French Town Honors WW II U.S. Liberators

World War II veterans and their families honored the U.S. 90th Infantry Division on Sunday, inaugurating a monument to the more than 1,000 men it lost in bloody battles to liberate this Normandy town.

Aging veterans saluted as an Army cloth was lifted from “the four brave”--a life-size bronze statue of four young Americans killed near Periers before Adolf Hitler’s army was driven out of the town July 27, 1944.

Relatives, some of whom knew the four soldiers only from black-and-white photos, stood weeping as they shot videos of the unveiling.

“I never knew my father. I’ve only seen pictures of him,” said Ann S. Giese, 55, of Oahu, Hawaii, who was born six months after her father, Sgt. Andrew Speese, died. She laid a wreath around the neck of the statue modeled after him. “It’s a very good likeness,” she said.

In another war-era ceremony, Britain’s Prince Charles joined aging veterans to mark the 60th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation--the stunning operation to whisk about 338,000 Allied soldiers under German siege across the English Channel to safety.

But the ceremony will be the last, as the Dunkirk Veterans Assn. is going to disband after losing more men to old age.

An 81-year-old English veteran, Walter Darvill, collapsed and died at Sunday’s ceremony at Dunkirk, police said.

In Periers, the monument was unveiled on a grassy plot in front of the town hall. It depicts medic Virgil Tangborn helping the wounded Speese. Watching over them is soldier Richard Richtman, as Sgt. Tullio Micaloni gestures for his tank crew to move forward.