A Return to Vivoin

I found the following two real photo postcards together at a postcard show/sale. They appeared to have been taken in France during WWI, as both had the customary French postcard backs for that time and place. The subjects seemed to be American soldiers in a French village. One of the cards had the word "VIVOIN" written in ink on the front of the card; however, there was no other identifying information.   

Here's a detail from the first photo. Look at the French citizens on the left and note the young girl in the large white hat with the ribbon on it.

And a detail from the second photo:

I really like the pose of the automobile driver––everything about him says, "France, 1918." Do you see the girl with the white hat again, standing beside her mother?  It seems that the soldiers were checking out the town, and the citizens were taking a look at the American doughboys.  Imagine the conversations that took place or were attempted that day! 

The obvious first step toward investigating these images was to look up the name Vivoin. As I suspected, it's a small French village, or more appropriately, in French terms, a commune in western France in the region of Pays-de-la-Loire. Saint-Nazaire, southwest of Vivoin, became a critical WWI debarkation port for US troops, especially in the war's latter stages.

The United States entered WWI in 1917, and American troops began to arrive in France as the American Expeditionary Force in June of that year, but they did not enter the front-line trenches in divisional strength until October. Vivoin is far from the Western Front, but the troops in these photos likely would have been on their way to or from the front. French, British, Canadian, and Russian troops had been engaged in desperate and bloody battles against the Germans since 1914, and the arrival of the Americans provided a much-needed enhancement in troops, equipment, and morale.

(See 2021 Addendum below. These photos may date to 1919, as American troops were headed     home.)

To confirm that these photos were indeed of Vivoin, France, I turned to Google Earth. I am still amazed by this piece of technology.  I remember standing in the backyard with my Dad in 1957, watching Sputnik cross the sky. In the 1980s, Dad, a pilot, was delighted to show us the LORAN's navigation uses–a recently-available, long-range radio navigation system. He was a fast learner on the home computer in its early days, and he saw the coming development of GPS, but he never saw anything like Google Maps or Google Earth.  


Google Maps and Google Earth allow earth-bound folks like me to fly––as if on a magic carpet––and land almost anywhere. Since Vivoin is a small community, I transported myself to the largest intersection in town and took a look around.


Here's what I found on my first attempt:

Look familiar?  Here's a slightly different view:

Well, okie, dokie then––some details have changed––but look at the roofs, the dormers, the brick details on the top of the corner building, and the placement of windows and doors. It's the same place. We are looking north on Rue de Doucelles in Vivoin, France.


I had one of the photos confirmed as to place, but I wanted to see if I could locate the other one. I turned my virtual self 90 degrees east in Google Earth, and here's what I saw:

This is the church l’Eglise St. Hippolyte in Vivoin.   Here are two more views:  

That's it. We're there.  I can't read any patches or insignia on the 1918 uniforms, so we don't know who these troops were (See 5/7/21 note below) or anything about their war experiences or their lives after the war, but a century later, we can put ourselves on the same sidewalk.   Since the girl in the hat and her mother had moved from one corner to another, we know the photos were probably taken only minutes apart and that the citizens of Vivoin were following the soldiers as they took in the town. (As per the 5/7/21 note below, it is likely that these photos were snapped after the Armistice and that both soldiers and civilians were justifiably jubilant.)

We've now had a trip to France and through time, compliments of the person who snapped the photos in 1918, the soldier who brought them home, and the magic carpet of Google Earth.  I offer special thanks to the person who took a moment to write "Vivoin" on the photo.

If anyone from Vivoin sees this blog, I'd be happy to hear from you.

“I'll just tell you what I remember

 because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.”  

― Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else

May 7, 2021 Addendum:

Many thanks to Patrick Anstead of Fayetteville, NC, who provided the photograph below of Company F, 2nd Battalion, posing in front of the church in Vivoin sometime between November 1918 and February 1919. He notes that the photographs in my blog entry may be of the same unit. If any readers can shed light on that question, please leave a comment.

Company F saw heavy fighting on the Western Front and was part of the Allied Grand Offensive, also known as the Hundred Days Offensive (August to November 1918), which ended the First World War.  Mr. Anstead also provided this link: History, 119th Infantry, 60th Brigade, 30th Division, U.S.A., Operations in Belgium and France 1917-1919.    https://docsouth.unc.edu/wwi/conway/conway.html