With the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings looming over the horizon like an invasion armada, tourist authorities in Normandy and southern Britain are braced for The Longest Summer.
Tourists who want to commemorate the actual anniversary in Normandy on June 6 are out of luck unless they already have made arrangements. Hotels have long since been booked full; worse, several heads of state are expected for the day itself, with all the traffic jams and security restrictions that they drag along as baggage.
But for travelers willing to schedule their trips before or after the week surrounding June 6, tourist authorities are promising a full spring, summer and fall of special events. And they’re pledging to avoid the mistakes of the 40th anniversary in 1984, when D-Day veterans got shoved aside to make room for VIPs.
For this coming June 6, special quotas set up through veterans’ groups will assure that the ranks of dignitaries include large numbers of the graying Americans, Britons and Canadians who left a big chunk of their youth behind on the beaches.
This time around, the tourist people promise, the veteran himself will be the VIP.
Britain
British tourism officials are in a bit of a stew. The Americans staged the invasion from southern England, but tourist people fret that the veterans will want to revisit only the battlefields in France, not the training grounds in England.
The concern seems overstated. After all, Britain housed tens of thousands of Army Air Force veterans whose only view of the continent was from a B-17. Their memories of the war years rest in the villages of England.
And for the rest-the infantrymen who sailed from England for what the British call The Far Shore-Britain offers a friendly, yes-we-speak-English introduction to Europe.
The ex-GI who wants to fit his own adventures into the larger context of history could start at London’s Imperial War Museum. The name calls up images of Victorian glory, but the reality is a poignant display of the human cost of war, and it’s worth the better part of a day. A D-Day exhibit opens Feb. 18.
The Imperial War Museum also operates a fascinating annex in the heart of London’s government district-the Cabinet War Rooms, the formerly top secret warren of underground offices from which Winston Churchill directed the war effort. Visitors can see Churchill’s bomb shelter bedroom, his map room, the telephone cranny from which he talked to President Franklin Roosevelt-even Churchill’s chrome-plated air raid helmet and his personal chamber pot.
Outside London, the points of interest include:
– Southwick House near Portsmouth. The manor housed Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s pre-invasion headquarters. Here, in the predawn darkness of June 5, 1944, he decided to gamble on the weather and go ahead with the invasion. Today, the manor is a bachelor officers’ quarters for a Royal Navy signal school. Eisenhower’s map room is open by appointment, but his actual office-the room where he said, “OK, let’s go”-houses an officers’ bar. In the quaint village of Southwick, local legend holds that the Golden Lion pub was Ike’s own unofficial officers’ club.
– The D-Day Museum in Portsmouth. Like so many World War II museums in Normandy and southern England, this one is an untidy and ill-organized jumble of rifles, mess kits and mannequins dressed as British paratroopers, American infantrymen and German Panzertruppen. But its saving grace is the Overlord Embroidery, the 20th Century’s answer to the Bayeux Tapestry. Across its 272-foot length, painstakingly stitched by the Royal School of Needlework, the embroidery depicts D-Day in all its blood and glory.
– The Tank Museum at Bovington Camp in Dorset. The place boasts of 10,000 tons of armor under one roof, plus God knows how many more rusting away in a storage yard. The display ranges through Desert Storm, but the main emphasis is WW II. (Veterans of George Patton’s 3d Army can pat the flank of a pudgy Sherman tank, although the Sherman is scarcely rare in this part of the world. Every museum in England and France seems to have one.)
– The Museum of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Royal Regiment in Salisbury. This area of England housed legions of Americans shortly before the invasion, and many a veteran might want to scour the countryside to find his old bivouac site. By this time, the veterans’ wives will doubtless be growing weary of war memories. Salisbury offers them a break-its stately 11th Century cathedral, set in a picture book English town. While the wives traipse off into antiquity, the veterans can drop in on the small but fascinating regimental museum. Although the Duke’s men played a D-Day role, the real interest lies in the oh-so-British atmosphere, beginning with a wall-sized oil painting of some long-ago pitched battle in Afghanistan. This museum is an Evelyn Waugh novel played with a straight face. Don’t miss it.
– Other D-Day attractions abound in southern England, and the tourism people have cobbled together a full calendar of special D-Day events. Information on the programs (and on accommodations) is available from the British Tourist Authority. In Chicago, call 312-787-0490.
France
Even without the rich history of D-Day, Normandy-The Far Shore-is worth the ferry boat ride. True, the regional capital of Caen offers little that’s scenic. The fighting of 1944 all but razed the city, which was rebuilt as a charmless cluster of industrial and office parks.
But outside Caen, Normandy retains a rural and especially European appeal. Its lush meadows teem with dairy cattle and apple orchards, making Normandy famous for cream, cheese and calvados, the region’s belly-warming apple brandy.
