D-Day

This day was reserved for a day-long tour of some of the major D-Day sites in Normandy.  For H and I, it was a highlight of our trip so far that we had been eagerly anticipating for a long time.  And it started off with this view from our hotel room--the harbor at Port-en-Bessin.

Our first stop was at the German gun battery at Longues-sur-mer.  Four big canons were here to guard the beaches along a 12-mile stretch of coastline in Normandy.  When the D-Day invasion began, one of the Allied warships, which were 5 miles out to sea at the time, miraculously managed to get a shell directly into this concrete bunker and blew the whole thing apart.  Minutes later, the gun housing next to this one got its roof blown off.  Then the soldiers manning the remaining two guns ran off.  (Smart guys.)  This was one of the few things that went the Allies' way on D-Day.

The second (damaged) German gun in the battery.

The third and fourth (both undamaged) abandoned gun locations.

Here is where some poor German soldier woke up one morning, after months of scanning the ocean and seeing absolutely nothing, only to see 6500 Allied ships on the horizon, and contemplate his own inevitable death later in the day.

Part of the D-Day invasion involved creating an artificial harbor at Arramanches.  Some of the concrete pontoons are still there, creating a semi-circle out into the ocean in the distance.  This is the view from the German gun battery at Longues-sur-mer.

The road leading inland from Omaha Beach.  In 1944, it was only half as narrow, just as windy, and with banks and hedges on either side.  That made it especially dangerous, because all the Germans had to do was blow up one vehicle and it blocked the entire road.  There was nowhere to move anything.

A memorial to the "Big Red One," the first division to land at Omaha Beach on D-Day

And this is Omaha Beach, looking west.  It was high tide the morning we visited, but it was low tide when the invasion began which (because of the huge tide differential in this part of the world) meant that the Allies had to run up a half-mile of sand just to get to this rock wall, making them sitting ducks for the Germans entrenched along the hillside.  Bad news all round, unless you could actually make it to this little rock wall, which provided the only protection from German fire.  Our guide told us it's the only time in military history that the safest position for an invading force was to go forward, not backward.

The view from that tiny rock wall up to where the German soldiers were located, on top of the hill.

View from the German position down to the beach.  It took the Allies pretty much the whole day to take this hill.

The US military cemetery at Omaha Beach was especially moving, even to me (an non-US citizen).  I've been to Auschwitz and Birkenau, and felt some small portion of the horror of those places.  But this seemed much more immediate to me, as I walked past the headstones and read names that could have been people I knew.  I reflected on the families of these men and what it meant to them, and just burst into tears.  E immediately pulled her scarf off and wiped away my tears.  She understood, better than most of the students, what this place was about.

The grave of Pres. Teddy Roosevelt's son, who dies in WWII.  Another Roosevelt son died in WWI, and his remains were moved here so he could be buried next to his brother.

The two headstones in the foreground belong to the Niland brothers, the motivation behind the story of Saving Private Ryan.  As our guide told us, that movie took a lot of liberties as it Hollywood-ized the story, but the benefit is that it made this cemetery the second-most visited cemetery in the world.

I didn't include a photo of another pair of headstones here.  It was of a father and son who were fighting in different locations (I think the father was in Italy and the son here in Normandy) and were killed within days of each other.  We don't know if the father heard of his son's death before he died himself.   But we do know that the mother got the two telegrams within 45 minutes of each other on the same day.  So much grief here.

A mosaic in the dome of one the memorials.

View of Omaha Beach from the cemetery.

As a way of honoring these good men and women, E spontaneously picked up four pine cones (one for each member of her family) and placed them on four random headstones.  But I asked her if I could place one of them on this one, because it just tore me apart.  Only 3% of the graves here contain the remains of unidentified soldiers, but they made my heart grieve even more than those that had names.

Next we visited Pointe-du-Hoc, where some British Rangers scaled these cliffs with fireman's rope ladders and took out a German gun position.

To end the day, we visited a German military cemetery in Normandy, which had a very different feel to it than the American one.  The entrance is only one person wide, signifying the idea that each of the soldiers buried here will have to account individually to God for their actions.

Because Germany lost the war, they don't have government money to fund the military cemeteries.  It's funded mainly by private donations, and the upkeep is done by volunteers (including German school children and college students on summer camps).  And because they lost the war, there were many more bodies of German soldiers that couldn't be identified.  As the Allies advanced, they would come across the bodies of both Allied and German soldiers, and would take care of their comrades' remains but loot the German remains for souvenirs, including dog tags.  20% of the burials in this cemetery are unidentified.  And that mound in the middle is a "charnel mound," made from unidentified human remains, covered by a layer of earth.

Much more sober than the US cemetery.  No glory, no victory, no white marble or beautiful mosaics.  No view over the battlefield.  Just deep grief and introspection.  It was very instructive to see both sides in the same day.

Sometimes the German soldiers were buried two-deep, sometimes six-deep, because there simply wasn't room enough for them all in this donated cemetery (which used to hold Allied graves before they were moved over to the Omaha Beach cemetery).