My father, the hero
“The war is going to start,” Ren’s father said.
Ren knew it was true. Only hours ago he had stepped off a train from Paris, where the 15 year old had been attending a Boy Scout camp. His days of bicycle riding near the Normandy beaches had been cut short by the call from his father – Lt. Col. Louis J. Fortier. Fortier wanted his son to come home quickly and wouldn’t say why on the phone. But now, Ren knew.
His train delivered him to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in August 1939 – back to the lush American Embassy with his mother, sister and father, the U.S. Military Attache to Yugoslavia. In those days, there was no Central Intelligence Agency, but there was a global intelligence community and Col. Fortier held a membership. Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, just days after Ren arrived, and Col. Fortier knew it was coming. He also assumed France would be next, and the country wasn’t ready.
Ren saw it too. On his trip back to Belgrade, his eyes had been opened. He had seen Europe in migration – a surge of distressed flooding the streets, brought on by the storms of both impending and ongoing war. The Spanish were running from their dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, and the Norwegians from the German army. The French, in the middle, had nowhere to run. More importantly, they couldn’t. All Ren saw at French train stations were crippled and masked men disfigured by the Great War. In town, all he saw were women. A country’s working class had died in the trenches, and he was alone on a train with what those muddy holes had spit back into society. It made him sad.
It was a long ride, and every click in the tracks signaled things were going to change. No more afternoons hiding from the rain in the empty concrete shells of the Maginot Line, no more camping on the grassy hills in the French countryside. Ren’s father knew those places were no longer safe, and he was right. In time, their beauty would transition from serene to haunting. In time, they would be replaced by fields of white crosses.
Now 88, Ren, or Louis Renshaw Fortier, a Mountain Brook resident, looks back on those moments and remembers, above anything else, the wisdom and heroism of his father. He called Col. Fortier his best friend, and now understands that his father’s subversive way of teaching him military intelligence prepared him for the rest of his life, which includes an education at the United States Military Academy at West Point and service as an officer in the Pacific Conflict in 1945.
After his own military career, he authored Before the Fields of Crosses. The book, published in 2003, documents not only the events of World War II, but also how both he and his father saw – and lived – them.
“I really wanted to leave his legacy for my children, I wanted them to know about their remarkable grandfather,” Fortier said, sitting in his living room across from his wife, Peggy. “On the surface it looked like he had a regular military career, but until you get into all this, you wouldn’t know about his, really, three years of glory.”
For his actions between the years of 1939-1941, Col. Fortier would become known as “The Man Who Saved Belgrade.” In 1941, after sending his children across war-torn Europe to board a ship bound for America, Col. Fortier would throw himself into harm’s way, and come out on the other side the recipient of the U.S. Army’s Distinguished Service Medal.
“Lt. Col. Fortier was charged with the mission of making contact…with the German authorities in Hungary with a view to ending the bombardment of Belgrade,” reports militarytimes.com on Fortier’s receiving the medal. “From April 8 to April 12 (1941), Lt. Col. Fortier drove through battle and devastated areas under frequent bombing and aerial machine gun fire, and, in order to enter Hungary, traveled on horse, on foot and on a railroad section handcar through 30 kilometers of the demolished zone.”
This is the father Ren remembers, the one he reported back to after peeking at airplane parts hidden under tarpaulins on barges sailing the Danube River. This story – and many more – is what he wanted his children to know, and he reports it eloquently in Crosses.
Ren married Peggy after losing his first wife, Maureen, to a 14-year battle with lymphoma. He and Peggy now split their time between Mountain Brook and Virginia, where they have a summer home that’s decorated with remnants of both Ren’s and his father’s careers.
Ren said he doesn’t feel his life is worth writing about, that his father was the hero and he earned the words in the book. But maybe, one day, when his children stare long enough at the Japanese sword and marriage coat hanging on the wall, they’ll pick up a pen as he did.