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At one point, she said, “they asked if we wanted to give a sheet and take the parachute, but we said, ‘No, he needs to be buried with his parachute.’”
Four days later, he was buried at a temporary American military cemetery in the nearby town of Gorron, military records show. His body was later repatriated to Fairview Cemetery in his hometown of Carthage, N.Y.
The youngest of nine children, Saunders said Chaufty had grown up during the Great Depression. Unable to follow his dream of being a pilot in America, she said he had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force before World War II, before transferring to the U.S. Army Air Force after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Saunders said Bastien’s daughter Mireille, 61, reached out to her family via a genealogist who passed on a letter from her mother. Later they connected by email and a WhatsApp group she set up in February, she said.
Mireille said that it was “very moving to know that he was someone just like us but who died in the end, a hero.”
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