Andrés Pereiro: the story of a Spaniard who fought in the US Army in World War II

@DefAviation ES 11·07·2021 · 23:00 0

Although Spain was a neutral country in World War II, some Spaniards fought on different fronts of that war, including some Galician emigrants.

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In 2017 you could already see in Defense and Aviation two excellent reports from the Youtube channel Tropa Guripa about the Galician Manuel Otero Martínez, who emigrated to the United States after the Spanish Civil War and who fought and died in the Normandy Landings. Today Tropa Guripa has published the story of another Galician emigrant who fell in that conflict: Andrés Pereiro García, a native of Mera, in the Coruña town of Oleiros, who emigrated to the US with his mother and older brother as a result of the Spanish Civil War, integrating very well there.

After the entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941, Andrés - who had changed his name to Andrew - was called up, enlisting in the 29th Infantry Division of the US Army, a unit known as the Blue & Gray Division because its emblem is a yin and yang that includes those colors, to indicate that its soldiers came from the former two sides of the Civil War from the USA.

Andrés did not yet have American nationality when he enlisted, and without a doubt one of the incentives for not going to Argentina with relatives (as his mother suggested) was to obtain citizenship of the country that had welcomed him. . He died fighting in Brittany (France) on September 1, 1944, aged 21. He is buried in the British-American Military Cemetery of Saint-James, in Normandy, near the northeastern tip of Brittany, where the remains of 4,410 Allied soldiers who fought in the Normandy and Brittany campaigns in 1944 rest.

The video published today by Tropa Guripa includes the testimony of Pepe Conchado García, Andrés' cousin, as well as various photographs and documents with which the story of his departure to the United States, his enlistment and his death in combat (the video is in Spanish but has English subtitles, you can activate them in the bottom bar of the player):

Congratulations to Óscar Galansky, director of Tropa Guripa, for the excellent documentation work that he has done for this report, which deserves a few awards for recovering the memory of a compatriot who fought in World War II. Reports as valuable as this one should be broadcast in the major media and thus receive the attention they deserve.