A Decorated Father

Interviewer: What did your father do for a living? He was a carpenter. He was an immigrant, from France. He had been badly wounded in Verdun, and a few other places in, you know, World War I. He was a very decorated man. He had the Legion of Honor, a Military Medal, and four Croix de Guerre. He never used to talk about it. He, he got a pension from the French Army, from the French government. It’s only after, after he died, that we found that out. We found the documentation, you know, the recommendations for valour. We never, we never realized what he had gone through. He was badly wounded, he was, both legs were badly wounded, but one was fractured and so he had quite a limp. But we never realized that, you know, what he had gone through, not ‘til afterwards. Like the recommendation for the Croix de Guerre, you know, what he did. Crossing a river, under machine gun fire, to knock out a machine gun nest, and things like that, you know, on his own. And we always thought, my God, he must’ve been crazy to do things like that. But that’s what he had done. And he had, you know, he was rewarded with these medals. And the Croix de Guerre, the Military Cross came with a pension, lifetime pension, which came in very handy in the ‘30s.