New Neighborhood Voice
October 31, 2004
Remembering Gordon Edwards
(Photo by J. Gordon Edwards, 24 September, 1944,
Paris, France)
Paris had been liberated from the Nazi's one month earlier (on August 25, 1944):
"Tall and
poised, towering above the crowd around him, Charles de Gaulle stood at the Arc
de Triomphe
and before the tomb of France's Unknown Soldier. He laid a wreath of red
gladiolas on the
simple stone slab above the tomb. Then, with a symbolic gesture, de Gaulle relit
the grave's
eternal flame, the first Frenchman to perform that act in freedom since June,
1940."
(From Is Paris Burning? How Paris Miraculously Escaped Adolf Hitler's Sentence
of
Death in August, 1944, by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre) - This is what
J. Gordon Edwards helped accomplish in France in 1944 and what he went to see.
"On August 23, 1944, the following order had been transmitted from Adolf
Hitler's
Supreme Headquarters in East Prussia to the (Nazi) Commanding General of Paris:"
"The Fuhrer therefore categorically reaffirms his order ... Paris must not fall
into the
hands of the enemy, or if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of
ruins."
Click here for how we were asked to
remember
Gordon Edwards
Copyright© 2004 by Judy Thompson. All rights reserved.