Green berets of yesterday and today are gathered this Tuesday, June 6, in the dead end of a recent subdivision of the village of Amfreville (Calvados), between Caen and the sea. On this day of the 79th anniversary of the Normandy landings, the town named the small street after a former member of the commandos with the famous headgear: Guy Laot. "He was one of the youngest. He was very brave," said Léon Gautier, the last surviving member of the Kieffer commando, the only French unit to land on the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944.
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Guy Laot was his friend. The soldier was 20 years old when he was killed in Amfreville. "He never wanted to miss a patrol," says Léon Gautier. He did one too many. Guy Laot had headed to England at the age of 16. A "handsome boy, very strong-willed, with a hairstyle that was out of the ordinary," recalls Andrée, his first cousin, seven years his junior, very moved at the time of unveiling the plaque.
Wounded by a bullet in the arm on June 6, 1944, the one who had participated in a clandestine scouting operation on the Normandy beaches had previously continued the fight. Until this fatal patrol of June 25, 1944. Léon Gautier lost there "a friend I had known at the end of 1940. We stayed together. »
A proud family
When the Amfreville subdivision looked for a name at the cul-de-sac that serves it, a resident, Patrick Eury, suggested paying tribute to a soldier of the Kieffer commando. The town hall probes Léon Gautier. The centenary immediately proposes the name of Guy Laot. The ceremony of June 6, 2023, is poignant and touches Andrée: "I went to his grave at the military cemetery of Ranville (near Amfreville). The whole family is proud of him. It's a great emotion today. An explanatory panel adjoins the plaque to retrace the journey of one of the liberators of the commune, one of the 177 French green berets of D-Day.