Yesterday I was standing in front of the guest book at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial trying to think of something to write in it, and I came up with the following: "Never more proud of my country than here and now," followed by my name and my home town. That was how I felt throughout my visit to Normandy over the last few days. Time and again I felt more proud than I ever have of my country, and appreciative of what a privilege it is to call it home. Those who know me well know that I have frequently been a critic of the United States, particularly of its interactions with the rest of the world. I will never stop telling the hard and objective truth as I see it, nor will I ever stop trying to do my part to make our country better, but I gained a new appreciation of how great America is as I saw in person the living history of one of its great deeds, the liberation of France during World War II, there in Normandy.
I spent three days in Normandy, two of them around the D-Day beaches and the various WWII sights, and one of them at Mont Saint Michel. I actually visited Mont Saint Michel first on my way up from the Loire, but since I'm already on the topic of the WWII sights, I'll talk about those first and then say a bit about Mont Saint Michel after. As anyone who has read much of this blog has probably noticed, I like to interweave the history of the places I visit along with my accounts of what I saw and did, but for Normandy it seems unnecessary to go into my usual level of detail. I think most know as well as I do what was going on in Normandy in 1944 and why the United States sent its armies there; Nazi Germany had seized control of most of continental Europe and it was up to the United States and is European allies to liberate it. The beaches of Normandy, on the northern coast of France, were the chosen starting point of the Allied invasion. In the early morning hours of June 6th, 1944, more than 150,000 Allied troops landed there and successfully established a beachhead from which they would drive the Nazis back and achieve victory in Europe. That much is known to most Americans, but most never get to see Normandy, where one has the privilege of experiencing that history firsthand and of seeing in person the setting of one of the defining moments in American history. Going there and standing on the cliffs and beaches, walking through the bunkers and seeings the guns and the graves of thousands of young people who gave everything for the cause of liberty, one gains an appreciation for the magnitude of the American effort and the great, though grim, accomplishment which came as a result.
Without planning it, I ended up touring the D-Day sights in probably the most ideal order possible, starting with the Utah Beach Landing Museum. Utah Beach was one of the five landing points of the D-Day invasion, where the U.S. Army 4th Infantry Division landed and, due to ocean currents misdirecting them from their intended target, ended up meeting relatively light enemy resistance. The museum succinctly and engagingly tells the story, with an assortment of documents and photos and videos and artifacts, of the events leading up to the war, the progress of the war up to the D-Day invasion, the preparations for the invasion, and then of the invasion itself. At the Utah Beach museum you get a particularly good idea of how complex the invasion really was and how precisely the many different parts of the invasion force had to work together to pull it off. For example, crews on the final bomber runs over the German coastal defenses were given two minute windows to drop their payloads which had to be precisely adhered to, because within five minutes the first troops were landing on the beaches. Before troops had even made landfall, supplies and equipment were en route across the English Channel to support them. Naval artillery, troop and supply transports, tanks, infantry, aerial fighters and bombers, support divisions, communications, command, etc., all had to operate cohesively in order for the invasion to succeed. Somehow they made it all work, and at Utah Beach you get a pretty good idea of how they did it. At the end of the museum you get a chance to walk out on the beach itself. Were it not for the knowledge that you come with, you would never know that a battle had taken place there. It is a peaceful and beautiful stretch of land, but made all the more poignant knowing what occurred there nearly 70 years ago. It was at Utah Beach that I realized that the beaches of Normandy look very much like the beaches back home on the Oregon and Washington coasts. It would have looked familiar to any Oregonian or Washingtonian who landed there on D-Day, although the familiarity of the scene ws probably the furthest thing from their minds.
