BOBBY ARDOIN Editor/Consulting Writer
As Memorial Day and the 80th commemoration of the Allied invasion of Europe approach, members of a St. Landry Parish Gold Star family are again reminded of their relative who has never returned from World War II after his 1944 landing in Normandy.
Francis Vidrine of Grand Prairie was a 24-year-old U.S. Army sergeant who entered Europe five days after the June 6 invasion of Normandy and presumably killed in combat two months later during the early moments of a fierce German counter offensive near a rural French village.
Since then the remains of Vidrine, awarded by the military with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star, have never been authenticated after he was later declared killed in action on Aug. 7 near Mortain, France.
There’s an empty burial plot in the St. Peter’s Church Cemetery in Grand Prairie awaiting the return of Francis Vidrine, says cousin Kenneth Vidrine, but celebrating that moment has been deferred for nearly eight decades as U.S. officials with military forensic teams have been unable to positively identify where Vidrine is buried.
“It was his mother’s wish that Francis would be brought back here. His death was something that troubled his mother (Elizabeth Dupre Vidrine) her whole life. It was always tough for her. Francis was killed on his daddy’s birthday,” Kenneth Vidrine said.
Family members were provided with a potential semblance of hope over three years ago when Kenneth Vidrine said the family was notified by an Army representative that the remains of Francis Vidrine and his dog tags had been possibly located inside a mass gravesite around the Mortain area.
That notification for the Vidrine family however eventually turned out to be premature and apparently unsubstantiated, creating an emotional letdown for the Vidrine family and Bernadine Fontenot, the remaining sibling of Francis Vidrine.
“That was tough and it was really heartbreaking to think that finally after all these years, thinking Francis had been found and we would finally get to bring him home. There is still hope that someday he might be brought back to Grand Prairie. I know a lot of us have been praying for that for a long time,” said Kenneth Vidrine, a member of the Krotz Springs Port Commission.
In a Feb. 8, 2022 letter to U.S. Representative Mike Johnson, now speaker of the House of Representatives, Kelly McKeague, Director of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency wrote to Johnson that DPAA officials were unaware that any discovery of Vidrine or his dog tags had been made by Army officials in 2021.
Although a number of his relatives have submitted DNA samples to the DPAA, McKeague indicated in the letter that, “Sergeant Vidrine has not been associated (with) any unknown remains.”
It’s not that military officials have abandoned a search for Vidirine,
McKeague says in the same letter to Johnson that the case of Sergeant Vidrine is considered an “active pursuit” case. “Any new information we find will be sent to his family through the U.S. Army,” McKeague noted in the letter.
Taking An Active Role
Kenneth Vidrine said that Rev. Jason Vidrine, a priest with the Diocese of Lafayette, has twice visited the area where Francis Vidrine died in combat.
“On one of his trips (by Father Jason Vidrine), the people in a town nearby, actually celebrated a mass for (Francis Vidrine), so the people living there are aware of (Francis Vidrine),” Kenneth Vidrine said.
During an interview in March, 2021, Jason Vidrine said that in 2003 he became aware of Francis Vidrine story as he assembled the genealogy of the Vidrine family.
Jason Vidrine said as he began putting pieces of the family history together, he became interested in locating military records for Francis Vidirine.
Military Background
U. S. Army records show that Francis Vidrine entered the Army on Sept. 12, 1942 and served in Europe with Company A of the 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division in the European Theater.
Records also show that eyewitnesses have said that Vidrine died in action near the village of Saint-Barthelemy in Normandy, France. Vidrine is now memorialized on the Wall of The Missing at the Brittany American Cemetery in St. Mortain, France.
On August 6, 1944, Vidrine and the 30th Infantry were assigned to hold a defensive line which stretched from Saint-Barthelemy south and east of Mortain.
Around midnight the next morning, the German Army accompanied by tanks, infantry and artillery, began an offensive in order to recapture Mortain and drive a wedge between the First and Third U.S. Armies in Normandy.
The Germans moved quickly through a morning fog and surrounded elements of the 117th Infantry Regiment that included Vidrine’s “A” Company. Vidrine was an assistant squad leader as German tanks sliced through his nearby position.
Vidrine, according to Army witnesses, was probably killed by machine guns mounted on the German panzer tanks as Vidrine sought refuge by moving through a gap in a hedgerow north of Saint-Barthelemy.
The 117th Infantry Regiment experienced heavy losses Aug. 7, with 350 casualties. The 30th Infantry Division had more than 600 casualties that day, according to military accounts.
German troops occupied the former Company A location around Saint Barthelemy after Aug. 7 for several days, so U.S. Army recovery teams were unable to immediately process the location where Vidrine had been killed.
None of the Army recovery investigations that included interviewing villagers around Mortain beginning in 1946, have provided any information about where Vidrine might be located.
