A local D-Day veteran was just reunited with a woman who risked her life to save him.
It was a moment more than 80 years in the making.
Warren Goss, 101, of Glenshaw, still remembers the night in Normandy when two teenage French sisters saved his life and the 81 years it took to thank them.
“Well, I got interested when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” Goss said. “That’s when everybody got interested.”
Goss was just sixteen when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and by eighteen, he was drafted.
“I was sort of glad to get away from the chicken farm,” Goss said.
He landed on Utah Beach in the early hours of June 6, 1944.
Days later, leading a night patrol, Goss stumbled into a gunfight with German infantry.
Separated from his men, he crawled alone through the dark until he reached a farmhouse where two French sisters made a choice that could have gotten them shot.
“It was so dark and then two girls ran out and just ‘Come, come, come.’ The bosch is in the house. They call them the bosch. Now the bosch is a dirty word for the Germans. I didn’t know that then but that’s what they told me.
Marie-Joseph and Simone Phillipe hid the young American soldier in their hayloft all night.
At dawn, they came back.
“They come back and just ‘come, come, you can leave, the Germans are gone.’”
Goss never saw the sisters again.
Marie died in 2016, but he learned Simone was still alive during a trip to Normandy in 2024, and this month he brought some of his family back to that same farm to meet her.
“I’d tell that story at home and people never believed it. I’d never seen them since then,” Goss said. “82 years later, when I went over to visit, that’s when I met them. It was like a miracle.”
Goss credits his survival to his faith.
His mother sent him “Psalm 91” before D-Day and prayed it every day until he came home.
Eight decades later, he says those two French sisters were the angels that the psalm promised.
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