As befits the conquerors, which the Germans considered themselves, they entered Sainte-Mère-Église mounted on horses. On that very day of June 18, 1940, when the high-ranking officers and politicians were making entries into their war diaries and were declaring speeches, and Adolf Hitler was to welcome Benito Mussolini and Count Galeazzo Ciano within the railway station of Munich, the peasants of the unremarkable French town of Sainte-Mère-Église witnessed the first German soldiers on their streets. This short five-minute-long speech with a depressed tone and without the expression of a leader would become famous only years from that day as a retrospective of De Gaulle’s contribution.

By reading from his scratch of paper, Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle 49 years old declared that the French people may be devastated today, yet the nation will triumph once more in the future. In the late hours of June 18, another French officer, largely unknown at that time in the country and among the allies, delivered his speech from the BBC office in London.

The combat veteran and the commanding officer from the times of the Great War, the elderly Marshal regarded the resistance to be void of reason and announced his late appeal to the Germans to conclude an armistice. The day before, an 84-year-old Marshal Philippe Petain, the man of merely unlimited credit of trust among the French, delivered a radio broadcasting speech to the nation from his headquarters in Bordeaux. On June 18, 1940, Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff of the German Army High Command included a new passage into his years-to-come famous war diary regarding the cut-down of the number of Wehrmacht divisions from 165 to 120 and redistribution of the forces across the continent upon the earlier of complete triumph in the West. THE NORMAN HEARTLANDS: SAINTE-MERE-EGLISE

(5/6) tanks! battle of the bulge