French Town Invites Virginia Sisters of Fighter Pilot Shot Down Over Normandy on June 10, 1944, to Special Memorial Service on June 10, 2011. Billy Marchant, an American Hero During the Normandy Invasion in 1944
Golden Marchant Forbes, whose brother, Billy Marchant, was killed on June 10, 1044, in action as a P-47 Thunderbolt fighter pilot over Mouaze, France, during the breakout in the days following the D-Day Invasion on June 6, 1944, explains the unlikely sequence of events leading to a special memorial service for her brother now having being scheduled in Mouaze, France on June 10, 2011.
Muaze France, a
small French town, has scheduled a special memorial service for an American
fighter-pilot shot-down over the town during the Allies' invasion of Normandy
commencing on June 6, 1945. 1st Lt. William S. Marchant of Newport News was
shot-down on June 10, 1944 while piloting his P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-plane in
support of the breakout in the days following the Allies' breakout after
D-Day. Despite still being under occupation, the town conducted a special
funeral service for Marchant attended by approximately 500 residents. (Later, his body was moved to the St. James Cemetery in Rennes, France.)
Having recently learned the identities of his surviving sisters in the United States, the town has invited them to a special memorial service for their
brother in Muaze, France on June 10, 2010. The surviving sisters are
Golden Marchant Forbes (pictured below), who resides in Hampton, Virgina, and Frances M. Hall, who resides in Locust Hill, Virginia.
(The
full story plus the video embedded below and pictures displayed below are
published in the Daily
Press for Hampton, Virginia.) There are many interesting
details about the story in the video embedded immediately below:
The article in the Daily Press for Hampton Virginia also provides many more
details about the heroic Billy Marchant, the small French town, and Marchant's
surviving sisters. It's an excellent article. (To view that article,
click
here.) I have the honor of knowing Golden Forbes and
having heard her narrative first-hand. (If the above embedded-video
doesn't work, here's
the direct link to it.)
Jim is a proud descendant of 18th Century criminal exiles from England who swam to the Outer Banks when the British ship taking them to a Georgia penal colony sank in a storm near Cape Hatteras. Having the prescience to prevent their descendants from becoming "TarHeels," they immediately migrated to Virginia, where, within just a few generations they worked their way up into poverty. Jim's grandfather was the first in the family tree to see the distant horizons, but his career was cut short by severe injuries he sustained when a cousin cut down the tree.
After a brief stint in the Amry (ours) following graduation from law school, he began his legal career in the state bureaucracy but was never able to break into the federal bureaucracy. Several years later, he entered the private practice of law and co-founded a small law publishing company. Later, finding the publishing of small laws unstimulating and finding his private practice too private to be lucrative, he began writing political satire/commentary. His greatest vice is taking himself too seriously.
Although he regularly teaches Continuing Legal Education courses to lawyers, he's too-often available through he Rubber Chicken Speakers Bureau to speak on politics, satire, etc., at luncheons, dinners, root canals, funerals, etc. His speaking fees are so outrageously high they border on criminal price-gouging, but as a free-market advocate, he defends his fees on the higher moral ground of charging whatever the traffic will bear. For more information (surely more than one would want or need), go to www.PoliSat.Com.
Cover
•
Commentary
•
Books & Reviews
•
Climate Change
•
Site Links
•
Feedback
