{"id":143909,"date":"2023-07-04T07:00:33","date_gmt":"2023-07-04T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=143909"},"modified":"2023-07-03T15:28:56","modified_gmt":"2023-07-03T19:28:56","slug":"sad-day-freedom-aint-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=143909","title":{"rendered":"Sad day. Freedom ain’t free."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Medal of the Legion of Honor<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Monday, France lost their last remaining D-Day veteran. We are not so far away from doing the same.<\/p>\n

The last surviving Frenchman to participate in the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 died Monday aged 100, local authorities said.<\/p>\n

Leon Gautier was among 177 Frenchmen who participated in the landings on June 6, 1944, which marked the start of a rollback of Nazi Germany’s domination of western Europe.<\/p>\n

He belonged to the Kieffer commando, made up of French fighters who continued to battle the Nazis alongside the US, Britain and other Allied forces even after the French government surrendered to Germany in 1940.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I know we love to make French jokes: “French Rifle for sale, only dropped once” etc., but in so doing we ignore the thousands of French who fought for the Allies, or were in the Resistance. Not to mention the alliances we have maintained almost continuously since M. de Lafayette helped a fella named Washington in some our darker hours. Have they been perfect allies? Absolutely not, but then, arguably we have occasionally been the strangest of bedfellows ourselves too.<\/p>\n

Gautier — who had lived in Ouistreham since the 1990s — joined the Free France movement in London, headed by Charles de Gaulle, in 1940.<\/p>\n

He went to fight in Congo, Syria and Lebanon before joining the Normandy assault.<\/p>\n

After the war, he became a campaigner for peace, pointing to his wartime experiences.<\/p>\n

“You kill people on the other side who never did anything to you, who have families, and children. For what?” he said during a celebration for his 100th birthday last year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

AFP<\/a><\/p>\n

ALL of the folks who stuck their noses into that Nazi buzzsaw in June of 1944 deserve our respect. We need to be mindful that that was almost 80 years ago and cherish those few, from whatever Allied country,\u00a0 who remain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Monday, France lost their last remaining D-Day veteran. We are not so far away from doing … Sad day. Freedom ain’t free.<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":668,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121,217,649],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-stories","category-we-remember","category-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=143909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=143909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=143909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=143909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}