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Commendable Action
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| Avranches, France. The monument erected in 1954 in remembrance of General George S. Patton, commander of the US Third Army, which liberated much of western France and put the Nazis to flight. |
Le Monte, La Monte, Les Montes... no variations of Le Monte exist in the area of St. Lô, so I went with the nearest similarly named town, La Monterie. (Other units' after-action reports I found online mention la Monterie, so I'm fairly certain this is what our diarist meant.) The sign reads, Chemin de la Monterie, or “the la Monterie path."
From the road, it looked like just a small, rural neighborhood — a commune, in the French culture. The top sign indicated that there's no outlet, so I chose not to engage in another episode of potential trespassing. Besides, the entrance was guarded by a couple quite beefy individuals who glared at me suspiciously...
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| Biff Le Bœuf and Vinny Vache give me the stink-eye. |
Seriously, French cow puns aside, I did drive in to the commune, and it was just private dwellings, all appearing to have been built within the last 40 years or so. As the housing development is surrounded by farm fields, I would imagine that's all it was in 1944, or there was something else here that gave way to this housing in the meantime.
That said, Dad and the 129th did see action, here, in the effort to seal off the Mortain (or Falaise) Pocket:
An Unexpected Rest
The 129th was then dispatched to Avranche, captured two weeks earlier, to provide air defense against a counterattack.
However, instead, they got some much needed down time.
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| A fairly crappy photo of Mont-Saint-Michel, which is actually surrounded by water (google it for much better photos, but I didn't take those, so they don't count), but I wasn't going to pay for parking just to get a closer shot. |
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