French war cemetery Rétaud

graveyard
French war cemetery Rétaud (Nécropole nationale de Rétaud)
Country:	France
Department:	Charente-Maritime
Place:	Rétaud
Inauguration:	April 20, 1947

The French war cemetery of Rétaud (in French: Nécropole nationale de Rétaud ) is a war cemetery of the Second World War in France. Here rest a few hundred French soldiers who fell in the course of the liberation of France while taking the backward and isolated German positions of Royan and Oléron .

The cemetery is located in the south-west of the Charente-Maritime department just outside the commune of Rétaud at the place called "Chez-le-Tard". It is the counterpart to the German war cemetery at Berneuil , which is a few kilometers away.

Emergence

The decision to set up a war cemetery for the fallen Allied soldiers was made by a commission on April 11, 1945, in the middle of the attack on the isolated German positions of Royan (Gironde estuary north) and the pointe de Grave (Gironde estuary south).

For this purpose, a piece of land near the town of Rétaud was bought and prepared shortly after the fighting ended. The Friends of the Veterans of the French Armed Forces in South West France (Amicale des anciens des forces françaises du Sud-Ouest) took care of the production. The association's president was General Henri Adeline , who was involved in the liberation of Royan. On March 3, 1950, the cemetery was named "nécropole nationale" by the Ministry of Former Combatants (Ministère des Anciens Combattants).

In the years that followed, many soldiers buried in various communities around Royan were exhumed. Then they were transferred to the Rétaud cemetery and buried there. In 1974 the cemetery was partially rebuilt.

The dead

330 soldiers rest in the French war cemetery of Rétaud. Among them are members of the Forces françaises de l'intérieur (FFI), Forces françaises libres (FFL), Armée d'Afrique (France) , the armed forces of the United States and the French and Allied air forces. The names of the fallen can be found on the Internet.

The cemetery complex

The cemetery is 3,191 square meters and is divided into several sections. The names of the fallen, if known, are given on steles. They fell in the last fighting when France was liberated from German occupation. The steles are particularly simple and differ according to the religious affiliation of the dead. In addition to the stelae with crosses, there are 129 stelae for the fallen of the Islamic faith with quotations from the Koran.

In the center of the cemetery there is a symbolic memorial: a granite wall (a symbol of the Atlantic Wall ) with a breach in the middle (a symbol of freedom that has been regained). In the breach there is a war cross, behind it a flagpole on which the colors of the nation flutter. The names of the fallen soldiers are engraved below the following memorial for the liberators of Royan and Oléron: