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FRENCH HISTORY

Archaeologists probe French coast for WWII wrecks

A team composed of British and French experts has launched a new campaign to find shipwrecks from the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940.

Archaeologists are searching French waters around Dunkirk to find WWII wrecks.
Archaeologists are searching French waters around Dunkirk to find WWII wrecks. (Photo by Sameer Al-DOUMY / AFP)

Shattered by bomb impacts, the 100-metre-long British destroyer “Keith” has been lying at the bottom of the Dunkirk channel since its sinking in 1940.

It went down during Operation Dynamo, when hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were rescued by sea from the advancing Germans.

Now the World War II warship appears in brightly coloured 3D, vertical slice by vertical slice, on the screen of Mark James, a geophysicist from Historic England.

James has joined a group of archaeologists taking stock of the traces of the battle still lurking under the waves.

A British government agency, Historic England has joined the search for wrecks dating to the Dunkirk evacuation run by France’s DRASSM, which is in charge of underwater archaeology.

Firing sound waves down to the seabed, a multibeam sonar “allows us to create a really nice 3D model of the seabed and any wrecks and debris,” he said.

“It’s quite an emotional feeling seeing somebody’s wreck come up on the screen,” he added. “You kind of realise the human sacrifice that was made.”

Although a large ship, the “Keith” is set to “disappear bit by bit”, said Cecile Sauvage, an archaeologist with DRASSM who is one of those leading the search launched on September 25.

Surveying the wrecks now will allow both countries to “preserve the memory of these ships and the human history behind these wrecks”, she added.

Perilous crossing

Brought to the big screen in an acclaimed 2017 film by Christopher Nolan, Operation Dynamo ran from May 26 to June 4, 1940.

Encircled in northern France by Nazi German forces, the Allies threw everything into a mass evacuation.

Over those nine days, 338,220 soldiers — mostly British, but also 123,000 French and 16,800 Belgians — were evacuated on all kinds of vessels, cramming into military ships, fishing trawlers, ferries and tugboats.

The shortest route from Dunkirk to safe harbour across the English Channel in Dover is 60 kilometres (40 miles).

But that path was within range of German guns already in place at Calais.

“Between 1,000 and 1,500 vessels of all types made the crossing”, with 305 sunk by “shelling, enemy torpedoes, mines and even collisions caused by the panic around the operation,” said archaeologist Claire Destanque, another of the search mission chiefs.

Almost 5,000 of the fleeing soldiers were drowned, according to Dunkirk-based historian Patrick Oddone.

‘305 stories’

The three-week search by two archaeologists and two geophysicists has quartered the English Channel to tally up the lost ships  – the first hunt of its kind in French waters.

Volunteer divers had already catalogued the locations of the wrecks, with the scientists’ job to confirm the sites and shore up their identifications by comparing them with archive data.

Sailing on from the “Keith” under the autumn sun, the crew next heads for a French cargo ship, also around 100 metres (yards) along the keel.

The “Douaisien” had made the trip from Algeria to unload its goods at Dunkirk before being requisitioned to transport 1,200 soldiers.

It had barely left the port before it hit a mine and sank, Claire Destanque recounts.

She points out the point the mine struck on the sonar screen, still visible more than 80 years later.

“Knowing the history that’s behind it, it’s very moving,” she says.

The campaign has allowed the archaeologists to definitively identify 27 Operation Dynamo wrecks.

Three more have been found, but need closer inspection by divers next year given the extent of the damage.

Sauvage says their aim has been “to better locate and get to know the remnants”, as well as “to protect them better, especially if there’s a construction plan like a wind farm that could destroy them”.

Plans have been afoot for several years to build turbines in the sea off Dunkirk.

Another benefit of the search is the return to the headlines of “an important milestone” in World War II history that is far less familiar to the French public than in Britain, Sauvage adds.

The sunken wrecks represent “305 stories within the sweep of history,” Destanque believes.

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FRENCH HISTORY

WWII vet to marry in French town after D-Day commemorations

Hundred-year-old World War II veteran Harold Terens will marry his 96-year-old fiancee Saturday in the French town of Carentan-les-Marais, just days after being honoured on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings that took place a few kilometres away.

WWII vet to marry in French town after D-Day commemorations

Terens’s 11:00 am (0900 GMT) wedding to Jeanne Swerlin will be followed by a celebration “with his loved ones, in a small group”, said Sarah Pasquier, the town hall’s representative for D-Day commemorations.

“We are very honoured that Mr. Terens has chosen to get married here, in Carentan, where in June 1944 the meeting of Allied troops from the landings at Utah and Omaha beaches took place,” Mayor Jean-Pierre Lhonneur told AFP.

“We will offer him champagne, of course, but also a gift to thank him for having participated in the liberation of France.”

After the ceremony, “depending on his possible fatigue”, Terens may join in a parade of veterans in the centre of Carentan during the afternoon, according to Pasquier.

A liberation ball will be also be held in the evening as part of the D-Day commemorations, she said, with attendees “invited to dress in the 1940s theme, and solders from the nearby American base welcome”.

“But Mr. Terens and his wife may be to tired to join,” she added.

READ ALSO: VIDEO: British D-Day paratroopers face post-Brexit checks in Normandy field

Terens, who lives with Swerlin in Boca Raton, Florida, was awarded the French Legion of Honour by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019.

After the war Terens married his first wife, Thelma, with whom he spent 70 years and raised three children until her death in 2018.

In 2021, a friend introduced him to Swerlin, a charismatic woman who had also been widowed, and the two have been inseparable practically ever since.

“She lights up my life, she makes everything beautiful,” Terens told AFP in an interview last month in Florida. “She makes life worth living.”

In the same interview, Swerlin said her fiancee was “an unbelievable guy”.

“He’s handsome — and he’s a good kisser.”

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