About 170 miles southwest of Normandy’s famous landing beaches, the remains of a D-Day site few visit peek out from behind trees in rural Brittany.
Covered in moss and ivy, the stone farm buildings were the former headquarters of Saint-Marcel Maquis: thousands of local French resistance fighters who had gathered in response to coded calls from the Allies over the radio. the BBC to prepare for an invasion. Among them were French army commandos who parachuted in to prevent the Nazis from sending reinforcements to the beaches.
But before the operation could get underway, the camp was discovered by the Nazis and destroyed. Dozens of fighters were hunted down and killed. In retaliation, most of the surrounding buildings were burned and hundreds of locals were executed.
It is a wound of tragic heroism that few in France know about, much less commemorate.
President Emmanuel Macron of France hopes to change that on Wednesday when he presides over a ceremony in Plumelec, the nearby town where French commandos landed early on the morning of D-Day as the first Allied planes and gliders arrived in Normandy. One of the members of that elite French unit, Émile Bouétard, was shot dead by German army soldiers. He is considered one of the first Allied casualties of D-Day.
The president’s visit will be the last in a year of events planned to celebrate the country’s liberation from Nazi control 80 years ago. Unlike many of his predecessors, Macron has chosen to commemorate not only the brave and brave, but also the shameful and forgotten, including a site where French resistance fighters were killed by members of the French militia working with the Nazi regime.
Some critics have derided the events as “memory inflation,” but others point out that they occur at a time when the country should be contemplating its ghosts of the past. The head of an advisory board of historians, Denis Peschanski, says the events are aimed at achieving “historical balance.”
For many in this pocket of Brittany, the presidential tribute will be a long-awaited recognition. The last French leader to visit the area for a ceremony was General Charles de Gaulle in 1947, and he was not president at the time.
“It’s a good thing,” said Marcel Bergamasco, the last Saint-Marcel fighter alive and able to recount his experience. He is 99 years old. “It’s a recognition that what happened in Saint-Marcel was important.”
Two former commandos of the French unit of the British Special Air Service, Both, close to 100 years old, are expected to attend the ceremony.
“It is very moving that they are finally recognized before they die,” said Claude Jacir, president of the Association of Families of SAS Paratroopers with Free France. “They are the last guardians of memory. “They really hope their story doesn’t fall into oblivion.”
Ask why this story is so little known in France and you’ll get many reasons, including the fact that it occurred so far from Normandy, where most of the action took place. He didn’t fit the mold either.
The French paratroopers were lethal agents, trained to attack and then disappear. His instructions were to blow up bridges, railway and telephone lines to confuse and prevent the Nazis from rushing into Normandy, and then move on.
But when they arrived at headquarters, which was packed with untrained volunteers from across the region, their leader felt obligated to stay. The command leader radioed for reinforcements to be parachuted in, along with hundreds of containers of weapons and ammunition. Four jeeps even floated in.
For more than a week after D-Day, the 1,235-acre forested area dotted with cow pastures and mansions in the Morbihan region became a training ground.
After four years of occupation, the locals suddenly felt liberated. They called the area “Little France” and established an infirmary, an automobile workshop, a shoe store, and a field kitchen with bakers who prepared bread 24 hours a day.
But early on the morning of June 18, the field was discovered by a German patrol that sent armored reinforcements from across the region. After a day of fighting, the remaining paratroopers and resistance fighters were forced to flee into the forest. Some were hunted down and shot by enraged Nazis, who had suffered heavy losses in the battle. The Nazis then unleashed their fury on local residents.
Today, one chilling memorial after another marks the roadsides. One pays tribute to three residents who were shot the day after the battle, including 83-year-old Françoise Le Blanc. Another commemorates two local women who were sent to Ravensbrück, a large concentration camp for women in northern Germany, as punishment.
The town at the center of the fighting, Saint-Marcel, had to be completely rebuilt after almost all the buildings were burned down. A site off the main road marks where the bodies of six resistance fighters were discovered in an unmarked pit two decades after the end of the war.
“I had nightmares every night for 10 years,” said Jean-Claude Guil, 85, who dedicated his retirement to researching the battle that shadowed his life. His father, a local tenant farmer, was among those executed in revenge.
Their D-Day story was so painful that most locals wanted to forget it for many years, said Tristan Leroy, director of the nearby Brittany Resistance Museum.
“Some even said that if there hadn’t been organized resistance, they wouldn’t have burned down all the farms and the village, and there wouldn’t have been all those executions,” he said. “There was an ambivalent feeling about what happened here.”
It was not until the 1980s, given the rise of the far-right National Front in France and the statements of its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, downplaying the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail” of history, that The former fighters began speaking to remind people of Nazi atrocities, Leroy said. The museum was built around the same time.
“If we hadn’t had that battle, where would we be now?” Bergamasco said during an interview last month in the stone house he built in 1955 in Ploërmel, where he lives with his 97-year-old wife, Annette.
He is one of the last resistance fighters still alive in France.
“I’m happy with what I did. I don’t regret anything at all,” she stated.
Bergamasco was 15 years old in 1940 when, after just a few months of fighting, France signed an armistice and was occupied by German soldiers. His first acts of resistance were those of adolescent fury: bursting German tires with a knife he carried in his pocket.
As a truck driver for his father’s construction company, he was often tasked with making deliveries for the Germans. He was recruited by the resistance to deliver intelligence on the German fortifications he visited. That information was later compiled into a voluminous secret document with hand-drawn maps called the “Cherry Basket” and smuggled into Britain.
He used his hybrid truck, which ran on coal as well as gasoline, to deliver supplies to the resistance. Later, he became part of the Maquis truck squadron, going out at night to pick up SAS commandos and supplies descending from the sky.
When Bergamasco tells stories from that time, it is as if he returned to his teenage body and experienced them again. He plays dialogue, impersonates characters, and delights in outwitting and often outrunning the Germans.
Even the night he spent in jail, being tortured so brutally that he would later suffer internal bleeding, is presented as another successful escape. “I see the front door open. Oh! What more could you want? she related, her blue eyes shining. “I throw myself down the stairs and leave.”
But his memories of the Battle of Saint-Marcel are dark. He remembers the sound of his wounded friends suffering in pain and his feeling of helplessness at not being able to save them.
And since Russia attacked Ukraine, Bergamasco has been consumed by worry that the dictatorship he fought against is returning, said Yolande Foucher, one of his two daughters.
“It’s their nightmare,” he said.