A story from Normandy

Remembering the fallen
THE P-47 THUNDERBOLT, piloted by 27-year-old 2nd Lt. Jesse Mountjoy of Woodford County had been hit by German ground fire and was going down over the rolling farmland of Normandy.
That summer afternoon in 1944, only a few weeks after D-Day, Mountjoy’s 509th fighter squadron was strafing German positions in advance of the Allied ground assault. He was flying too low to bail out when his plane was hit.
Frenchman Leon Bouillon was working in the woodshop at his farm, La Cleriotiere, that afternoon. His son, Claude, 8, was helping his mother feed the chickens, while another son, Louis, 11, was in the woodshop helping his father when Mountjoy’s plane appeared barely above the treetops—its engine popping and trailing black smoke.
Mountjoy tried to land in a nearby field, but ran out of space. He nosed the plane upward at the last second to avoid hitting the woodshop, then struck a tree and utility pole before crashing into an embankment.
Bouillon and two farm workers rushed to the scene to find the pilot’s lifeless body near the wreckage. After carrying him back to the woodshop, they recovered and hid his identification tags and personal papers, then made a coffin and buried him in the nearby apple orchard.
Back in Kentucky, Mountjoy’s son, Jesse Mountjoy Jr., was only 15 months old and with his mother, Runelle, at her parents’ farm in Hart County when his father was killed. Many years later, with help from a World War II veteran, Mountjoy, an attorney in Owensboro and resident of rural Daviess County, was connected with a French researcher who knew exactly where his father’s plane had crashed.
In 2001, Jesse Mountjoy Jr. and his wife, Helen, made their first visit to the site near the village of La Haye-Pesnel in northwest Normandy.
To their surprise, the farm on which his father’s plane crashed is still owned by the Bouillon family. And although Leon has passed away, his son, Claude, who witnessed the crash at age 8, still lives at the farm and can recount many details of that day.
The surrounding countryside reminded him of “the old Mountjoy farm” in his father’s native Woodford County, Mountjoy recalls.
The French Resistance photo of the crash scene, which the Bouillon family had saved all these years, was given to Jesse, along with a handle from the bullet and flak-riddled ordnance bay door of his father’s plane. Jesse was brought to tears when he touched the door.
The Mountjoys were honored by the French Veterans and the village of La Haye-Pesnel, where a bronze marker memorializes the pilot’s sacrifice. His remains have been reinterred in Lexington.
Jesse and Helen Mountjoy, longtime consumer-members of both Kenergy and Meade RECC, have been to Normandy twice, and one of their sons and a grandson have made another visit to the Bouillons’ farm.
“They are our family,” Jesse says. “They are the extended Mountjoys. Or I guess we’re the extended Bouillons.”