For civilians in Normandy, the D-Day invasion was both a triumph and a tragedy. Thousands were killed in bombings that accompanied the Allied landings, and many more fled their homes. While for decades commemorations focused on military feats, more attention is finally being paid to ordinary people who saw the historic events from a different side.
By June 1944, Henri was used to seeing warplanes overhead, flying towards targets in occupied northern France.
But on the night before 6 June, Henri – 19 and requisitioned by the Nazis to build reinforcements along the Normandy coast – noticed something different.
“Planes were passing non-stop, and we started to hear bombings inland,” he recalled decades later.
He and other forced labourers were lodged in a dormitory next to Langrune-sur-Mer beach.
“At four in the morning we looked out the window and saw hundreds of boats on the sea. On the horizon, we saw that fighting had started and we said to ourselves, here it is – the landing.”
No one in France had known for sure where the Allies would start their invasion. Whichever region they chose would bear the brunt of the battle to drive out the Germans.
“We were happy in one way,” said Henri, “but afraid of what was coming for us.”
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Life under occupation
The people of Normandy had already been living with German soldiers for around four years by then.
That had involved considerable sacrifices, and they intensified as Nazi commanders began to suspect an invasion was coming.
From early 1944, the region saw a massive build-up of troops. Locals like Henri were drafted for forced labour, while swathes of farmland was seized – some of them flooded to make it harder for Allied paratroopers to land.
There was a clampdown on anyone suspected of working for the Resistance. In March that year, residents even had to hand over their radio sets to prevent them listening to the BBC or any other enemy broadcasters.
“By the time the landings were approaching, the occupation in Normandy – which had weighed very heavily since 1940 – was becoming ever more consuming and oppressive for the local population,” says Emmanuel Thiébot, historian and director of the Falaise Memorial in Normandy, a museum dedicated to the experiences of ordinary people during World War II.
But as much as locals longed to be free of the Nazis’ grip, they knew the battle to loosen it would be costly. Thiébot refers to propaganda posters spread by France’s collaborationist government at the time, showing all the regions of the north and west coast saying of a possible invasion: “Not in my backyard!”
There was truth to that, he says. People were afraid of what being the site of the landings would mean, and they had reason to be.
Rain of bombs
For the Allies, the landing beaches had to be protected at all costs. The Germans couldn’t be allowed to flood the zone with troops and push back the invasion.
In the months preceding D-Day, British and American planes bombed the rail network in northern France. In the hours before and after the landings, they targeted Normandy’s main roads.
The routes passed through cities, towns, villages. But Allied commanders decided to sacrifice them – in fact, to pulverise them. Their ruins would serve as roadblocks.
The Allies dropped leaflets with warnings written in French – but unable to specify places or dates that would let the Germans in on their plans, they kept the wording so vague that many residents assumed the alerts didn’t apply to them. Others missed them altogether, the papers carried away in the wind.
Some 15 towns were pummelled by Allied bombs on 6 June and the days that followed, including ones with no military targets to speak of. By 7 June, 3,000 people were dead – as many as on the beaches the day before.
The raids continued on and off into September, killing an estimated 20,000 civilians in all.
Henri saw his fiancée, uncle and cousin fatally hit just metres from him.
“Everybody was a bit angry with the Americans because at the end of the day they were the ones killing civilians,” he told RFI in 2019.
“Caen was bombed, for example – why? For nothing. There were hardly any Germans there. All these towns were massacred.”
Allied soldiers complained that they didn’t get the hero’s welcome they’d been promised, says Thiébot.
“Sure, but if you’ve lost everything and maybe had loved ones wounded or killed, you’re not going to jump for joy and start dancing in the streets,” he points out. “You see some pretty pictures like that, but usually in towns that weren’t badly damaged.”
Images from Caen, Lisieux, Le Havre or Saint-Lô – 95 percent of which was destroyed in the bombings – told a different story, one that didn’t make it into American or British newsreels.
Exodus
After the shock came the exodus.
“As soon as the first bombardments were over, it was a mad dash to escape,” says Thiébot.
“The bombardments, the fighting, the front line moving forward and civilians caught between the Allies who were advancing and the Germans who were trying to stop them, all that would cause an exodus over the three months of the Battle of Normandy – June, July and August 1944 – in which it’s estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 people fled their homes.”
The flight was chaotic. “You took whatever you could grab,” says Thiébot, whose museum displays suitcases, baskets, a homemade wheelbarrow, even a violin case that those fleeing carried with them.
They moved south, but so did the front line. The number of people on the road snowballed, with the first refugees joined by residents from towns that had originally hosted them.
Soon the inland departments of Normandy were telling the coastal areas they couldn’t take any more of the displaced. Some Normans ended up trudging all the way to the south-west of France.
“Then after the Battle of Normandy you can finally stop and go back,” says Thiébot – “but go back where, when 30, 50, 70, even 90 percent of your town has been bombed?”
Years of silence
It would take around 20 years to rebuild Normandy after the war – and many more for survivors to talk about what they’d lived through.
“For 50 years no one talked about it,” said Henri. “I never told my family about all that.”
For France’s new leaders, too, acknowledging the civilian cost of liberation was uncomfortable.
“The first D-Day commemorations were taking place in the context of the Cold War,” points out Thiébot. “The enemy of the day had become the Soviet bloc, while the ally was NATO – primarily the Americans and the British.
“Remembrance ceremonies mainly sought to highlight the heroism of these warriors who saved Europe from the Nazis, rather than reminding people that the liberation of Europe came with civilian losses.”
The towns that had suffered held local memorial services to their dead, he explains, but national and international commemoration of D-Day focused on shared, unequivocal triumph.
That began to change when survivors, aware it was now or never, started to speak. The 50th anniversary in 1994 kicked off a drive to collect eyewitness accounts – including from Henri, who felt compelled to tell the story for younger generations.
And as archives were gradually declassified, historians were able to piece together a clearer picture of the chaos of summer 1944.
It was sometimes a galling one; recent research suggests that the Allies’ carpet-bombing of Normandy ultimately served little strategic purpose.
Road to remembrance
For the 70th anniversary in 2014, then French President François Hollande dedicated a D-Day speech to the people of Normandy – whose sacrifice, he said, had been long overlooked.
It was the first time civilians had been acknowledged in France’s official commemorations. They remain notably absent from D-Day discourse in former Allied countries.
“I think the French are just erased,” says US historian Mary Louise Roberts of the American perception of the invasion.
Roberts, who has written extensively about the experiences of French civilians in a bid to correct that narrative, says for many in the United States, “the French are just the background in which American heroism became clear”.
But in Normandy, the Falaise Memorial seeks to bring them into the foreground. Opened in 2016, it’s the only museum in France, and one of very few in Europe, that focuses on what civilians went through in the war.
“Through the example of the past that we describe here in the museum, the idea is to show what war does to civilian populations, even today,” says Thiébot.
The bombings, displacement and upheaval encountered by Normans in 1944 will ring a bell for anyone who watches the news, he points out.
“World War II was the first in history where, by the end, more civilians had died than soldiers... Sadly, this is the pattern we would go on to see in every conflict that followed.”
This story appeared on the Spotlight on France podcast, episode 112.
D-Day survivor Henri was interviewed by RFI's Raphaëlle Constant in 2019.
