These families are not mere visitors: they carry on a story that began here in December 1944. Coming from the United States and beyond, they walk in the footsteps of a father, a grandfather, an uncle — and the Ardennes welcome them as their own.
On the left, the face of 1944. On the right, those who carry his name today.
Left to right: Mary McPeak, his daughter; William Robert Hogan, his son; Bruce McPeak, his son-in-law; Haleigh and Samuel McPeak, his grandchildren — Samuel bears his grandfather’s name. Below, Susy Hogan, the colonel’s wife, holds the portrait of Samuel M. Hogan at the Task Force Hogan memorial in Rendeux.
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Stewart Walker, his son, at the Hogan’s 400 Memorial in Beffe — where his father held the column while Hogan searched for a way through.
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Norbert Schafer, his son, at the Hogan’s 400 Memorial in Beffe — a few kilometres from the farm where the 400 were welcomed on the morning of December 26.
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Ann-Marie Guidry lays a wreath at the Hogan’s 400 Memorial in Beffe, eighty years after the testimony Harry left behind.
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Four generations of the Porter family gathered at the Hogan’s 400 Memorial in Beffe, where he opened the way for the column on Christmas night.
Read his portraitFamily photos are published with their permission. More families will join this page — if yours is one of them, write to us.
Some encounters cannot be told in two lines. Here are six.
During the encirclement, Colonel Hogan gave Léa Téchy — who sheltered him at Marcouray — the figures of a nativity scene. Eighty years later, the Téchy family handed them back to the Hogan family. A tin, a few plaster figures, and two families finding each other again.
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Lucie Soreil was nine years old in December 1944. She saw the Americans arrive, then vanish into the Christmas night. Decades later, the Hogan family came to sit at her side — the witness and the descendants, in the same room.
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Monique Poncelet, daughter of Lucie Soreil, and Judy Cogdill Porter, daughter of S/Sgt Lee B. Porter. The daughter of the woman who watched the 400 pass through and the daughter of the man who walked at the head of the column, hand in hand before his portrait — eighty years after Christmas night.
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Monique and Nicole Poncelet, Lucie Soreil’s daughters, Judy Cogdill Porter and François Janssen gather around Lucie in front of her house. On her shoulders, a shawl: “Never forget”. She was nine years old when the 400 came through here.
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Nothing was planned. Judy Cogdill Porter and Stewart Walker found themselves there, on the same day, in the same place — the daughter of the sergeant who opened the column and the son of the major who held it together. She gave him a gift, at the roadside, between two jeeps.
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On the morning of December 26, 1944, the 400 reached Allied lines at Soy: hot soup, rations, and the reporters of the 165th Signal Photographic Company. Norbert Schafer came back to hold that photo in the very yard where it was taken.
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