Léon Gautier was the last surviving French participant on the so-called D-Day – the Allied landings in Normandy in 1944. The Frenchman has now died at the age of 100.
With the veteran Léon Gautier, the last French participant in the Allied landings in Normandy in the Second World War died. Gautier was 100 years old, as the memorial in Caen announced.
“Léon Gautier, the last member of the Kieffer Commando who landed in Normandy with his 176 French comrades on June 6, 1944, and hero of the liberation, has left us,” President Emmanuel Macron said today. France will not forget Gautier. “We are not heroes, we just did our duty,” the veteran said repeatedly, said Macron.
Friendship with German veteran
The commando Kieffer was trained in Britain, where Gautier volunteered to join the battalion. The landing of the Allied forces in Normandy on June 6, 1944 marked the beginning of the liberation of Western Europe from National Socialism.
Around 150,000 soldiers in 3,100 landing craft were ready for the largest landing in the history of the war. The advance of the Allied troops was prepared and supported from the air by 7,500 aircraft. By the time Paris was captured in August 1944, around 200,000 Germans and 70,000 allies were said to have been killed. Up to 20,000 civilians died in Normandy, which was devastated by the fighting.
Gautier last lived near the landing beaches at Ouistreham. There he had befriended a German veteran who had been involved in the fighting as a paratrooper. Both men had attended the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Allied landings together.
“The Germans followed Hitler like sheep, that can just as easily happen to us,” Gautier once said in an interview. “We must not lose the peace again,” he repeatedly emphasized. President Macron opened a new museum in Arromanches in June, documenting the history of the landing of British soldiers in this place.