The front page of The Marietta Times from June 17,1940.

Some days are just sad.

And some days the newspaper’s front page reflects that sadness.

On June 17,1940, The Marietta Times had one of those headlines that just knocks you down a notch when you read it. FRANCE GIVES UP! Britain fighting alone as French ask Hitler for “Honorable” Peace.

Hitler’s conquest of Europe was nearly complete.

The first three paragraphs of the story are chilling to read, even 76 years later.

“France asked Adolf Hitler for “peach with honor” today, but Great Britain fought on alone.

“The Nazi fuehrer – described unofficially by Nazi sources as likely to accept nothing but complete capitulation – arranged to meet with Italian Premier Benito Mussolini to discuss the French proposal broadcast by Premier Marshal Henri Petain as German armies thundered southward through the beaten and exhausted ranks of Poilus.

“Leaders of the British government took the position that the fight must go on.”

France was the United States’ oldest European ally, helping the colonies gain freedom from Great Britain and was the first country to have diplomatic relations in 1778. They fought alongside the colonists until victory was assured. The treaty that ended the war, the treaty of Paris, was signed in 1783.

Marietta is named for the former Queen of France, Marie Antoinette.

The United States more than doubled in size when in 1803, France sold the United States the Louisiana territory. In 1886 France gifted the United States the Statue of Liberty, the ultimate symbol of freedom.

Yet on that June day 86 years ago, France was anything but free. Overrun by a tyrant and exhausted by a fight they could not win, they had declared Paris an open city three days prior to preventing the city from being destroyed.

A few weeks before 330,000 British, Belgian and French troops had been evacuated off the beach of the French city of Dunkirk during a risky operation when basically anything in England that could float was sent across the channel to pick up anyone that they could. More than 800 small crafts helped rescue the soldiers.

The United States of course was not in the war yet. We provided plenty of aid, assistance, and advice. We did not, however, provide the much-needed boots on the ground.

It would be more than a year before the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor and Germany declared, four days later, war on the United States.

To reverse the tide of tyranny would take a monumental global effort. Four years later, allied troops, more than 160,000 strong, returned to France for the largest invasion from the sea the world had ever seen. The push to Berlin started on the beaches of Normandy on June 6,1944.

Victory in Europe happened on May 8, 1945, after allied forces, pushing from multiple directions, completed their mission to topple Germany.

After giving up in 1940, France was once again free.

Art Smith is online manager of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel and The Marietta Times, he can be reached at asmith@newsandsentinel.com