Frenchman discovers father he never knew was American WWII soldier
LUDRES, France — After decades of searching, Andre Gantois had lost hope.
The retired French postal worker figured he’d likely go to his grave without knowing who his father was, unable to identify the U.S. serviceman who had fought his way across France after the D-Day landings, taken a bullet to the skull and been nursed back to health in a military hospital by Gantois’ mother.
Into his 70s, Gantois still had no clues to pursue, no name to work with, no paper trail to follow.
As a consequence, he also had no peace.
“Throughout my life, I lived with this open wound,” he said. “I never accepted my situation, of not knowing my father and, most of all, knowing that he didn’t know about me, didn’t know of my existence.”
Even as Europe, the U.S. and their allies mark 75 years since 160,000 Allied troops stormed a heavily fortified 50-mile stretch of Nazi-occupied coastline in Normandy, the history of D-Day and its aftermath is still being written.
Soldiers on all sides fathered tens of thousands of children, some of them unable to answer that most existential of questions: Where did I come from?
Until a few months ago, when what he calls an unexpected “miracle” changed his life and filled in one of these missing pieces of wartime history, Gantois was among them.
Growing up as a postwar kid in eastern France, he would simply draw a line on forms at school that asked pupils for their fathers’ names and other family details.
‘I have to tell you’
His mother and grandmother told him his father was killed in France’s war in Vietnam that broke out in 1946, the year Gantois was born. The grandmother said his father’s name was Jack. A trusting child, Gantois couldn’t know these were lies. He didn’t pay much heed to elderly neighbors who called him “the young American” or “the American’s kid.”
Only at age 15, when Gantois was mourning the death of his mother, taken by tuberculosis at 37, did he get the truth.
“‘Listen, Andre, I have to tell you,’” the 73-yearold Gantois recalled his grandmother confessing to him. “‘Your dad was an American, in the war.’” At first, Gantois was lost. Later, in his 20s, he became determined to find out more. But many avenues proved to be dead ends.
Until last June. Urged on by his daughter-in-law, Gantois took a DNA test.
Weeks later, in the middle of the night, she called him with the earthshaking results.
“‘You have an American brother, a sister, a whole family,’” Gantois recalled her telling him. “I didn’t know what to say.”
His dad, the test helped reveal, was Wilburn “Bill” Henderson from Essex, Mo. The infantryman landed on Omaha beach seemingly just after D-Day, fought through Normandy, suffered a head wound in the closing months of the war and met Irene Gantois at a hospital in occupied Germany.
After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, when the soldier came to visit her at home in eastern France, she apparently didn’t tell him that she was carrying his child. He returned to the U.S., started a family and never spoke to his children about her before his death in 1997.
The trail would have ended there for Andre Gantois had his American half brother not also taken a DNA test. By chance, they both picked the same testing company, enabling it to put them together. The two men and Gantois’ half sister, Judy, met for the first time last September in France.
Allen Henderson took the test on a whim because the company had a special offer on its prices and, he said, because “I thought, well, that would be interesting.”
Striking resemblance
Both Gantois and Henderson acknowledge how lucky they are not only to have found each other but also that their father survived Normandy and its aftermath.
“When I was little, he was always telling me stories about being in France, and he’d speak a little French and kind of talk about how it was like to lay in a foxhole and guns, bullets flying over your head and guys dying all around you,” said the 65-year-old Henderson, who lives in Greenville, S.C. “Amazing that he survived.”
Henderson said he knew straight away when he saw Gantois that they were brothers because the resemblance is so striking.
“You know, Andre actually looks more like my dad than I do,” Henderson said. “Your mannerisms, your smile, your face, I feel almost like I’m talking to my dad.”