Hill 147
Hill 192
St. Lo
Arromanches
Point du Hoc
Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, Sword
Pegasus Bridge
Caen
Bereigny
Bastogne
St. Mere-Eglise
Le Cambe
Beny-sur-Mer
Bayeux
Colleville-sur-Mer
From vantage points to cemeteries, today is, once again, that day we remember the invasion of Normandy. Some of those words and numbers are probably terribly foreign. 147 and 192, for instance, or only memorable when connected to another word - Arromanches? Mulberry Harbors.
11 years ago, I traveled to the invasion beaches and took a class in the invasion from the British perspective. Lectured by Gary Sheffield, Lynette Nusbacher, Andy Wiest, and other luminaries of the historical canon, we were staggeringly lucky to have such an informative and talented group of scholars to augment our second-hand knowledge with their lectures and primary sources. It is impossible, for instance, to understand the fear of young soldiers splashing onto the beach at Omaha. But moving steadily up the beach to get away from one of the fastest rising tides in the world, with your back to a
machine gun nest, reading those soldiers' letters home?
And then, looking down from the nest to see what a clear shot the Germans had to mow down the invasion force? We were able to approximate some small understanding.
We climbed hill 192 and traipsed through the edge of a wheat field to dig up a piece of an 88 shell.
There were tanks to climb at the
Falaise Pocket.
We went to Arromanches and looked down at the Mulberry harbors, chased the rabbits on a rainy day at Point du Hoc.
We struggled to understand the
destruction left there as such a stark reminder of how good we humans are at destroying ourselves.
We drank cider at
Pegasus Bridge while we read the glider pilots' memorials there. The beaches, of course, we traversed in order and remembered in their own peculiar rhythm - Utah, Omaha, GoldJunoSword. St. Mere-Eglise was a hot and windy afternoon, standing in the courtyard under John Steele's statue.
Then there were the cemeteries. It does us no good to glorify the action unless we seriously consider the loss and regret it, then work to avoid it - a mistake we make all too often in America.
Le Cambe - the smallest plot of land with the largest number of people, a little bit of Germany in France, where men are buried two and three deep without names (Drei Deutsches Soldaten) and with.
Bayeux, of England, and
Colleville-sur-Mer, of America.
Beautiful expanses of coastal France, filled with the bones of men from around the world. What started with finite heights - the view of a wheat field from 192 feet up a nettle-covered hill - ended with infinite sorrow and loss planted and strewn across the blood-soaked battlefields of Normandy.