About 170 miles southwest of the famous landing beaches of Normandy, looming behind trees in the Brittany countryside is a little-visited D-Day site.
Overgrown with moss and ivy, these stone farmhouses are the former headquarters of the St. Marcel partisans, the headquarters of the thousands of local French resistance fighters who responded to coded calls from the Allies on BBC radio to gather in preparation for the invasion. They included airborne French Army commandos who were brought in to stop Nazi reinforcements from reaching the beaches.
But before the operation was fully underway, the camp was discovered and destroyed by the Nazis. Dozens of fighters were hunted down and killed. In retaliation, most buildings in the surrounding area were burned down and hundreds of locals were executed.
It is a trauma of tragic heroism that is little known, let alone commemorated, in France.
French President Emmanuel Macron wants to change that, and he will preside over a ceremony in Plumelec on Wednesday, where French commandos landed as the first Allied planes and gliders arrived in Normandy early in the morning on D-Day. A member of this elite French unit, Émile Bouetard, was killed by German soldiers. He is believed to be one of the first Allied casualties on D-Day.
The president's visit will be the latest in a series of celebrations of France's liberation from Nazi rule 80 years ago. Unlike many of his predecessors, Macron has chosen to honor not only the brave and courageous but also the shameful and forgotten – including sites where French resistance fighters were killed by French militias who collaborated with the Nazi regime.
Some critics have derided the events as “Memory bloatBut others pointed out that these events occur at a time when the country should reflect on the ghosts of the past. Dennis Peschzinsky, chairman of the advisory board of historians, said event Aims to achieve “historical equilibrium”.
For many in Brittany, the president's salute will be a long-awaited recognition. The last French leader to visit the region for the ceremony was General Charles de Gaulle in 1947, before he became president.
“It’s a good thing,” said Marcel Bergamasco, the last living fighter from St. Marcel who can tell his story. He is 99. “It shows that people realize what happened in St. Marcel is important.”
Two former SAS commandos from the French unit, Both elderly people are expected to attend the ceremony, both of whom are nearly 100 years old.
“It’s very poignant that they are finally being recognized on their deathbed,” said Claude Jacir, president of the Free French SAS Association of Families of Paratroopers. “They are the last keepers of memory. They really want their history not to be forgotten.”
Ask why this story is so little known in France and you'll get a number of reasons, including that it takes place far away from Normandy where most of the action takes place. It also doesn't fit the pattern.
French paratroopers were deadly agents trained to strike and then disappear. Their orders were to blow up bridges, rail lines and telephone wires to confuse and stop the Nazis as they rushed toward Normandy, then to keep going.
But when they arrived at headquarters, it was so packed with untrained volunteers from around the region that their leaders felt they had to stay. The commando leader radioed for reinforcements, which dropped hundreds of containers of weapons and ammunition. Four jeeps were even dropped.
For a little over a week after D-Day, this 1,235-acre forested area of cattle pastures and estates in the Morbihan region was transformed into a training camp.
Four years into the occupation, locals suddenly felt free. They called the area “Little France” and set up infirmaries, auto repair shops, shoe repair services and field kitchens, with bakers making bread around the clock.
But early in the morning of June 18, a German patrol bringing armored reinforcements from the area discovered the camp. After a day of fighting, the remaining paratroopers and resistance fighters were forced to flee into the woods. Some were hunted down and shot by the angry Nazis, who suffered heavy losses in the fighting. The Nazis then turned their fury on the local population.
Today, chilling memorials stand alongside the road. One commemorates three residents who were shot the day after the war ended, including 83-year-old Francoise Leblanc. Another commemorates two local women who were sent to Ravensbrück, a large women’s concentration camp in northern Germany, for punishment.
In the village of Saint-Marcel, at the heart of the war, nearly every building burned down and the village had to be completely rebuilt. Twenty years after the war ended, the bodies of six resistance fighters were found in an unmarked grave just off the main road.
“For 10 years I had nightmares every night,” said Jean-Claude Guil, 85, who has devoted his retirement to researching the war that has overshadowed his life. His father was a local sharecropper and one of those executed in reprisal.
Tristan Leroy, director of the nearby Brittany Resistance Museum, said the story of their landing in Normandy was so painful that most locals wanted to forget it for years.
“Some even say that if there hadn’t been organized resistance, they wouldn’t have burned all the farms and villages, and all these executions wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “People have a conflicting feeling about what’s happening here.”
It was not until the 1980s, in the face of the rise of the far-right National Front in France and the rhetoric of its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, that Downplaying the Nazi gas chambers as a historical “detail” Mr. Leroy said former fighters began speaking out to remind people of Nazi atrocities. The museum was built around the same time.
“If we hadn’t gone through that battle, where would we be now?” Bergamasco said last month in an interview in the stone house he built in 1955 in Ploermel, where he lives with his wife, Annette, 97.
He is one of the last remaining resistance fighters in France.
“I'm happy with what I did. I don't regret it at all,” he said.
Bergamasco was 15 in 1940 when, after months of fighting, France signed an armistice and was occupied by German soldiers. His first act of defiance was a teenage rage – puncturing German tires with a knife in his pocket.
As a truck driver for his father's construction company, he was often ordered to make deliveries for the Germans. He was recruited by the Resistance and tasked with providing intelligence on the German fortifications he visited. This information was later compiled into a thick confidential document containing hand-drawn maps, known as the “Cherry Basket”, and smuggled into Britain.
He used his hybrid truck (running on both charcoal and petrol) to deliver supplies to the resistance, and later became part of a convoy of Maquis trucks, driving out at night to pick up SAS commandos and supplies dropped from the sky.
As Mr. Bergamasco told the story, he was transported back to his boyhood, reliving the stories, reenacting the dialogue, acting out the roles and taking pleasure in outwitting and often escaping the Germans.
Even after spending the night in jail, where he was tortured to the point of internal bleeding, he still considered it another successful escape. “I saw the front door open. Oh! What more could I ask for?” he recalled, his blue eyes sparkling. “I rushed down the stairs and escaped.”
But his memory of the Battle of St. Marcel is vague. He remembers the cries of pain from his wounded comrades and his sense of helplessness in being unable to save them.
Since Russia attacked Ukraine, Bergamasco has worried about the return of the dictatorship he opposed, said Yolande Foucher, one of his two daughters.
“This is his nightmare,” she said.
