Facts from Normandy

From the Allied beachhead, TIME Correspondent Charles Christian Wertenbaker cabled a coolly realistic account of Normandy and the Normans:

Along the roads of the Manche and Calvados, beside the hawthorne hedges, the farmers of Normandy stand with their families waving at every passing vehicle that throws dust into their faces. In the towns the Tricolor waves from nearly every building, the statues are decorated with American and British flags, and the townspeople take wine and cider to the soldiers who stop their trucks and jeeps in the streets. Seeing these things, you could be carried away by sentiment and say that the oppressed French are welcoming their liberators with tears of joy. But that would not be the whole truth.

The whole truth is harder to put together from the evidence of ten days. I have talked to people in Isigny, Carentan, Bayeux and nearly all the smaller towns between them and the sea, and this is a preliminary report of what they have said and what they have revealed by their actions.

Land of Plenty. In the first place the people of this part of France are not hungry--far from it. This province is rich in milk, butter, cheese, eggs, beef, veal, cider, applejack and horseflesh. The countrymen are sturdy and long-lived. The women are as rosy-cheeked as the apples they pick, the children plump as pumpkins.

The Germans who occupied this peninsula were not ruthless; they were extremely well behaved. The townspeople say that the Germans ate and drank too noisily, but their treatment of the French was a little more than correct. Along the coast they fraternized with the local people with some success and at least two French wives or mistresses became snipers--although most of the women snipers were Germans (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS). Some of the conscripted labor was French but much more was German, Italian and Russian. In one town, Bayeux, the German commandant managed to avoid sending the full quota of young men away to labor battalions and the people were grateful for that. The conscription rate for cattle was one cow per herd per month, which was not considered exorbitant.

All this does not mean that the people liked the Germans. The Normans bore their four years of occupation as they would have borne any other unwelcome visitation, with patience and a good deal of phlegm. The people here are not as demonstrative or excitable as are the people of many parts of France, and the wars of 1870 and 1914 had left them without the active hatred of the Germans that other Frenchmen felt. And so they went on with their cattle raising and farming and horse-racing and with their smalltown occupations. Although the resistance movement was not inactive, the majority of the people took as little part in it as they had in the political struggles between the two world wars.

Land of Candor. When the Americans and the British came, therefore, the people did not welcome them with unmixed joy. At first, when bombs rained down and shells poured in from the sea on their towns and villages and fields, crumbling their houses, destroying their cattle, killing and wounding many people, they wondered if it would be to any good purpose. They were afraid the invaders would be driven into the sea and they would have only death and destruction and the Germans again. Later, when they saw the masses of men and weapons streaming through the countryside and looked up through the dust at the skies full of zebra-striped planes, they decided that the Allies were here to stay and waited to see what kind of people they were.

The welcome they then offered was all the more real because it was tentative and restrained. They did not crowd around or throw flowers; they did not celebrate or interfere in any way with the business of the armies. If a man looked thirsty they offered him a drink. If he wanted to talk and could speak their language they talked to him in a friendly way. With shyness but also with candor they made it plain that they were glad the armies had come and hoped they would behave.

No Land for Heroes. Isigny was bombed and shelled because German troops were there. French ships shelled it. The day after Isigny fell, it was a mass of rubble and all business had stopped. The people were appalled by what had happened, but they understood that it was war. They were not bitter.

Later Isigny buried its 35 French dead. American soldiers moved in to help clean up the wreckage and civil affairs administrators helped get business going again.

Then General de Gaulle came to Isigny and took a queue away from the butcher shop that had just reopened. He got out of his jeep at the edge of town and walked in, and the crowd followed him, cheering. But again the welcome had in it a note of restraint, as if the people were ready to like this new leader and hoped that he would give them cause to do so. They listened in respectful silence as De Gaulle (eld them that he had come to Isigny be cause Isigny had suffered most in a battle that was necessary for France. It was not a political speech, and wisely not. The people here are not yet ready for politics.

At hard-hit Carentan, Americans got their warmest welcome. The townspeople said that the farmers round about sold to the Germans and the black market before they would sell to the local people. Many of the farmers have grown rich--again according to the townspeople. Now that the franc is pegged at 50 to the dollar (it was 250 to the dollar on the black market), they are richer than ever.

Good Start. Bayeux was hardly touched by the invasion; the Germans got out too fast. In this pleasant tourist town, life is much as it always was, except for the gala display of the Tricolor. But in Bayeux I heard a story that probably reveals the temper of France better than anything else one could see or hear in isolated Normandy. A young man who had come from Paris three days before the invasion said that there, all the young people are mad for jazz music and the young men now wear zoot suits. He understood that this was a manifestation of desperation and revolt. But as he whistled snatches of tunes and spoke of le jazz hot, his eyes glistened as if he too were a little bit mad.

So far the invasion armies have behaved well, the English with disciplined correctness, the Americans with careless camaraderie. Civil affairs officers have stopped the indiscriminate sale of brandy. So far as I can see, they are neither too officious nor too lax. Soldiers wave at pretty, apple-cheeked girls on the streets and in the country, but they have not been too forward with their attentions. These are businesslike armies and they have plenty of business ahead. If they stick to it the people of Normandy will like them, and a delicate problem of international relations will get off to a good start.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.