Once-unbreakable Europe-US bonds under pressure

Brussels: The memory of blood dripping from trucks loaded with the mangled bodies of US soldiers arriving at a nearby war cemetery from the battlefield in 1945 still gives 91-year-old Marcel Schmetz nightmares.

It also instilled a lifelong sense of gratitude for the young soldiers from the US and around the world who gave their lives fighting to end World War II. Schmetz even built a museum at his home in the Belgian Ardennes to honor their sacrifice.

“If the Americans hadn’t come, we wouldn’t be here,” the Belgian retiree said.

That same spirit also pervades Normandy in northern France, where the allied forces landed on June 6, 1944, a day that became the tipping point of the war.

In Normandy, Marie-Pascale Legrand is still taking care of the ailing Charles Shay, a 100-year-old American who stormed the bloodied beaches on that fateful “D-Day” as a teenager and fought to help liberate Europe for many more months.

“Gratitude for me means that I am eternally indebted, because I can live free today,” Legrand said.

It would take almost another year of fierce fighting before Germany would surrender on May 8, 1945. Commemorations and festivities are planned for the 80th anniversary across much of the continent for what has become known as Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day.

Ever since, for generation upon generation in the nations west of the “Iron Curtain” that sliced Europe in two, it became a day to confirm and reconfirm what were long seen as the unbreakable bonds with the US as the two stood united against Soviet Eastern Europe.

No more. Over the past several months, the rhetoric from Washington has become increasingly feisty.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has questioned the vestiges of the decades-old alliance and slapped trade sanctions on the 27-nation EU and the UK. Trump has insisted that the EU trade bloc was there to “screw” the US from the start.

The wartime allies are now involved in a trade war.

“After all that has happened, it is bound to leave scars,” Ghent University European studies professor Hendrik Vos said.

Yet deep in the green hills and Ardennes woods where the Battle of the Bulge was fought and Schmetz lives, just as along the windswept bluffs of Legrand’s Normandy, the ties endure — isolated from the tremors of geopolitics.

“For all those that criticize the Americans, we can only say that for us, they were all good,” Schmetz said. “We should never forget that.”

After watching the horrors of the dead soldiers at the nearby Henri-Chapelle cemetery as an 11-year-old, Schmetz vowed he would do something in their honor and gathered war memorabilia.

A car mechanic with a big warehouse, he immediately started to turn it into the “Remember Museum 39-45” once he retired more than three decades ago.

For the treasure trove of military artifacts, what truly stands out is a long bench in the kitchen where US veterans, their children and their grandchildren come and sit and talk about what happened, and the bonds uniting continent, memories all meticulously kept by his wife Mathilde, to pass on to new visitors and new generations of schoolkids.

Shay, who is now bedridden in Normandy, was part of the 1st Infantry Division and came through the Ardennes region before heading to Germany. He started making visits to the D-Day beaches about two decades ago.

He became increasingly sick over the years, and Legrand took him in to her home in 2018.

The moment everything changed for Legrand was listening to then-US president Ronald Reagan in 1984 speaking on a Normandy bluff of the sacrifice and heroism of American soldiers.

Barely in her 20s, she realized that “their blood is in our soil and we have to show gratitude. We have to do something. I didn’t know what at the time, but I knew I would do something to show it.”

She had long volunteered to help Allied veterans before she met Shay. He was lonely, sick and frail when she took him in and began caring for him at her Normandy home.

“It is a strong symbol, which takes on a new dimension in this day and age,” she said, referring to the tumultuous trans-Atlantic relations that have put the bonds between allies that Trump called “unbreakable” only six years ago, under extreme pressure.

Central in Trump’s criticism of European NATO allies is that they have happily hunkered far too long under US military supremacy since World War II and should start paying much more of their own way in the alliance. He has done so in such terms that many Europeans sincerely fear the break-up of the trans-Atlantic bonds that were a core of global politics for almost a century.

“The naive belief that the Americans will, by definition, always be an ally — once and for all, that is gone,” Vos said. It also raises a moral question for Europeans now.

“Are we doomed to be eternally grateful?” Vos asked.