, at nearby Colleville-sur-Mer or at another war cemetery, St-James, 30km south.

Helloin-Vanura's outrage was sparked by the front page of the New York Post, which accused France of dishonouring the war dead by forgetting its historic debt to America. Other US tabloid media have stylised France and Germany, another anti-war holdout, as slippery, cowardly and disloyal - "the Axis of Weasels".

For Catherine Dupuy, 30, a doctor from Meaux, America is in a warmongering mood. "France has become the scapegoat. As if we could ever forget their support during the Second World War," she says.

A local farmer's wife, Chantal Poisson, chooses her words carefully when questioned about a possible war in Iraq, and American hostility to French thinking.

"Everyone has a right to their own opinion," she says. "It's because we've seen war, and we see the graves of the soldiers all the time, that we know that war is not an answer."

Her home on the outskirts of Sainte-Mere-Eglise became the scene of an epic three-day battle as the 82nd Airborne defended a bridge that was the strategic key to the port of Cherbourg. The ancient stone farmhouse and walls are pitted by bullet holes.

Today, the English, French and American flags fly at the farmyard entrance, and across the road is a statue of an American paratrooper, "Iron Mike", who looks out grittily across the soggy fields where hundreds lost their lives.

Poisson opens her spare rooms to veterans and their relatives who trek across the Atlantic to this windswept coast, sustaining the liberation bond.

"The ones who took part in the battle are gradually dying, and this is very sad. But we have close friendships with their sons and daughters, which endure," she says.

Recognition of D-Day is also embedded in the French education system. Schoolchildren are taken to the Nazi fortifications, the five D-Day landing beaches, the cemeteries where more than 14,000 US war dead are buried, and to an excellent museum at Caen that deals with World War II and the Cold War.

By comparison with many American counterparts, the French media are restrained and, so far, have not responded to the jingoistic barbs.

"The countries of Old Europe are being portrayed as deserters for not supporting every American position," the Normandy daily La Presse de la Manche lamented.

"Our American friends must understand that to search the paths of peace is not to desert or be a coward. It is a search for a solution that does not open up new sources of hatred."