BAYEAUX, France -- American, British and Canadian flags flutter above the cobblestone streets of this medieval cathedral town.
White letters in shop windows read "Welcome to our Liberators." A huge banner proclaims: "Juin '44 Thank You. Juin '94 Welcome."
For the people of Normandy, D-Day is not some dusty textbook lesson. Here, where schools close every June 6, it is the stuff of daily life.
Jour-J, as the French translate the day the Allies invaded France, is everywhere. In Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, behind Utah Beach, there is the Bar du 6 Juin. In Ste.-Mere-Eglise, a mannequin of a paratrooper still hangs from the church steeple, a reminder of one of D-Day's most famous episodes. Roads are named for Allied soldiers killed in action.
Americans "are the deliverers to us," says Nicole Quinquis of Bayeux. "So (we) want to say 'thank you.' "
The French will personally thank about 35,000 American, British and Canadian veterans, expected this week at D-Day 50th anniversary ceremonies.
Thousands of French citizens have opened their homes to returning veterans.
"A lot of people are disappointed because . . . there were not enough veterans" to go around, says Jacques Ravelli, who runs two souvenir shops in Arromanches.
Beatrice Bouvier-Muller is among the lucky ones. She will host a veteran of the U.S. 9th Air Force. "Everybody in Normandy knows very well what our debt is to the American people," she says.
For Jean d'Aigneaux, a member of the Normandy Regional Council, D-Day represents a bond that goes back two centuries. One ancestor served with Lafayette in the American Revolution. When the Germans surrendered at Cherbourg, the treaty was signed in d'Aigneaux's father-in-law's chateau.
For years, Gen. C. Lawton Collins visited the family. "We felt like cousins," says d'Aigneaux.
Annick Magne was born five years after D-Day, but the daughter of a French POW is touched by the veterans who stay at her Hotel Notre Dame.
"It's very moving. I see men crying" after they visit lost friends' graves, she says. "If the veterans didn't come to liberate France, France would not be the same now."
Ravelli does remember D-Day. He was a 6-year-old living in Bayeux. "My bedroom was facing toward the sea, and I remember seeing big searchlights and explosions in the night, like lightning. It woke me up. My mother always told me that I went into my parents' bedroom and I said, 'They're landing! They're coming!' "
The next day, June 7, Bayeux was liberated.
"I am so respectful of the veterans and what they did 50 years ago," says Ravelli, who has located U.S. military equipment for the Utah Beach Museum and Pointe du Hoc. "Normandy is sort of a sacred land for the freedom of Europe and we must not forget all that."
Ginette and Michel Brouchot have not. Twice a year, they drive from their suburban Paris home to the U.S. military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer to lay flowers on the grave of a young American they never knew. The retired French couple have "adopted" Staff Sgt. Paul Womack, a Lynchburg, Va., infantryman killed at 22 on Omaha Beach, as a way to thank the "unforgettable Americans who came to us June 6th."
Though the trip takes 2 1/2 hours, Michel Brouchot wrote Womack's brother that the effort is small. "We are simply conscious of the efforts the Americans made and also that without them nothing would have been possible."
Still, the invasion proved bittersweet for many French who lost family and friends in the relentless Allied bombing.
Andre Heintz, then a 24-year-old college student and member of the French Resistance, recalls how 85% of Caen was destroyed during two months of constant shelling. Electricity, running water and cooking gas would not be restored until December.
Yet, he says the price of freedom was worth it. "We could not have contemplated to keep living as we did during the German occupation. We are still immensely grateful that they came from so far to liberate us. "We are ready to give them a good welcome."
