PARIS (Reuters):
WHILE BRITAIN will honour its war heroes and Germany will again confront its Nazi ghosts, the national mood in France is more ambiguous as it hosts the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings on Sunday.
Gratitude prevails for the U.S., British and other Allied soldiers who gave their lives in the military exploit that helped liberate France and hastened the end of World War II.
Yet there is also pain at recalling a period when France lost control of its own destiny, collaborated with Nazi occupiers and finally suffered huge civilian losses as it became one of Europe's bloodiest battlegrounds.
"There were thousands of civilian deaths and some towns were 70 per cent destroyed by Allied bombs," said Jacques-Adrien Perret, a teenager at the time, who has published a set of memoirs about how French locals saw events.
"It is a complex, difficult part of history for the French. But I think they accept D-Day and the Battle of Normandy that followed as the price for ending the Occupation," he said.
Seventeen heads of state and government including U.S. President George W. Bush will attend Sunday's ceremonies, which are expected to draw a million visitors to the windswept beaches of Normandy where more than 132,000 Allied soldiers landed.
Germany will for the first time send its leader to attend the ceremonies, in what Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has said is proof its post-war period is "over and done with for good."
Britain has seized on the event as its last formal chance to celebrate one of its great success stories before the remaining veterans pass away. Jamaica, which was a British colony at the time of World War II, provided troops for the Allied Forces.
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The French have nothing so clear to focus on.
France for years pushed under the carpet its memories of the Occupation and played up the role of the anti-Nazi Resistance. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac recognised the role of the collaborationist Vichy government in the Holocaust and became the first French leader to apologise to the Jewish people.
That ambivalence is present in the plethora of French newspaper pull-outs, television documentaries and books on D-Day, much of it dwelling on the more sombre aspects.
Mass distribution Paris Match magazine devoted 12 pages of its current issue to stark images of the destruction of the port of Caen and other towns by the 40,000-tonne onslaught of Allied bombs that accompanied the landings.
"They expected a time of joy. They were plunged into hell," it said of the plight of French civilians amid a battle which left up to 20,000 of them dead and thousands more without homes.
Photographs abound of French families welcoming liberating forces with open arms. But memories are also being stirred of abuses committed by Allied soldiers as they drove back German troops and took control of French towns.
Historian Jean-Pierre Azema said there was evidence of nearly 500 rapes of Normandy women committed by U.S. soldiers, which badly hit relations with the locals in some towns.
"The rapes tarnished the image of the liberators. The Americans were never regarded as occupiers, but they ceased to be seen as true liberators," Azema, a noted French authority on the period, told France Soir newspaper.
There are also mixed feelings in France about some of the guests Chirac has invited to an event he wants to be seen as a demonstration of both European and transatlantic unity.
"A lot of people my age in Normandy are questioning whether it is the right event to invite Schroeder to, given that we were facing a merciless German enemy," said Perret. "Better to have invited him to the (May 8) anniversary of the war's end."
There is also concern that Bush, who will deliver a speech on Sunday, will use the event to compare the U.S. heroics in World War Two with the Iraq war, still unpopular in France.
"The first was morally beyond reproach and the second was based on the lie that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction," said left-leaning Liberation daily.
