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

CARENTAN-LES-MARAIS, France : 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.”

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. (Agencies)