Normandy’s gray stone villages, each within walking distance of the next, look much as they must have to the GIs of 1944. And if the coastal weather tends toward the gloomy-well, that’s why there are calvados.
The invasion beaches-two American, two British, one Canadian-stretch for about 40 miles of east-west coast paralleled by National Route 13. As is the case at Gettysburg, Pa., unit memorials stud the landscape.
In fact, the landscape itself is a memorial to the grittiness of the American soldier. For centuries, Norman farmers have enclosed their small fields with bocage-nearly impenetrable hedgerows standing taller than a man. The bocage country was made for defenders, and it was hell on the GIs. Each hedgerow seemed to conceal a German machine gun; clear it, and another hedgerow lay just 100 yards ahead.
Tourists who speed past the hedgerows on their way to yet another manmade attraction might pause and ponder the lot of the American infantrymen who had to cross this country on foot and under fire.
As for those manmade attractions, here are some of the better-known museums and memorials:
– Ste. Mere Eglise, which translates as “the Church of the Holy Mother.” This village sits on the western flank of the invasion area. It became an inadvertent battlefield when errant planes dropped American paratroopers into the village early on the morning of June 6, 1944.
Those who have seen the movie “The Longest Day” may recall that the parachute of one GI, played by Red Buttons, snagged on the steeple of the village’s gray stone church. The GI’s real name was John Steele; he died in 1969, but he’s remembered today with a hotel named in his honor-and a mannequin draped by a parachute from the steeple of the church.
The church might as well be named Our Lady of the 82nd Airborne. Dominating its humble interior are two stained glass windows featuring the Virgin Mary amid American paratroopers.
Ste. Mere Eglise also has the Airborne Museum, a small but well-organized display put together by an expatriate American with the fittingly French name of Phillipe Jutras.
– Pointe du Hoc. This high ground dominates the western end of Omaha Beach. The Germans had concrete gun emplacements there, and American Rangers scaled 100-foot cliffs under intense fire to seize the position. The ugly concrete emplacements remain as a memorial to the courage of the Rangers.
– Vierville-sur-Mer. Omaha Beach has more than a dozen memorials. Among the more touching is one that remembers not elite soldiers like paratroopers or Rangers but the common American militiaman.
It’s the National Guard Memorial at Vierville-sur-Mer, where the 116th Infantry of the Virginia National Guard suffered terribly in seizing one of the four draws, or exits, that cut through the high bluffs overlooking the beach.
– The American Cemetery. On the plateau overlooking another stretch of Omaha Beach rest the remains of 9,286 Americans, set in geometrically arrayed ranks and files of white marble crosses, dotted here and there with a Star of David.
Among the dead are four women, 33 pairs of brothers, one father-son team and the son of a president, Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. All stayed behind in Normandy by choice of their families, who elected to let the soldiers rest where they fell, rather than have their remains brought back home after the war.
Visitors can stroll to bluff’s edge and descend 104 steps to Omaha Beach itself, to a stretch that invasion planners designated Easy Green and Easy Red. Nothing about those beaches looks easy. The soldiers had to cross 200 yards of open beach, then climb more than 100 feet up the face of the bluff, all under mortar and machine gun fire from the high ground.
Today, thick brush covers the hillside, and signs warn of roaming wild boar. But in 1944, sheep and cattle had grazed the area down to grass, which meant that the GIs had no concealment. Visitors who trudge back up those 104 stairs can only guess at what scaling the bluffs must have been like on D-Day. It was a hellish mess, judging by the number of marble crosses that bear the date June 6, 1944.
(A curious note: One chilly, sunny day last fall, most of the hushed voices of the cemetery visitors were speaking in French. The French have a reputation for being difficult with American visitors. But toward the 9,286 American visitors residing for eternity at the American Cemetery in Normandy, the French displayed nothing but awed respect.)
– A break: Honfleur. To shake off the ghosts of war, try a half-day or so in Honfleur, a fishing village just east of the British invasion beaches. The war left Honfleur as a medieval picture postcard come to life. Parisians think nothing of driving there for a Sunday lunch, and the area has attracted so many wealthy Britons who buy up farm houses that officials worry for its future as a reminder of France’s past.
– Un Musee Pour la Paix, the Peace Museum, in Caen. This is far and away the best of the museums-dignified, subtle, informative. Caen suffered grievously in the war as British and German tanks fought for its key terrain for weeks. Its city fathers decided after the war to remember Caen’s ordeal with a museum that stresses hope over despair, peace over war.
The literature suggests a visit of at least two hours, but you might set aside three or four. This museum demands a thoughtful pace as it guides you step by step into the abyss of World War II-and then out again, into the hope of a world in which tanks can be relegated to museums, or even beaten into plowshares.
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More information on attractions and accommodations in the Normandy area is available from the Maison de la France, 900-990-0040. It costs 50 cents a minute, but tourist agents have computers and can answer questions quickly.
