Veterans recall 'other' D-day

PARIS - Historians call it the Forgotten D-day.

But aging veterans like John Shirley vividly recall Aug. 15, 1944, when they stepped ashore on the French Riviera and delivered an uppercut to Hitler's diminishing army.

"Maybe it was a sideline to the big fights up north, but it was a very important invasion," said Shirley, 79, of Livermore, Calif.

Tourists soaking up the Riviera sun this weekend will have to make room for Shirley and hundreds of other aging war veterans descending on the Provence region of southern France to commemorate Operation Dragoon and be honored by the French nation they liberated.

"The Normandy landings were a spectacular operation that everyone knows about, and we commemorate it with enormous fanfare," said French historian Andre Kaspi. "Then, there are the Provence landings that are more or less forgotten, but nonetheless essential."

Operation Dragoon, and the D-day landings in Normandy 70 days earlier, caught France's German occupiers in a pincer. Though smaller than D-day in scale and Allied losses, Dragoon brought about 350,000 Allied soldiers ashore along a 50-mile stretch between Toulon and Cannes.

Compared with the D-day anniversary hoopla in June - attended by President Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others - the commemorations today and Sunday will be distinctly low key.

La Motte, the first village liberated in Operation Dragoon, will host a ceremony today at which nine British veterans will be decorated with the Legion of Honor, France's most prestigious decoration.

Later today, nine American veterans will receive the Legion of Honor from French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie at the Rhone American Cemetery in nearby Draguignan. It overlooks the graves of 861 soldiers who fell during the landings and in the weeks that followed. The bodies of 1,600 other Americans were repatriated.

On Sunday President Jacques Chirac will be aboard the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, anchored off Toulon, hosting leaders of 16 African nations that were French possessions in World War II and which provided soldiers for the Allies. Also present will be several hundred veterans including Shirley.

The former staff sergeant is leading a dozen American veterans, mostly in their 80s, on a package bus tour that some say will be their last trip to the battlefield. One of them is 84-year-old George Burks.

"This is my last hurrah. I'm sure of it. I don't want to wait another 10 years," said the former first lieutenant before leaving Englewood, N.J., for France for his first trip back since 1944. He, like Shirley, fought with the 15th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division.

Operation Dragoon was to have coincided with D-day but there were no landing craft to spare. Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister, had fiercely resisted the operation, preferring to focus Allied strength in the north. The Americans prevailed, arguing for a pincer movement.

French troops had played only a minor role in D-day, and Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, was eager for them to have a big part in liberating the important port cities of Toulon and Marseille. Half of Operation Dragoon's invasion force was French.

When the invasion was unleashed, thousands of paratroopers, mostly American and British, bore the brunt, preceding the amphibious operation in drops north of the coast. The night of Aug. 14, 1944, was foggy and many fell short and drowned at sea.

Hitler pulled back German forces from the south just two days into Operation Dragoon. Allied troops liberated Toulon and Marseille in late August, and took Lyon, France's second largest city, on Sept. 3.

Fierce fighting lay ahead as Allied troops moved into the Vosges Mountains near the German border.

"For the first month, it was amazing how fast we moved. But, then we got into October and the rains," Burks said. "I can still walk out onto my back porch when it rains, and I can smell the Vosges. It all comes back."

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