French soldier landed with U.S. forces at Normandy on D-Day

Jacques Lewis, who was believed to be the last surviving French soldier to clamber ashore with U.S. forces at Normandy on D-Day in 1944, died July 25 in Paris. He was 105.

His death, in a hospital and care center at the Invalides military complex, was announced in a statement by the office of President Emmanuel Macron of France.

On June 8, less than two months before he died, Lewis insisted to his caregivers that he be taken in his wheelchair to greet President Joe Biden and Macron at a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Biden thanked Lewis for his work with U.S. forces as they had moved inland from Utah Beach to drive the Germans out of France.

In 1944, Lewis was a member of the Free French Forces, the army that Gen. Charles de Gaulle had assembled in exile in London after Germany invaded and occupied France in 1940. Fluent in English, he was assigned as a liaison officer attached to the U.S. Army’s 70th Tank Battalion as the D-Day landings approached.

Lewis was not just an interpreter; he was a soldier, and thus well-suited to take on a vital role after the invasion. The Americans needed someone with military experience to link up with French villagers and French guerrilla resistance fighters known as the Maquis to help guide U.S. troops past German positions inland to reach the small rural town of Carentan and relieve members of the U.S. 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, who had earlier parachuted in, behind enemy lines.

In an interview with French television channel TF1 in 2019 on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Lewis recalled approaching Utah Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944. It was the first time he had spoken about the war, even to his family, he said.

“We were crouched behind the ramp of our landing craft, and when the ramp went down, I saw my country, France, which I’d wanted to help liberate for so long,” he said. “It was very moving. But then I saw the stretchers carrying wounded or dead American soldiers — being carried down the beach to get into our landing craft to be taken back to England. I realized that many of the first wave of my American comrades had already died on the beaches to liberate my country.”

He waded ashore, his rifle over his head, under heavy German gunfire. In the TF1 interview, he displayed a military identification bracelet that he wore on his left wrist that morning (comparable to the dog tags his American comrades wore around their necks). Pointing to his military number, FFF 55770, he said, “That was so that they knew I was a French soldier if I died.”

Allied casualties on Utah Beach — 197 killed or wounded — were relatively light compared with the 2,400 or so recorded at Omaha Beach to the east. By nightfall on D-Day, more than 10,300 allied troops had been killed or wounded across Normandy.

After Lewis crossed Utah beach unscathed, his first task was to help the Americans reach Carentan. Consulting with resistance fighters and French residents, he mapped out routes that the Americans could take and then joined them. Along the way, they were greeted as saviors.

“The locals appeared at their windows or emerged from their doors,” he recalled. “They gave us wine, and my American colleagues gave the kids chocolate. They were so happy to see the Americans and surprised to realize I was French.”

Jacques Pierre Lewis was born March 1, 1919, in the village of Cauderan, now a district of the city of Bordeaux, in southwestern France. After attending the prestigious Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris, he studied law at the Instituts d’Études Politiques, known as Sciences Po.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Lewis, then 20, was called up for military service. He was a junior officer when Germany invaded France in May 1940. The following month, he fought in the Battle of Saumur, on the Loire River, as the French army fought in vain to keep the Germans from pushing on to Paris.

When the overrun French government signed an armistice agreement with Nazi Germany on June 22, 1940 — effectively a surrender — Lewis, like many of his compatriots, refused to accept defeat. With the goal of joining de Gaulle’s resistance fighters in London, he fled France, crossing the Pyrenees mountains into Spain on foot.

Once there he was immediately arrested by troops serving under Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who had officially remained neutral in the war but who was sympathetic to Adolf Hitler. With the help of Spanish Republican inmates, who had been Franco’s enemies in Spain’s civil war, Lewis escaped from prison and boarded a Liberian cargo ship, which first crossed the Atlantic to the United States before heading to England, withstanding attacks by German Luftwaffe aircraft.

After joining the Free French Forces in London in July 1943, he served as a liaison officer with British forces in the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel, as they defended it against heavy bombardment by the Luftwaffe.

He was then integrated into the ranks of the U.S. 2nd Armored Division, which had been trained in England by Gen. George S. Patton Jr. in preparation for the Normandy landings. When U.S. commanders decided to send the 70th Tank Battalion to Utah Beach on D-Day as an advance force, Lewis was assigned to it as a reconnaissance and liaison officer.

By then, the Free French Forces had promoted him to the rank of commandant, the equivalent of major.

After helping guide the Americans to Carentan, he accompanied U.S. forces as they broke through the so-called Saint-Lô line, moved through the Ardennes forests of Belgium and Luxembourg and crossed into Germany. His duties included debriefing and repatriating French soldiers and resistance fighters whom the Americans had liberated.

After the war, Lewis worked in the French cosmetics industry. He was admitted to the hospital and care center for military personnel at the Hôtel National des Invalides in Paris in April 2018 and was living there at his death. (Information about survivors was not immediately available.)

On the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019, at a ceremony at the Invalides complex, Lewis was given a certificate signed by the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, thanking him for his bravery in helping U.S. forces on Utah Beach and beyond.

In the statement announcing his death, Macron and his wife, Brigitte, hailed Lewis as having been “filled with courage and audacity, who preferred to risk his life rather than his honor, and allowed the nation to regain its freedom.”