When Leon Gautier landed on Sword Beach in a hail of enemy fire on June 6, 1944, as one of the first wave of French commandos to set foot on the soil of Normandy, the last thing he expected was that 70 years later one of the “Boches” he was fighting against would be a friend and neighbour.
Today, 91-year-old Gautier and his friend Johannes Boerner, 88, are two of the dwindling number of veterans of the Allied D-Day landings and the ensuing battle of attrition that began to push German forces back from the western front of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Time and understanding have forged a bond between the former French commando and the German parachutist from Leipzig, who as neighbours in the Normandy town of Ouistreham will both attend ceremonies next month marking the 70th anniversary of D-Day.
“We’re like brothers now, it’s just great for both of us,” said Boerner, who took French citizenship in 1956 after marrying a Norman woman.
It is one of the vagaries of history that both men live today in the same town where Gautier landed on D-Day – Tommy gun in hand and a year of training under his belt – one of Commander Philippe Kieffer’s 177 French soldiers who battled the machine-gun fire, landmines and barbed wire of Sword Beach as part of the No 4 British Commando unit.
Shells from German bunk-ers rained down on Gautier and his commandos even before they reached land, but training and a surge of adrenalin outweighed their fear.
The surprise amphibious attack roused Boerner from his sleep far away in Brittany, setting him and the rest of the elite 2nd Fallschirmjaeger (parachute) unit on a 350km march to Normandy to shore up German defences and try to break the Allied bridgehead.
Gautier and Boerner were never in the same place at the same time in Normandy, but they retain kindred memories: the impenetrable hedgerows that snared tanks and hid snipers, hearing the voice of the enemy just metres away, the mosquitoes that infested the flooded valleys, the small green apples that were too sour to eat, and the smell of human corpses rotting in the heat.
Forced to evacuate Saint-Lo on July 17 with the approach of the Americans, Boerner and his German unit began a series of retreats to the interior, eventually finding themselves trapped in the “Cauldron”, the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, encircled by Allied forces.
“The approach to Falaise was horrendous. They were all around us with their tanks, especially their planes, they just didn’t let up,” said Boerner.
“There were bodies everywhere… there were 10 000 dead on the approach to Falaise.”
Hungry, lice-ridden and demoralised, Boerner and his comrades from dispersed Ger-man units rifled pockets of dead soldiers for cigarettes or food.
On August 21, after days of aerial and artillery bombardment, and unable to escape eastwards through a narrow gap the Germans dubbed “the corridor of death”, Boerner was taken prisoner by the Canadians. He was one of the lucky ones; of Boerner’s original company of 120 men, only nine survived.
“Falaise was one of the greatest killing grounds of the war,” US General Dwight Eisenhower later wrote in his memoirs. “It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.”
A book about the two men, Ennemis et frères (Enemies and Brothers) by Jean-Charles Stasi, was published in 2010.
“I hope we never see another war like this because it’s just not possible… The young men, the young men on the front there, shooting machine guns, it’s just not possible. Freedom and peace, that’s all I can tell you,” Boerner said.
Gautier thinks about the flowers that he will be laying on his fallen comrades’ graves soon.”For the young people – they need to know all about this,” he said.
“It cannot happen again. We have to be vigilant.”
Reuters