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| Utah Beach Landing Museum - a diagram of the invasion points |
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| Utah Beach Landing Museum - dresses sewn by French civilians |
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| Utah Beach Landing Museum - landing craft |
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| Utah Beach |
After Utah Beach my next destination was Pointe du Hoc, a place where the U.S. Army Rangers executed a special mission on D-Day to disable a German artillery battery overlooking the Normandy coast. The artillery at Pointe du Hoc was considered particularly dangerous to the invasion because its position would have allowed it to rain down shells on a significant portion of the landing zones and also on Allied ships close to shore. In the days and weeks leading up to D-Day, Allied bombers had dropped millions of pounds of explosives down on German artillery batteries like the one at Pointe du Hoc to try to destroy or disable them, but the German defenses proved resilient. As a result, however, Pointe du Hoc is dotted with gigantic bomb craters, which along with the defensive emplacements there makes it a great place to get a feel for what the battle looked like for the men who fought that day. The artillery battery was up on top of a high cliff, and it was the task of the Rangers to scale that cliff and then assault the emplacement and disable the guns. Using grappling hooks and ladders, even in the face of German defensive fire, the Rangers made it to the top and secured the battery, suffering significant casualties. When they got to the top, however, they found that the guns had been moved further inland, but they did ultimately accomplish their mission and disable the artillery, removing the threat to the troops fighting for a toehold down on the beaches. Pointe du Hoc made a great second stop on my Normandy tour because it shed a different and more intimate light on the D-Day invasion, giving you a better idea of what the fight was like for the boots on the ground than probably any other sight in Normandy.
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| The cliffs at Pointe du Hoc |
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| A bunker at Pointe du Hoc |
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| German artillery - this isn't at Pointe du Hoc, but this is the type of gun the Rangers were trying to disable |
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| Aerial photo of the bombing at Pointe du Hoc, showing what caused the massive craters |
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| A crater at Pointe du Hoc |
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| The battlefield at Pointe du Hoc |
After Pointe du Hoc I had one other biggie to check out, the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. The cemetery is the final resting place for more than 9,000 American soldiers killed during World War II. It ended up being such a great sight that I actually visited it twice, once to stroll through the cemetery itself and once more to tour the excellent museum. The cemetery is operated and maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission on land donated by the French government for its use, and the site has got to be one of the most scenic and peaceful I've ever seen. I found myself constantly thinking that I could not imagine a more beautiful place to be laid to rest. The site is situated on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach, another of the landing points on D-Day. The cemetery is appropriately simple and somber, just a sea of headstones surrounded by trees, flowers, chirping birds, a light marine breeze and the dull roar of the surf nearby. The headstones are all perfectly uniform, mostly white crosses with a few white Stars of David for Jewish soldiers, and each bearing the name, rank, unit, home state, and date of death of the person buried there. An especially moving feature of the cemetery is the many graves of unknown soldiers, which are all marked with the inscription "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God". The cemetery is an incredibly moving sight, on par with places I've written about like Oradour-sur-Glane or Dachau, only with a more reverent, pride-inducing sobriety than the sorrow those places evoke. The cemetery had the greatest concentration of Americans I had seen in Normandy so far (and, understandably, Normandy had the greatest concentration of Americans I've seen on this trip so far), and most other visitors seemed to feel a similar reverence and pride. I took some time to wander among the rows of headstones and read the names and tried to imagine what those men would have been like in life. It occurred to me that although they lost their lives nearly 70 years ago, most of them were much younger at the time than I am now, and perhaps more than anything else that thought made their sacrifice the most real for me.
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| An unknown soldier's headstone at the Normandy American Cemetery |
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| The Normandy American Cemetery |
It's getting into the early morning hours here in Paris and I have a full day ahead of me tomorrow, so I'm going to abruptly stop this post here. There is so much more I could say about my days in Normandy, but time is short. I do hope I can find time to write a bit about Mont Saint Michel, which was a unique and spiritually moving sight. I spent a few hours today in Paris and I'll be here for the next two days, so I know I won't lack for material to write about in the coming days. As always thanks for reading, and until next time, bonne journée et au revoir.
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