UPDATE
Jun 8, 2024 4:10 PM CDT
World War II veteran Harold Terens, 100, married Jeanne Swerlin, 96, just inland from the beaches of the D-Day landing in Normandy, France, proclaiming Saturday "the best day of my life." The music of Glenn Miller rang out on the streets Carentan, where well-wishers—some in wartime-period clothes—lined up before the wedding in the town hall, the AP reports. A pipe and drum band also played in the town that saw fierce fighting after the Allies' June 6, 1944, landing. "It's not just for young people, love, you know? We get butterflies," Swerlin said. The mayor married the American couple, though the rite wasn't legally binding because he can't marry foreigners. Terens toasted the crowd from a window of the town hall. "To everybody's good health," he said. "And to peace in the world and the preservation of democracy all over the world and the end of the war in Ukraine and Gaza."
Mar 11, 2024 2:38 PM CDT
Harold Terens and fiancee Jeanne Swerlin kissed and held hands like high school sweethearts as they discussed their upcoming wedding in France, a country the World War II veteran first visited as a 20-year-old US Army Air Forces corporal shortly after D-Day. Terens, a gregarious and energetic 100-year-old, will be honored in June by the French as part of the 80th anniversary celebration of their country's liberation from the Nazis. Then he plans to marry the sprightly 96-year-old Swerlin in a town near the beaches where US troops landed, the AP reports.
"I love this girl—she is quite special," said Terens, who has been dating Swerlin since 2021. "He's an amazing guy, amazing," Swerlin said. "And my god, he's the greatest kisser," she said. The couple, who are each widowed, grew up in New York City: she in Brooklyn, he in the Bronx. They laugh at how differently they experienced World War II. She was in high school and dated soldiers who gave her war souvenirs like dog tags, trying to impress. Terens, on the other hand, enlisted in 1942 and shipped to Great Britain the following year, attached to a four-pilot P-47 Thunderbolt fighter squadron as their radio repair technician. All four were killed in action. "I loved all those guys," says Terens.
story continues below
On D-Day—June 6, 1944—Terens helped repair planes returning from France so they could rejoin the battle. He went to France 12 days later, helping transport freshly captured Germans and just-freed American POWs back to England. To him, the Germans seemed happy because they would survive the war. The Americans, however, had been brutalized by their Nazi captors over months and even years. "They were in a stupor," he said. (Read the full story, which details Terens' further missions and two close calls that nearly took his life.)
(More
World War II stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
