Europe will mark V-E Day's 80th anniversary as once-unbreakable bonds
with the US are under pressure
[May 03, 2025]
By RAF CASERT
THIMISTER-CLERMONT, Belgium (AP) — The memory of blood dripping from
trucks loaded with the mangled bodies of U.S. soldiers arriving at a
nearby war cemetery straight from the battlefield in 1945 still gives
91-year-old Marcel Schmetz nightmares.
It also instilled a lifelong sense of gratitude for the young soldiers
from the United States and around the world who gave their lives
battling the armies of Adolf Hitler to end World War II in Europe.
Schmetz even built a museum at his home in the Belgian Ardennes to honor
their sacrifice.
“If the Americans hadn’t come, we wouldn’t be here,” the Belgian retiree
said.
That same spirit also pervades Normandy in northern France, where the
allied forces landed on June 6, 1944, a day that became the tipping
point of the war.
Eternal gratitude
In Normandy, Marie-Pascale Legrand is still taking care of the ailing
Charles Shay, a 100-year-old American who stormed the bloodied beaches
on that fateful D-Day as a teenager and fought to help liberate Europe
for many more months.
“Gratitude for me means that I am eternally indebted, because I can live
free today,” Legrand said.
After D-Day, it would take almost another year of fierce fighting before
Germany would finally surrender on May 8, 1945. Commemorations and
festivities are planned for the 80th anniversary across much of the
continent for what has become known as Victory in Europe Day, or V-E
Day, one of the most momentous days on the continent in recent
centuries.
Fraying bonds
Ever since, for generation upon generation in the nations west of the
Iron Curtain that sliced Europe in two, it became a day to confirm and
reconfirm what were long seen as the unbreakable bonds with the United
States as both stood united against Soviet Eastern Europe.
No more.
Over the past several months, the rhetoric from Washington has become
increasingly feisty.
The Trump administration has questioned the vestiges of the decades-old
alliance and slapped trade sanctions on the 27-nation European Union and
the United Kingdom. Trump has insisted that the EU trade bloc was there
to “screw” the United States from the start.
The wartime allies are now involved in a trade war.
“After all that has happened, it is bound to leave scars,” said Hendrik
Vos, European studies professor at Ghent University.
Honoring the fallen
Yet deep in the green hills and Ardennes woods where the Battle of the
Bulge was fought and Schmetz lives, just as along the windswept bluffs
of Legrand's Normandy, the ties endure — isolated from the tremors of
geopolitics.
“For all those that criticize the Americans, we can only say that for
us, they were all good,” Schmetz said. “We should never forget that.”
After watching the horrors of the dead soldiers at the nearby Henri-Chapelle
cemetery as an 11-year-old, Schmetz vowed he would do something in their
honor and gathered war memorabilia.
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World War II D-Day veteran and Penobscot Elder from Maine, Charles
Norman Shay, center, and Marie Pacale Legrand during a D-Day 76th
anniversary ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery in
Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, June 6, 2020. (AP
Photo/Virginia Mayo)
A car mechanic with a big warehouse, he immediately started to turn
it into the Remember Museum 39-45 once he retired more than three
decades ago.
“I had to do something for those who died,” he said.
And for the treasure trove of military artifacts, what truly stands
out is a long bench in the kitchen where U.S. veterans, their
children, and even their grandchildren come and sit and talk about
what happened, and the bonds uniting continent, memories all
meticulously kept by his wife Mathilde, to pass on to new visitors
and new generations of schoolkids.
‘The Big Red One’
In the coming weeks, she will be going out to put 696 roses on the
graves of soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division — nicknamed “The
Big Red One,” or “BRO” — who lie buried among 7,987 headstones at
Henri Chapelle.
Charles Shay, who is now bedridden in Normandy, was also part of the
1st Infantry Division and came through the Ardennes region too
before heading to Germany. He survived the Korean War too and
started making visits to the D-Day beaches around two decades ago.
Over the years, he became increasingly sick and Legrand, who has
helped veterans in one way or another for more than 40 years, took
him in to her home in 2018.
He has been living there ever since.
Reagan's impact
The moment everything changed for Legrand was listening to then U.S.
President Ronald Reagan in 1984 speaking on a Normandy bluff of the
sacrifice and heroism of American soldiers.
Barely in her 20s, she realized that “their blood is in our soil and
we have to show gratitude. We have to do something. I didn't know
what at the time, but I knew I would do something to show it.”
She had long volunteered to help Allied veterans before she met
Shay. He was lonely, sick and frail when she took him in and began
caring for him at her Normandy home.
“It is a strong symbol, which takes on a new dimension in this day
and age,” she said, referring to the tumultuous trans-Atlantic
relations that have put the bonds between allies that Trump called
“unbreakable” only six years ago, under extreme pressure.
Once an ally, always an ally?
Central in Trump's criticism of European NATO allies is that they
have happily hunkered far too long under U.S. military supremacy
since World War II and should start paying much more of their own
way in the alliance. He has done so in such terms that many
Europeans sincerely fear the breakup of the trans-Atlantic bonds
that were a core of global politics for almost a century.
“The naive belief that the Americans will, by definition, always be
an ally — once and for all, that is gone,” said Vos. It also raises
a moral question for Europeans now.
“Are we doomed to be eternally grateful?” Vos asked.
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