Eighty years after his uncle's B-17 was shot down over Brittany, John Breidenthal flew from Kansas to find the field where Leslie landed. This is the story of that day.
Some tours are more than a journey through landscapes. Some are journeys through time, through loss, through family memory, through the kind of history that doesn’t live in museums but in farm fields, in village archives, and in the hands of passionate local historians.
The story of John Breidenthal is one of them.
A B-17 Over Brittany, September 1943
It began with an email, a simple request from a man in Kansas, USA, looking for traces of his uncle Leslie, a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot who had flown a mission over Brittany on September 23rd, 1943.
Under orders from the United States Air Force, Leslie’s aircraft had taken off from southern England with a single objective: bomb the aerodrome of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande, then occupied by German forces.
Hit by anti-aircraft fire, the plane went down over the Breton countryside. All ten crew members managed to parachute to safety. Leslie landed in a farm called La Penthiatière, in the commune of Baulon, breaking both ankles on impact. He was taken prisoner by the Germans and held until the end of the war.
Eighty years later, his nephew wanted to find that field.
An Email That Changed Everything
When John’s message arrived in my inbox at Bellidays, I knew immediately this was no ordinary tour request.
I reached out to the ABSA, the Breton Association of Air Remembrance (Association Bretonne du Souvenir Aérien 39-45), and more specifically to Pierre Mahé, a board member living in Lassy who had personally met three other members of Leslie’s crew and had even exchanged letters with the pilot himself.
What followed was one of the most moving days I have experienced as a driver-guide in over 17 years.
Standing on the Ground Where History Happened
Standing on the very field where his uncle had parachuted eighty years before, John was visibly overwhelmed.
“I wasn’t prepared to discover so many fascinating facts when I first came here, on the very place where my uncle’s history unfolded.”
For a moment, no one spoke. The field looked like any other field in rural Brittany, green, quiet, unremarkable to the passing eye. But for John, it was sacred ground.
This is what private touring in Brittany can be. Not just châteaux and crêpes, but real stories, real ground, real emotion. History doesn’t live in museums alone. Sometimes it lives in a farm field in Baulon, waiting for the right person to come and find it.
The Associations That Keep the Memory Alive
One of the most powerful aspects of this experience was meeting Pierre Mahé and the members of the ABSA. These passionate volunteers have spent decades tracking down crash sites, interviewing survivors and witnesses, and preserving the memory of the airmen who flew over Brittany during the Second World War.
Thanks to their meticulous records, we were able to piece together the full story of Leslie’s mission, the flight path, the crash site, the names of the farm families who had witnessed it all. Connections that no travel agency could have made from behind a desk.
This is the power of local expertise and local networks. As a certified driver-guide rooted in Brittany for 17 years, I know who to call. And sometimes, knowing who to call makes all the difference.
Does Your Family Have a Connection to Brittany or Normandy?
Thousands of American, British, Canadian, and Commonwealth families have a link to northwestern France through the Second World War, whether through a pilot, a soldier, a nurse, or a prisoner of war. Many of those stories have never fully been told.
At Bellidays, we specialise in designing private, tailor-made tours that go far beyond the standard itinerary. If your family has a connection to this land, a name, a regiment, a crash site, a village, we can help you trace it.
With access to local historical associations, regional archives, and a deep knowledge of Brittany and Normandy’s wartime history, we will help you experience these places not as a tourist, but as someone who belongs here.
“We were destined to meet each other.”, John Breidenthal
That is the kind of journey we love to create.
