6-Year-Old WWII Resistance Agent Finally Gets His Due
Little Marcel Pinte followed orders, crossing enemy lines to pass messages in Nazi-occupied France.
In the end he was killed by friendly fire at the age of 6, likely the youngest member of the French Resistance during World War II.
Marcel, code-named Quinquin, has only recently gotten his due.
Just last week his name was inscribed on a monument to the war dead in Aixe-sur-Vienne, a small town in central France near his zone of operation.
He was among the fallen honored Wednesday when France commemorated the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice ending World War I and paid homage to all those who have died for the nation.
The little boy lived at the heart of the “army of the shadows,” as Resistance fighters were known, led from London by Gen. Charles de Gaulle and on the ground in France by his father, Eugene Pinte, a local Resistance chief who set up an operations center at a farm outside Aixe-sur-Vienne.
His farmhouse received coded messages from London and parachute drops of supplies in a field nearby.
A street was named after the father, code-named Athos, four years ago for leading the liberation of the town.
Marcel, the youngest of five children, was put to work helping fighters with an array of tasks.
He could, for instance, slip away to nearby farms to pass messages, according to accounts published by a relative, Alexandre Bremaud.
Nicknamed Quinquin by Resistance fighters after a children’s song in northern France where he was born, he served as a veritable liaison agent.
“There was a bit of carefreeness because of his age. A resident told his father to be careful because Marcel sometimes sang songs learned from fighters,” the newspaper Le Figaro quoted Bremaud as saying.
But on Aug. 19, 1944, a sensitive automatic pistol dropped from a parachute of arms and munitions into a field let off a spray of gunfire.
Marcel was hit and died.
The day before, his father had led a rout of the enemy converging on Aixe-sur-Vienne.
“Very touched by the disappearance of his son … the commander did not change plans and continued encircling [nearby] Limoges with his troops,” read a speech delivered by Bremaud and another family relative, Marc Pinte, for the inauguration in 2016 of the street named Eugene Pinte.
Top Resistance commanders attended the funeral of the child on the morning of Aug. 21, 1944.
His father helped liberate Limoges that evening.
Several days after Marcel’s death, containers fell in the field in a final drop, but the parachutes were black.
“The British knew that the little Marcel played a real role. This parachute was the calling card sent to the family,” Marc Pinte said.
An official card for “volunteer combatants of the Resistance” was delivered on Aug. 12, 2013, in the name of “Monsieur Marcel Pinte” by the National Office of Former Combatants and War Victims.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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