Uniformed American soldiers emerge from the bars and cafes around Plaza June 6, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.
Phil Collins is blaring from the speakers. American flags fly from chimneys and windows, on airlines and even around the neck of a golden retriever trotting past with its owner.
Is this really France?
“This is the 53rd state,” said Philippe Nekrassoff, the local deputy mayor, as he crossed the square, with its Roman milestone and medieval church, while American paratroopers in maroon berets played soccer with a group of local teenagers. “Americans feel at home here.”
Here is Ste.-Mère-Église, a small town in northwest Normandy with one main street. About 3,000 inhabitants live in the city and its surroundings, with its cow fields and imposing hedges.
Hundreds of American paratroopers landed in the immediate area in the early hours of June 6, 1944. Four hours later, even before the world’s largest navy reached the nearby beaches of Normandy, one of those soldiers lowered the flag Nazi and hoisted an American one. above the town hall.
“This was the first liberated city on the Western Front,” reads two marble plaques, one in French and one in English, in front of the building.
The story of that liberation is now deeply embedded in the city’s identity.
While most towns in Normandy hold annual D-Day commemorations, tiny Ste.-Mère-Église hosts six parades, 10 ceremonies, 11 concerts, and a parachute jump performed by current American paratroopers.
Historical statues, plaques and panels dot many corners. The stores have names like D-Day, Bistrot 44 and Hair’born salon. There is a mannequin of John Steele, the American parachutist immortalized in the 1962 film “The Longest Day,” hanging from the church steeple as he did on June 6, 1944, with his parachute flapping.
At first glance, the city seems, well, too unabashedly and in-your-face American for a country that revels in self-criticism and understatement.
But if we stay a while, the city will reveal a relationship with the American paratroopers that is deep, sincere and disarmingly beautiful.
“There is a sense of welcome here that is unlike anything else in the region,” said Jacques Villain, a photographer who has documented the town’s celebration for 25 years and was the driving force behind the newly published bilingual book “Ste.-Mère -Église: We will remember them.”
The city’s first D-Day commemoration was small and took place even as the war in Europe was still raging, he noted. On the first anniversary, Maj. Gen. James Gavin, then commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, sent 30 soldiers from Germany for the ceremonies.
Shortly after midnight on June 6, 1944, wave after wave of low-flying aircraft roared over Ste.-Mère-Église and the surrounding area. Thousands of parachutes came out of them and fluttered through the sky like confetti.
A parachute floated into a trench dug in Georgette Flais’s backyard, where she was huddled with her parents and a neighbor. Next to him was Cliff Maughan. Flais refers to him as “our American.”
“For me, it represented something extraordinary: liberation,” said Flais, now 96.
He remembered how the German soldier staying in his house appeared before him, with his rifle pointed at the trench. Ms. Flais’s father jumped up and begged the German not to shoot. Miraculously, he accepted.
Shortly afterward, the German soldier realized that the Americans had taken the city and surrendered to Mr. Maughan, whom Flais described as preternaturally calm, handing out chewing gum, chocolate and cigarettes. He curled up in his parachute for a quick nap before heading out at dawn to fight.
“We gave him a warm kiss goodbye,” Flais said. “A friendship was born.”
As the first liberated place, Ste.-Mère-Église quickly became the place where fallen American soldiers were first buried: 13,800 in three fields converted into cemeteries around the town. Local men dug the graves.
“It was just a small town of 1,300 people,” said Marc Lefèvre, the city’s mayor for 30 years who left office in 2014. “They witnessed the price of sacrifice, with all those trucks of coffins. “That left a big impact.”
One of the graves was for Brig. General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who died of a heart attack five weeks after landing on Utah Beach. He was the eldest son of Theodore Roosevelt, the former president of the United States.
Simone Renaud, the mayor’s wife, was captured placing flowers on his grave by a Life magazine photographer.
The reaction from grieving mothers in the United States was immediate. Hundreds of people sent letters to Ms. Renaud, begging her to visit the graves of her children and send them photographs. She complied.
Henri-Jean Renaud, 89, recently thumbed through albums of carefully arranged letters to his mother, handwritten from 80 years ago.
Some of the women later came to visit the graves. They dined with the Renauds and sometimes stayed at their house. “I’m still in touch with a family who had a son my age,” Renaud said.
He still visits a soldier’s grave “from time to time, to say hello,” he said.
Years later, American veterans began making pilgrimages to Ste.-Mère-Église for the annual D-Day commemorations.
The town had only one hotel, since renamed after Mr. Steele. So Ms. Renaud, who died in 1988, formed the Friends of American Veterans association, and many locals joined in and welcomed visitors into their homes.
Volunteers spent afternoons driving around, trying to help veterans find the exact spot in a field, swamp or tree where they first landed.
“For most of them, it was there that they suffered their first losses, their first powerful emotions, their first friend killed, their first wounded,” Renaud said. “Those are things that mark you for life. So they were always trying to find that beginning.”
In 1984, Flais was teaching Greek and Latin at a secondary school in Alençon, about 140 miles away. On June 6 of that year, she was watching television when she saw on the screen an American soldier who had returned to Ste.-Mère-Église. He was bigger and wore a baseball cap instead of a helmet. But he had the same relaxed demeanor. He got into the car and ran back to his childhood town.
“He was my American,” he said. “We fell into each other’s arms.”
Today, 80 years later, few veterans remain. His successors now fill the town square, where Steele and his fellow World War II paratroopers are celebrated and remembered as true gods.
They are joined by thousands of recreation enthusiasts, tourists and French citizens who come to pay their respects.
“It’s overwhelming,” said Jonathan Smith, 43, whose trip here was a retirement gift after 18 and a half years of service in the 82nd Airborne Division. “I didn’t take 10 steps this morning without kids stopping me to ask for a photo and shake my hand.”
The local tourism office expects one million people to visit the city during this year’s ten days of commemorations and celebrations.
Among them are the children and grandchildren of the Americans who were in charge on D-Day, from General Roosevelt Jr. to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander in chief of the Allied forces.
“I think I need to be here and be a part of this,” said Chloe Gavin, General Gavin’s daughter, who returned regularly before he died.
On a recent evening, local families welcomed more than 200 American soldiers into their homes for dinner.
Across the street from City Hall, where the American flag hung by soldiers in 1944 now hangs framed on a wall, three generations of the Auvray family sat in their garden with three American paratroopers from Puerto Rico. The family matriarch, Andrée Auvray, gave them her D-Day memories.
She was nine months pregnant and living on a horse farm on the outskirts of the city that had been requisitioned by a battalion of German army soldiers. Just days before the Allied landing, soldiers left for Cherbourg, France, convinced the Allies would attack there, she said.
“We were very lucky,” said Auvray, now 97 and a great-grandmother of 13. “It would have been a bloodbath.”
Three American paratroopers landed in his garden.
A US military hospital was quickly built next door. Their farm became a health clinic and a temporary home for civilians fleeing the battle that occurred after German troops attempted to retake Ste.-Mère-Église. They fed 120 people for a month. She gave birth to her son, Michel-Yves, in a field bed because his bed had been given over to the wounded.
Michel-Yves will soon turn 80 years old.
Auvray described the missile explosion nearby, the lingering fear that the Germans would retake the city, and his gratitude that they had not done so.
“We lived through that anguish together,” he said of the American soldiers and French residents. “That’s why we have such a precious relationship.”