He’s gone Leon Gautier: era the last commando veteran Kieffer protagonist of the glorious Normandy landing in 1944. He was 100 years old. The Twitter profile of the Caen Memorial and the local press made it known West Francespecifying that Gautier was the last living of 177 French marines landed on June 6, 1944. The soldier died in a hospital in Caen, as communicated to the media by the mayor of the municipality of Ouistreham (Calvados), Romain Bail. “Ouistreham is very sad today, we are a bit orphaned of this father, this grandfather, a local hero known to all who transmitted a certain number of values for freedom of which he was an ardent defender, arriving on our beaches” he said added Mayor Bail.
President Emmanuel Macron, calling him a “hero of the Liberation”, immediately paid tribute to him in a tweet. The state will organize a national tribute in Normandy in his memory.
Born in 1922 in Rennes, Leon Gautier joined London and General de Gaulle in July 1940 before going to fight in Cameroon, Congo, Syria, Lebanon, to then participate in the landing of June 6th ’44. Since then he has never stopped working for peace. “The worst thing you can see is a war. Because we kill people in front of us who have never done anything, who have families, children. All this to achieve what?” said Gautier, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, dressed in a suit and tie in a wheelchair, during a ceremony for his 100th birthday last October 27. A father of two, Gautier had lived in Ouistreham since the 1990s. And he used to repeat: “We are not heroes, we just did our duty”.
