Jacques Lewis, Last French Veteran of US D-Day Landing, Dies at 105: Utah Beach, Normandy 🇲🇫

- Jacques Lewis, French Veteran, U.S. Landing on D-Day, Dies at 105. Believed to be the last surviving Frenchman to wade ashore with Americans, attached to an Army unit that stormed Utah Beach and helped drive Germans out of France. NY Times, Aug. 8, 2024. Edited.
----
- Photo: Mr. Lewis sitting in a wheelchair wearing a U.S. Army baseball-style hat and a blue suit and tie. He wore a military medal on a red ribbon and had a protruding bandage over his right ear. June 8, 2024 ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 80th anniv. of D-Day.
--------
Jacques Lewis, who was believed to be the last surviving French soldier to clamber ashore with U.S. forces at Normandy on D-Day in 1944, died on July 25 in Paris. He was 105. His death at the Invalides military complex was announced by the office of President Macron. On June 8, less than 2 months before he died, Mr. Lewis insisted to his caregivers that he be taken to greet President Biden and President Macron at a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

Mr. Biden thanked him for his work with American forces as they had moved inland from Utah Beach to drive the Germans out of France.

In 1944, Mr. Lewis was a member of the Free French Forces, FFF, the army that Gen. Charles de Gaulle had assembled in exile in London after Germany occupied France in 1940.

Fluent in English, Mr. Lewis was assigned as a liaison officer attached to the U.S. Army’s 70th Tank Battalion as D-Day approached. He was not just an interpreter; he was a soldier well-suited to take on a vital role after the invasion. The Americans needed someone to link up with French villagers and guerrilla resistance fighters - Maquis to help guide U.S. troops past German positions to reach Carentan and relieve members of the U.S. 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions who had earlier parachuted in behind enemy lines. In an interview with French television in 2019, Mr. Lewis recalled approaching Utah Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944.

It was the first time he had spoken about the war, even to his family, he said. “We were crouched behind the ramp of our landing craft, and when the ramp went down, I saw my country, France, which I’d wanted to help liberate for so long. It was very moving. But then I saw the stretchers carrying wounded or dead American soldiers — being carried down the beach to get into our landing craft to be taken back to England. I realized that many of the first wave of my American comrades had already died on the beaches to liberate my country.” He waded ashore under heavy German gunfire. He displayed his military ID bracelet, number FFF 55770. “That was so that they knew I was a French soldier if I died.” Allied casualties on Utah Beach — 197 killed or wounded — were relatively light compared with the 2,400 or so recorded at Omaha Beach to the east.

By nightfall on D-Day, more than 10,300 allied troops had been killed or wounded across Normandy.

Mr. Lewis was born on March 1, 1919 in Caudéran, France. He studied law at the Instituts d’Études Politiques. He was a junior officer when Germany invaded France in May 1940. The following month, he fought in the Battle of Saumur where French forces fought in vain to keep the Germans from pushing on to Paris. When the overrun French government signed an armistice with Germany on June 22, 1940 — effectively a surrender — Mr. Lewis, like many others refused to accept defeat. Intending to join de Gaulle’s resistance fighters in London, he fled France, crossing the Pyrenees mountains into Spain on foot...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/world/europe/jacques-lewis-dead.html