D-Day’s Forgotten Victims Speak Out
▻https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/06/20/d-days-forgotten-victims-speak-out-forgotten-blitzes
E.G. Malindine/Imperial War Museums - Une femme française et un soldat britannique dans Caen libéré - 10 juillet 1944
During the three months that followed #D-Day, nearly 18,000 French civilians were killed by British and American bombers—nearly two fifths of at least 51,380 killed by Allied bombing during the war. That is low compared with the 420,000 Germans estimated to have been killed by Allied bombs, but roughly equivalent to the 60,000 British civilians killed in the Blitz. (The same number of Italian civilians were also killed by Allied bombing, two thirds of them after the armistice was signed in September 1943.)
Yet while the Blitz is a cult in British historical memory, these French victims of Allied bombs were almost invisible for five decades after D-Day and have occupied a marginalized corner of the war’s history in the years since. They are absent not only from official British and American accounts but from French ones, too—it was considered ungrateful to offend the liberators, and the Norman economy is significantly reliant on D-Day tourism. Visitors come to hear about victory, not a massacre of innocents by their own air forces.
▻https://archive.ph/4B9KN
#bombardement #débarquement #mémoire #tourisme #phosphore #Caen #Le_Havre #Normandie
