Ghosts of the Great War may be losing their strength. Echoes of the artillery that drove the Nazis out of France and toward ultimate surrender fade a little more each year.
Normandy, the northern end of France, where cliffs and beaches meet La Manche (the English Channel) cries out for remembrance. On June 6 it will have been 50 years since D-Day and the most massive amphibious invasion in the history of warfare. Thousands of soldiers arrived soon after midnight and all through the dawn in a flotilla of ships and a sky-shrouding mass of aircraft. At great sacrifice, they broke Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall of fortifications and began the liberation of western Europe.
Do we recall that now? Do all the war memorials, cemeteries, battle sites, museums and relics in Normandy succeed in apprising us of the terrible losses and great acts of courage that were necessary to preserve our freedoms?
Veterans and the people of Normandy strive valiantly to prevent that invasion from drying into dust on the pages of history. The awesome spring and shattering summer of 1944 remain integral to their lives. Each June 6 brings an important anniversary, and even when the date represents no particular, even-numbered milestone, soldiers of the nations that fought together return to keep the memory alive. Canadians host the ceremonies one year, French another, Yanks yet another. The Allies take turns except for major anniversaries when they all participate equally.
This year, the British did the honors, and all over Normandy they visited the scenes of Allied triumphs and devastating setbacks. There was no mistaking them-ruddy men in maroon or green berets, their blue blazers laden with colorful ribbons and medals, their tour buses wearing proud slogans and the insignia of their various brigades.
Their emphasis, naturally, fell on the beaches where they and their Canadian partners landed-beaches code-named Gold, Juno and Sword. They would stand at attention in the squares of villages they had liberated, hear the French speeches from officials of a still-grateful nation, listen to military bands, lay memorial wreaths on monuments and wonder how long the world would continue to look toward Normandy on all those June 6 observances yet to come.
How many more times, for example, would reporters surround Maj. John Howard, the man who commanded the first gliders to land in France on the morning of D-Day, the man whose troops captured the now-famous Pegasus Bridge at Benouville?
This June 6, he sat at an umbrella-shaded table outside the Cafe Gondree, known as the first house in France to be liberated by the Allies. Nearby, the Pegasus Bridge spanned the Orne River and the adjoining canal that connects the sea to the city of Caen, six miles southwest of Benouville and a vital metropolis in the battle for control of France. The bridge was named after the war and refers to the symbol of Britain’s 6th Airborne Division.
Quietly, Howard again told reporters and bystanders of that time, shortly after midnight on the morning of June 6, 1944, when the gliders he commanded bumped across a field near the bridge and came to a stop in the tall weeds.
“Within 15 minutes of landing we were giving out messages of our success on the radio,” he related. “Both bridges, this one and the bridge at Ranville, had been captured intact. We landed six gliders, 30 men in each glider, a force of 180 men to capture two bridges. Only two of ours were killed and 14 wounded. A lot of the enemy ran away, and the rest were caught sleeping in the bunkers. Some sentries were killed. Two of the sentries ran away, and one of them is here today.”
Howard peered between the shoulders of the people who surrounded his table, as if he might pick out that former adversary in the crowd. An aspect of WW II that apparently has died out over the decades is anger.
“One of my best friends is Col. Hans von Luck,” Howard said, referring to the former commander of a German panzer (tank) regiment that had given the Allies fits as they pressed inland in the effort to recapture Caen.
Howard sounded almost off-handed, even affectionate, when he spoke of Von Luck. “He surrounded my company in Escoville, with many casualties. And now we lecture together all over the world.”
Howard seemed far more concerned, in a tired sort of way, when he considered the fate today of the Pegasus Bridge. Plans called for a replacement to speed navigation in and around the Orne. War-related structures of all kinds, from pillboxes to temporary piers, dot the Normandy landscape. But Pegasus was impeding the flow of commerce, and officials determined that it had to go.
“The bridge in 1944 was exactly as it is now,” Howard said, “but next year there will be a new one. It’s a pity, but the ships do have to come in. Today I am going to march over this bridge for the last time.”
Soon after that, he and his comrades did cross the bridge-Howard slowly and with the use of a cane-to the field where free-standing plaques marked the landing position of each glider and a tall, buff concrete stele bore a brief description of perhaps the first heroic deed on D-Day.
There would be many more, of course: daring parachute drops, the American Rangers who scaled the cliffs at Ponte du Hoc on Utah Beach, the countless skirmishes and individual acts of bravery.
One might suppose that such massive and sustained warfare could never be forgotten. Nearly 7,000 ships and 11,000 aircraft sped from Allied bases in southern England. Three million soldiers from a dozen countries fought in the Battle of Normandy that summer. All those alive-support workers as well as fighting men, plus all the friends and relatives of those who played a role in Operation Overlord-insist on sustaining the memory.
Museums in Normandy and England try to keep the story fresh, but sometimes the most devoted World War II historians feel as if their audience has shrunk.
