Pascale Lozano, 62, a native of Paris and resident of Lafayette, is on a mission to ensure that American veterans of WWII who helped liberate her home country are honored and remembered for their sacrifices.
Her father, Pascal, joined the French Navy in 1942 and was taken as a prisoner of war in Dortmund, Germany, until his liberation by American troops on May 5, 1945.
“This is my humble way of saying ‘Thank you,'” she said.
Lozano is searching for WWII veterans and helping them apply for the French National Order of the Legion of Honor, the highest military and civilian decoration awarded in France.
In Louisiana, Lozano turned to historian, New Iberia native and Houston resident Jason Theriot, who interviewed South Louisiana WWII veterans for a three-volume series titled, “To Honor Our Veterans: An Oral History of World War II Veterans from the Bayou Country.”
Theriot said he provided Lozano with a list of Louisiana veterans to start her mission.
She is especially interested in contacting “Frenchies,” the Louisiana veterans whose Cajun French was relied upon in the European theater of the war to communicate with French-speaking natives.
The requirements for the French Legion of Honor are “very, very, very strict,” Lozano said.
U.S. veterans must have fought in one of the four main campaigns leading to the liberation of France: Normandy; Southern France, also called the Provence invasion or Operation Dragoon; Northern France; and the Ardennes campaign, also known as the Battle of the Bulge.
Veterans must complete an application and provide their military records, including any honors, and a copy of their honorable discharge papers.
The application and documents are then sent to the nearest French consulate, in this case New Orleans, she said, then to the French embassy in Washington, D.C., eventually making it to the Chancery of the Legion of Honor, which has “sole discretion to accept or deny an application,” Lozano said.
Lozano feels an urgency to her mission as WWII veterans are aging, with the youngest in their 90s. They are dying at a rate of 180 or more per day, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
As of 2022, only 167,284 of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII were still alive.
The French Legion of Honor, established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, is not awarded after death.
The application of the first Louisiana veteran Lozano assisted was rejected. She is assisting others and has one success so far, that being Norris Morvant, 99, of Thibodaux.
Morvant said Monday he didn’t know Lozano until she contacted him about the Legion of Honor award, calling her “very instrumental” in the process, going so far as to contact the French consul in New Orleans.
Lozano started the process in November 2021. Six months later, she learned Morvant would be awarded the honor, the equivalent to the Congressional Medal of Honor in the United States, Morvant said.
At a ceremony she attended at the World War II Museum in New Orleans in September 2022, Consulate General Nathalie Beras presented Morvant with the French Legion of Honor.
“They pick people they think are worthy of it,” Morvant said. “Sometimes I think I’m not. But I’m a part of history.”
Morvant was inducted into the U.S. Army Air Corps in March 1943 and assigned to the 89th Compliment Squadron in the headquarters of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander In Europe.
“My duties were special missions,” he recalled, “such as bringing orders to different units on the front line when we couldn’t get ahold of them on their old-style telephones. I had to go find them and give them the orders from headquarters.”
As Gen. George Patton prepared for the Battle of the Bulge, Morvant one day was ordered to deliver gasoline to the troops. The mission lasted three days.
“I carried 2,500 gallons of gas from Le Havre to Belgium, picked up an empty truck and brought it back [full] the next day,” Morvant said in a September 2022 story.
Upon his return to headquarters, “I was told to meet with a certain colonel,” he said. “I thought I had done something wrong, but Gen. Patton had sent me a Bronze Star.”
The fourth-highest award a service member can receive, the Bronze Star is awarded for meritorious service in an armed conflict.
Morvant encountered Eisenhower one day, backing against a wall and saluting the general who would become president. Eisenhower stopped, turned to Morvant and said, ‘Soldier, you don’t need to salute officers in headquarters,’ he recalled.
He considers himself privileged to have seen in person Eisenhower and Patton along with French Gen. Charles de Gaulle, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and British Gen. Bernard Montgomery.
Lozano’s quest to honor veterans led her to the non-profit Best Defense Foundation, which pays for veterans to return to the battlegrounds upon which they served.
In June, Morvant was among 43 U.S. veterans who, thanks to the Best Defense Foundation, were flown to Europe for the 79th anniversary of the June 6, 1944, landing on the beaches of Normandy. Morvant arrived a month after the invasion.
This June he visited military cemeteries and museums, along with Omaha and Utah beaches where American troops fought to retake France from German troops.
“The last time I passed through that was during the war,” Morvant said. “Everything was devastated. Now, everything is fixed and neat and pretty.
“It’s a different world,” he said. Adding, “It’s important to be able to make the young generations of France aware of what went on for their freedom.”
One of the American veterans on that trip, Lozano said, died a few weeks after returning home.
Next June will be the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Lozano fears it will be the last significant remembrance ceremony of the invasion that changed the course of the war and the world.
For more information about applying for the French Legion of Honor, contact Lorzan at [email protected].
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