One of the last surviving French veterans of the June 1944 D-Day landings has died aged 105, only weeks after he helped welcome US President Joe Biden to Paris for the 80th anniversary of the amphibious assault, the presidency said Tuesday.
Jacques Lewis passed away on Thursday at the Invalides Memorial complex in Paris where he had spent his final years.
He took part in the June 1944 D-Day landings alongside American units on Utah beach, as Allied forces swept into Normandy to begin their offensive to end Nazi occupation of France and Western Europe in World War II.
After landing, he sought out locals from the town of Carentan to map the area to help Allied forces take the town.
He then took part in other battles in France before moving into Germany itself “always alongside his brothers-in-arms from the American division”, the Elysee said.
He was caught up in the war from the age of 20, in 1939, while he was a student at Sciences-Po University in Paris.
He first served as an officer cadet in the army before joining the ranks of Free France in London after the 1940 capitulation of France to Germany.
Making it to Britain from occupied France had been anything but easy.
“Crossing the Pyrenees on foot, armed only with a compass, arrested on his arrival in Spain (…) he managed to escape from the prison in Pamplona, boarded a Liberian cargo ship and began the crossing of the Atlantic under German bombardment,” the Elysee said.
Speaking good English, he was integrated into the ranks of US General George Patton’s 2nd Armored Division where his interpreting skills proved hugely valuable.
He was present in June under the Arc de Triomphe for the welcoming ceremony for Biden in Paris marking the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte salute “a figure of a French destiny filled with courage and audacity, who preferred to risk his life rather than his honour, and allowed the nation to regain its freedom”.
The 80th-anniversary celebrations in Paris and Normandy were widely seen as a final chance for the world to pay its respects to surviving veterans on a major D-Day anniversary.
Just 209 French soldiers took part as infantrymen in the June 6, 1944, Normandy landings out of around 150,000 Allied troops, but their role has been hugely symbolic for France’s modern historical memory.
