Pandemic makes for lonely D-Day at France memorial

COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France — At daybreak Saturday, Charles Shay stood lonesome without any fellow veteran on the very same beach where he waded ashore 76 years ago, part of one of the most epic battles in military history that came to be known as D-Day and turned the tide of World War II.

Compared with last year, when many tens of thousands came to the northern French beaches of Normandy to cheer the dwindling number of veterans and celebrate three-quarters of a century of liberation from Nazi oppression, the coronavirus lockdown turned this year’s remembrance into one of the eeriest ever.

“I am very sad now,” said Shay, who was a 19-year-old U.S. Army medic when he landed on Omaha Beach under horrific machine gun fire and shells. “Because of the virus, nobody can be here. I would like to see more of us here.”

When a full moon disappeared over land and the sun rose on the other side over the English Channel, there was no customary rumble of columns of vintage jeep and trucks to be heard, roads still so deserted that rabbits sat alongside them.

Still the French would not let this day slip by unnoticed, such is their attachment to some 160,000 soldiers from the U.S., Britain, Canada and other countries who spilled their blood to free foreign beaches and fight on to finally defeat Nazism almost one year later.

“It’s a June 6 unlike any other,” said Philippe Laillier, the mayor of Saint-Laurent-Sur-Mer, who staged a small remembrance around the Omaha Beach monument. “But still we had to do something. We had to mark it.”

The lack of a big international crowd was palpable.

In the afternoon, a flyover of French fighter jets leaving a trail of the national colors was reminiscent of the one President Donald Trump and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, watched from Colleville last year. This time, though, only a sparse crowd craned necks upward.

At the American cemetery on a bluff overseeing Omaha Beach, Shay went to pay his respects to over 9,000 servicemen. Again, he was the lone U.S. veteran at an intimate ceremony.

President Harry Truman’s quote, “America will never forget their sacrifices,” is etched into the cemetery’s Orientation Pavilion.

Ivan Thierry, 62, a local fisherman who catches sea bass around the wrecks that still litter the seabed nearby, was holding an American flag in tribute even before dawn.

“There is not nobody here. Even if we are only a dozen, we are here to commemorate,” he said.