‘Victoire à la France’

We spent what we in the U.S. call VE Day on Tuesday with folks in the French village of Loubillé. Here it’s Victory in France.

In Paris, it involves a huge parade down the Champs Élysée. In Loubillé, population 400, about a score or more of villagers walked 2 kilometers out of town to a memorial at the edge of some woods. Here German troops executed three men on July 24, 1944. They were members of the French Resistance formed after France surrendered early in the war.

Mairie (Mayor) Gérard Collet  read an account of the incident. The men had been captured elsewhere. The truck carrying them stopped in the woods, where they were shot and left to lie where they fell.

Collet also played an anthem of the Resistance: 

"... tonight the enemy will know the price of blood and tears ...Take the rifles, the machine gun, the grenades out of the straws."

France’s Vichy government surrendered in part to spare the country a repeat of the horror from WWI when its military lost 1.4 million killed.

In WWII, the French army lost 210,000 killed. The number includes 68,000 freedom fighter deaths. More than 390,000 French civilians were killed by the fighting or executions.

The U.S. suffered 420,000 military deaths and 12,000 civilians killed, mostly merchant seamen.