In one tiny museum near Pegasus Bridge, 36-year-old Clive Wilson from Clacton-on-the-Sea, Essex, England, browsed the cases of weaponry and other military paraphernalia with a forlorn air. A guitarist by trade and a war scholar by avocation, Wilson has been working to establish a D-Day museum in his hometown, but he wonders if many will visit.
“The terrible thing is how many British people don’t realize that today is the anniversary of the D-Day landings,” he said. “I’ve bumped into so many Brits and I say, `Oh, you’re here for the landings’ and they say, `What landings?’
“I have to tell them it was the Second Front, that we Allies came over here and that’s how the war changed. Up till then it was going Hitler’s way, wasn’t it? We’ve got a problem in England, and it’s a terrible thing. We’re now finding fault with our own country over the Falklands War. I think we must be the only country in the world where we do something and a few days or years later find reasons why we shouldn’t have done it. And that really worries me. The American people, perhaps with the exception of Vietnam, are behind your country. If your country does something, the people normally say, yes, let’s do it!”
An American undoubtedly would find several more exceptions than Wilson could and encounter just as many American tourists in France that day who hadn’t the foggiest notion why the bands were playing and the flags waving. Even during anniversary week this year, the crumbling German bunkers along the coast often stood in solitude, the lack of crowds making those slotted turrets and gun emplacements all the more chilling and D-Day all the more real and immediate. A walk among the 9,386 graves in the American Cemetery at Colville-St. Laurent, a half hour looking down on Omaha beach and realizing the bluff might still hold potentially lethal land mines, pondering the thousands of lives that were lost so Allied soldiers could stand where you are standing-all that telescopes World War II into something that happened just yesterday.
A German friend too young for that war, a man who lived most of his life in parts of the world far from his homeland, cannot understand why anyone would dwell on it. Each mention of the atrocities committed by the Third Reich cuts a wound in his devotion to his homeland. I made the mistake of telling him how startling it is to see the Nazi structures of war still looming over Normandy pastures and beachheads.
“They could really build things in those days, eh? Not like now, where everything falls apart,” he said.
Still feeling as if I had just come from those days myself, I at first took his remark as a cruel taunt. But Hitler and the divided Germany that followed his defeat robbed younger generations of their pride and replaced it with the kind of guilt that provokes anger, because individuals like my friend did nothing to deserve it. I recalled a German military cemetery-not far from the American one and holding more than twice as many bodies-totally absent of visitors. In Normandy, pride and shame walk together in a scar of warfare that never quite seems to heal.
The museums, memorials and cemeteries tell us the danger of healing: forgetfulness and repetition of past mistakes.
A new museum/conference center/library has been built in Caen on a site where German officers once occupied an underground redoubt. The complex is called simply The Memorial, a hard chunk of marble in a raw expanse overlooking expressways and a neighborhood of brand-new apartments.
The battle to liberate Caen was fierce and long and left most of the city in the rubbled wake of Allied bombing attacks. The quaint, the charming, the old that remain in much of Normandy were destroyed in most of the big cities, and in Caen a lot of the rebuilding produced plain, functional structures.
The Memorial, which opened in 1988, is in some ways the plainest of the plain, an imposing limestone box broken only by a rugged cleft at the entrance to symbolize the terrible destruction so much of Normandy suffered.
War buffs will not find the huge collections of artifacts that proliferate in other excellent museums, such as the Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy in nearby Bayeux or the landing museum in Arromanches with its detailed depictions of a massive artificial port built by the Allies (portions of which still rise from the ocean a few hundred yards away).
In a sense, the Memorial sues for peace, tracing with photographs, films and documents the political, economic and moral factors that led to World War II and war in general. Following the displays in sequence and with some degree of concentration, the visitor can’t help but be alternately moved, discouraged and still, in the end, left with a sense of hope.
And yet . . . Out in the parking lot, half a dozen Japanese visitors walked toward their van. As they stopped to pose for pictures with the Memorial as a backdrop, the tape deck from a nearby car blasted out President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor radio speech, cassettes of which could be bought in the souvenir shop near the entrance.
Like so much of the Memorial, the speech brought back a “day of infamy,” and Roosevelt’s outraged voice ticked off the Pacific invasions of Dec. 7, 1941. “The Japanese also launched an attack against Malaya . . . the Japanese attacked . . . The Japanese attacked . . .”
It was impossible to tell if the occupants of the car had deliberately started the tape when they saw the Japanese tourists, and the tourists continued walking toward their van as if they hadn’t heard.
But it was an unsettling moment, and it could be argued that a region like Normandy thrusts at us too many reminders of war, too many things and places that upset composure and rekindle old nationalistic fires. And it could be argued that Normandy should continue to do exactly what it has been doing since World War II. Keep prodding, keep nagging at the conscience, until the world no longer needs to remember such tragedies-a time which most likely will never come.
