A STAR AT A TIME HANDMADE WARTIME FLAG FLIES IN U.S.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

VAN NUYS - It starts with a neighbor walking across Wish Street in Van Nuys on the Fourth of July last year, wondering where Earl Gibbs got that old 48-star American flag he was flying from his front porch.

It's a long story, Earl says, but if you've got the time I'd love to tell it.

The old flag comes from a family living in Belgium, in the small town of Remouchamps. It was sewn in August of 1944 by a young, 21-year-old woman named Yolande Bernard.

She made it clandestinely, at night with the windows covered because if the Germans patrolling the streets saw her sewing an American flag, well, they probably would have put the whole family to death.

It was that important, though, this flag. She knew the worst was almost over after living in fear for five years - that the Americans were on their way to liberate her town, and she wanted to be ready to welcome them.

So she took a white sheet, cut it into strips, dyed half the strips red, and sewed them to the white strips.

Then she dyed a larger square blue for the field of stars, which were cut out of cardboard and covered in tin foil before being sewn on the flag.

After she was done, she hid the flag in the basement. And she waited.

A few weeks later, on the afternoon of Sept. 10, 1944, American soldiers entered Remouchamps on the heels of the Germans fleeing that morning.

The first thing they saw was Yolande Bernard's homemade American flag flying from her house. And a pretty young woman standing beside it with her family, smiling and waving.

``Yolande's 77 now, and still can't tell the story without crying,'' says Earl, who's 75 himself. ``She said it was the most emotional, happy day of her life. A day of freedom from fear.''

Earl would meet Yolande long after the war. It was 1980 and he and his wife, Ruth, had gone back to Remouchamps to visit the Hubin family, neighbors of the Bernards.

It was the Hubins who had gratefully opened their house for a week to Earl's platoon from the 745th Tank Battalion.

``We had been taken off the front lines for some rest, and we lived in the Hubins' three-story house - 24 men on two floors, and the Hubins, with their six kids, living on the second floor,'' Earl says.

``I had a terrible cold and was up that first night coughing. In the morning, Mrs. Hubin knocked on the door and said, 'Give this to the young soldier who was coughing all night.' It was cough medicine made with sulfur and cognac.

``She treated me like a son that week, and cried the morning we left,'' Earl said. ``After the war, we stayed close. My wife and I visited them and their kids, and Yolande's daughter came to visit us in the United States a few times after that.

``But it wasn't until our next visit to Belgium in 1996 that Yolande brought out her flag and told me the story. She said she was getting on in years, and she wanted me to take it home and give it to one of the GIs who had liberated her town.''

Earl never did find a GI who was there that day in Remouchamps 56 years ago, but he's about to do something even better.

Earl and Yolande's daughter, Veronique Schuermans, are about to give it to an entire division of soldiers who were liberating Belgium towns at the end of 1944.

Later this month, in a ceremony at the First Infantry Division Museum in Wheaton, Ill., Yolande's 48-star, homemade flag will be handed over to museum curator John Votaw for display for all the World War II soldiers who come here to pay homage and remember.

``Growing up, my mother and father always talked to us kids about the Americans, and what they did for us,'' said Veronique, by phone from Belgium on Monday.

``And now to have this opportunity to come to America and present my mother's flag to them, well, we are all very, very excited about it,'' she said.

And that's the story behind the old, 48-star flag Earl Gibbs was flying from his front porch last Fourth of July.

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Photo: Van Nuys resident Earl Gibbs will present this flag, handmade in secret in Belgium, to a World War II museum.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer