Leon Gauthier, the last survivor of a unit of French commandos who landed with hundreds of thousands of Allied forces on French shores on D-Day to liberate France and Europe from Nazi forces, died today aged 100 years old.

Gauthier was one of 177 commandos (green berets) who landed on the beaches of Normandy facing the fierce defensive line of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi forces in 1944.

French President Emmanuel Macron called Gauthier and his fellow fighters “heroes of Liberation”.

“We will not forget him,” Macron tweeted.

Just last month, Gauthier handed a Marine trainee his green beret at a parade in Colville-Montgomery, near where he had landed on the beach code-named Sword Beach in a barrage of enemy fire. Gauthier was 21 years old.

In a touching moment during that ceremony, the young Marine knelt down so Gauthier, who was in a wheelchair, could straighten his beret.

Gauthier spoke to Reuters in 2019 from his home, several hundred meters from the remains of a German stronghold that he and his fellow soldiers under French Captain Philippe Kiefer’s special forces had captured before advancing inland.

He recalled being too young to join the military when Hitler’s forces occupied France in World War II, so he enlisted in the Navy.

He was on one of the last French warships to sail for Britain to join General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces as the Germans advanced into the northern half of French territory in 1940.

Decades later he still struggled with memories of the violence of the war.

“War is a misery. It hasn’t been long, and maybe you think this is dumb, but I was thinking “‘maybe I killed a young lad, maybe I left children orphans, maybe I made a widow or a mother cry,'” he said.

“I didn’t want this. I am not a bad person. You kill a man who has done nothing to you. That’s what war is like and you do it for your country.”