It was a family reunion of sorts for Mary Agnes Westbrook July 10 as she traveled with eight relatives to France to honor the memory of her fighter pilot uncle.

Westbrook, 63, a retired math supervisor for Warren County Schools, made the trip to the French village of Landisacq, in Lower Normandy, France, to dedicate a plaque and memorial to Maj. William G. Coleman, commander of the 511th Bomber Squadron, shot down flying a support mission Aug. 15, 1944.

“I only knew of him from stories my mother would tell through the years,” said Westbrook, joined on the trip by her sister Joan Pepper of Quitman; cousins Elizabeth Sanders and Ryan Smith, both of Houston; Charles Coleman of Shreveport, John Sanders of Dallas, Jean Jackson of Vienna, Va.; and her aunt and uncle Lela Coleman Smith and Will Smith, both of Houston.

The memorial is just in front of the village’s city hall and features a plaque with Coleman’s likeness and a passage in French that, when translated, includes the words, “death for our liberty.”

A large piece of Coleman’s plane, a P-47 Thunderbolt fighter, was erected near the plaque and honored by about 100 townspeople from the village and the mayor of Landisacq, Herve Lemancel.

After her aunt Lela unveiled the American flag covering the plaque, local children from the town laid flowers and helped sing both the American and French national anthems.

“That impressed me about the ceremony, how many young people were involved,” Westbrook said.

The group of nine also visited the historic landing sites of Omaha Beach, Gold Beach and Utah Beach and took in the spectacular views of St. Marie Eglise (Church) and the Airborne Museum near the church, where bright flowers are arranged in the emblems of the Screaming Eagles, a paratrooper group born during World War II.

Maj. Coleman was one of nine children, and one of three who served in World War II in the Pacific theater. He left Mississippi State College in 1940 to enter the military. Leaving from San Francisco for the Pacific, he sent a baby spoon to Westbrook’s mother.

After a year of flying missions in the war, Coleman married in November 1942 and had a chance to sit out the rest of the war. He returned to command the 511th Fighter Bomber Squadron, however, and received the Silver Star, the third highest award in the nation, just two weeks before his last flight.

Coleman was shot down at 7,000 feet above the French countryside, near the town of Avranches, supporting a rapidly progressing British armored division. He was 23.

Coleman, who grew up in Carter in Yazoo County, tried to parachute from the doomed fighter plane. His remains were identified several weeks later from a thumbprint taken from his body and buried in Brittany American Cemetery, now called Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial.

In August 2004, Tony Lemardely of the Normandy Association of Air Remembrance learned from Andre and Madeleine Baloche, a couple owning land near the crash site, that a fighter had crashed on part of the property.

Lemardely then used a Geiger counter to detect the buried plane wreckage.

“He used it to locate the wreckage and kind of directed the digging,” Westbrook said.

Seven of the eight guns, part of the engine and numerous smaller pieces of the aircraft survived the decades underground and were used to identify them as Coleman’s plane, particularly a serial number found on one of the machine guns.

As a 2-month-old child, Westbrook was given the baby spoon inscribed with the Golden Gate Bridge. Today she cherishes it.

“I was never really up on World War II history up to now,” she said. “I plan on it now.”