THIMISTER-CLERMONT, Belgium (AP) — The memory of blood dripping from trucks loaded with the mangled bodies of U.S. soldiers arriving at a nearby war cemetery straight from the battlefield in 1945 still gives 91-year-old Marcel Schmetz nightmares.
It also instilled a lifelong sense of gratitude for the young soldiers from the United States and around the world who gave their lives battling the armies of Adolf Hitler to end World War II in Europe.
Schmetz even built a museum at his home in the Belgian Ardennes to honor their sacrifice.
“If the Americans hadn’t come, we wouldn’t be here,” the Belgian retiree said.
That same spirit also pervades Normandy in northern France, where the allied forces landed on June 6, 1944, a day that became the tipping point of the war.
Eternal gratitude
In Normandy, Marie-Pascale Legrand is still taking care of the ailing Charles Shay, a 100-year-old American who stormed the bloodied beaches on that fateful D-Day as a teenager and fought to help liberate Europe for many more months.
“Gratitude for me means that I am eternally indebted, because I can live free today,” Legrand said.
After D-Day, it would take almost another year of fierce fighting before Germany would finally surrender on May 8, 1945. Commemorations and festivities are planned for the 80th anniversary across much of the continent for what has become known as Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, one of the most momentous days on the continent in recent centuries.
Fraying bonds
Ever since, for generation upon generation in the nations west of the Iron Curtain that sliced Europe in two, it became a day to confirm and reconfirm what were long seen as the unbreakable bonds with the United States as both stood united against Soviet Eastern Europe.
No more.
Over the past several months, the rhetoric from Washington has become increasingly feisty.
The Trump administration has questioned the vestiges of the decades-old alliance and slapped trade sanctions on the 27-nation European Union and the United Kingdom. Trump has insisted that the EU trade bloc was there to “screw” the United States from the start.
The wartime allies are now involved in a trade war.
“After all that has happened, it is bound to leave scars,” said Hendrik Vos, European studies professor at Ghent University.
Honoring the fallen
Yet deep in the green hills and Ardennes woods where the Battle of the Bulge was fought and Schmetz lives, just as along the windswept bluffs of Legrand’s Normandy, the ties endure — isolated from the tremors of geopolitics.
“For all those that criticize the Americans, we can only say that for us, they were all good,” Schmetz said. “We should never forget that.”
After watching the horrors of the dead soldiers at the nearby Henri-Chapelle cemetery as an 11-year-old, Schmetz vowed he would do something in their honor and gathered war memorabilia.
A car mechanic with a big warehouse, he immediately started to turn it into the Remember Museum 39-45 once he retired more than three decades ago.
“I had to do something for those who died,” he said.
And for the treasure trove of military artifacts, what truly stands out is a long bench in the kitchen where U.S. veterans, their children, and even their grandchildren come and sit and talk about what happened, and the bonds uniting continent, memories all meticulously kept by his wife Mathilde, to pass on to new visitors and new generations of schoolkids.
‘The Big Red One’
In the coming weeks, she will be going out to put 696 roses on the graves of soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division — nicknamed “The Big Red One,” or “BRO” — who lie buried among 7,987 headstones at Henri Chapelle.
Charles Shay, who is now bedridden in Normandy, was also part of the 1st Infantry Division and came through the Ardennes region too before heading to Germany. He survived the Korean War too and started making visits to the D-Day beaches around two decades ago. Over the years, he became increasingly sick and Legrand, who has helped veterans in one way or another for more than 40 years, took him in to her home in 2018.
He has been living there ever since.
Reagan’s impact
The moment everything changed for Legrand was listening to then U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1984 speaking on a Normandy bluff of the sacrifice and heroism of American soldiers.
Barely in her 20s, she realized that “their blood is in our soil and we have to show gratitude. We have to do something. I didn’t know what at the time, but I knew I would do something to show it.”
She had long volunteered to help Allied veterans before she met Shay. He was lonely, sick and frail when she took him in and began caring for him at her Normandy home.
“It is a strong symbol, which takes on a new dimension in this day and age,” she said, referring to the tumultuous trans-Atlantic relations that have put the bonds between allies that Trump called “unbreakable” only six years ago, under extreme pressure.
Once an ally, always an ally?
Central in Trump’s criticism of European NATO allies is that they have happily hunkered far too long under U.S. military supremacy since World War II and should start paying much more of their own way in the alliance. He has done so in such terms that many Europeans sincerely fear the breakup of the trans-Atlantic bonds that were a core of global politics for almost a century.
“The naive belief that the Americans will, by definition, always be an ally — once and for all, that is gone,” said Vos. It also raises a moral question for Europeans now.
“Are we doomed to be eternally grateful?” Vos asked.
