Soldier reunited with members of French family who sheltered him in 1944
Published: July 21, 2005
Jim Tronson has been reunited with members of the family who helped him survive after his plane was shot down in France in 1944. And they greeted him as close friends.
Tronson, of Doyon, welcomed members of the DeMachy family to North Dakota this week.
Ginette DeMachy, who was 19 years old in 1944, and her brothers, Jean and Andre, who were 14 and 12 at the time, met with Tronson and his family.
“It’s really nice,” Tronson said Thursday. “They’ve never been to America before.”
Tronson was a member of the Army Air Force, the gunner in the belly turret of a B-17 bomber, and was on his 13th mission when the plane was shot down over France on April 20, 1944.
Tronson, now in his 80s, carries a St. Christopher medal folded carefully in his wallet, a memento he exchanged with Ginette in 1944 for a heart-shaped necklace carved from glass.
This week, the families exchanged more mementos at a ceremony at Stump Lake Village, south of Lakota. The three DeMachys were given medals and certificates of appreciation for their help in keeping secret a young soldier’s presence in a small French village during World War II.
They communicated through an interpreter, and remembered those six months with smiles, hugs, gestures, and tears.
Tronson was 21 years old when Ginette’s father, a French shepherd, brought him to the DeMachy family home in Bellifontaine, Picardie, France after he parachuted to the ground.
The DeMachy family sheltered him for about a week, he said, and then he stayed with the family of a member of the French Resistance, Joseph Plouvier, for five months, until the Allied invasion freed him.
“The Canadian army come through,” Tronson said.
“I got hold of a car and went to Paris, and I just jumped on an airplane and flew back London.”
The friendship of the French family that has spanned decades. Tronson said he went to France to visit last year, to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
“It gets pretty emotional,” he said.
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