On Memorial Day, Remembering Billie and Peggy Harris and all those who have sacrificed for our Nation....
A Sherwood Extra....
On this Memorial Day, I wanted to share the most amazing story that I heard yesterday, when I was at a “community sing” sponsored by the Alexandria Harmonizers, an acclaimed men’s chorus.
The Harmonizers were planning to sing in France for the 2014 D-Day anniversary, when they heard the story of Billie Harris, a dashing 21-year old American fighter pilot, and his lovely bride Peggy, an 18-year-old Rosie the Riveter who was working on airplanes at a military bases.
Facing heavy fighting in the continuing battles following D-Day, on July 14, 1944, Harris crashed. As Harris’ plane was coming down, he faced a choice. If he landed safely, he might survive and someday return home to Peggy. They had married just six weeks earlier.
But to come home to Peggy meant he would risk crashing into Les Ventes, a small village, and killing the people on the ground.
Harris diverted his plane away from the town. Town residents watched as he did so. Nazi soldiers and French resistance fighters both pursued the plane, but the French reached the crash site first. Billie had died. But, with the Germans nearby, it took a couple days before they could safely remove him from the plane.
At that point, the town’s residents buried him along other local dead war heroes. They filled his grave with flowers. And they’d honored him ever since. But in the chaos, the town had never been able to correctly identify the young man.
An ocean away, Peggy had no idea what had happened. She got a series of notices—first saying that he was alive, then that he was dead, and then that he was missing-in-action.
Peggy, who never remarried, spent decades trying to get the answers, but to no avail. (At one point, she’d pleaded with her congressman to get involved. His office reported back that there were no records at the National Archives about her husband. An investigation later revealed that the congressman’s office had never bothered to do the records search.)
In 2004, amid the 60th anniversary of D-Day, officials in Les Ventes had decided to finally solve the mystery of their hero, while one of Peggy’s cousins had decided to do the same thing for her.
It took months more, but, 62 years after he died, Peggy finally learned what had happened to Billie.
Within a year, Peggy traveled to Les Ventes, to meet the townspeople, see the site of the crash, and go to the grave of her Billie, who had since been interned in the Normandy burial grounds. Afterwards, she visited again, and she sent flowers to his grave ten times a year, saying that she had 60 years of mourning to make up for. At the time, cemetery officials believed that she was the last WWII widow to be visiting a husband’s grave.
In 2014, when the Harmonizers heard this story, they decided to add a stop at Les Ventes, to sing a special remembrance for Harris. They got a message to Peggy that they were doing so.
Peggy—now in her 90s—got on a plane and flew to France for the event. She hadn’t even made any plans on how to get to Les Ventes when she’d arrived. She just went up to someone at the airport and asked them to drive her the three hours to the village. They did. On their way into town, they probably drove down one of the village’s main streets, now named Place de Billie Harris.
The entire town came out to hear the Harmonizers and honor the Harrises. (One couple was going to miss the concert because they were getting married. They rescheduled the wedding.) Since the largest room in the town only had a capacity of 70—and the Harmonizers themselves were a group of more than 100 singers—they sang outside.
So here’s a clip of them singing, serenading Mrs. Harris, whom the choir stayed close to until her death in 2020.