Wednesday, April 20-Nick wrote: At 9 am, our docent, a very nice young Brit named John, arrived with a large van and a full day's schedule to boot. We started off by driving about 30 minutes to a rail line near St Mere Eglise of which he wanted us to take special note. He felt knowing what occurred here was an essential, often overlooked, element to understanding the day's events of June 6, 1944.These railroad tracks were the basis for all Paratroopers' orientation. Once a Paratrooper got the ground, he was instructed to find these tracks and follow them to the NE which would eventually bring them to their rendezvous point- St. Mere Eglise. On our way thee, John drove us to the Merderet Bridge, just a short distance away. The long and short of the Merderet Bridge is it is about 30 feet or less in length, and over the next few days over 600 soldiers died there....both Nazis and Americans, trying to take control or retain control of this strategically situated bridge.
Rommel had ordered the locks near the mouth of the river, down by Carentan, opened at high tide, closed at low tide, so as to flood the valley. Because the grass had grown above the flooded area, Allied air reconnaissance photographs failed to reveal the trap. The water was not generally more than a meter deep, but that was deep enough to drown an overloaded paratrooper who couldn't get up or cut himself out of his harness.
"To pass on the memorial to remind that today we live in peace, freedom and dignity because others gave their life for us"...
We then proceeded to St Mere Eglise's main town square where the famous scene from "The Longest Day" says it all. A now famous paratrooper, John Steel, played by Red Buttons, drops into the town square and gets hung up on a church steeple.
Here you can see the 'statue' of the paratrooper, John Steel...
While the men were landing, a building was burning and the entire community came together to try to put it out. Here is the famous pump where they got the badly needed water.
Where that building stood is a now a museum in honor of the 82nd and 101st Airborne. After a quick coffee and a photo of the famous pump on the edge of the town square, Next, we went inside the church to see these beautiful and now famous stained glass windows.
Look closely at this photo and you can see that surrounding the Virgin Mary and Child are paratroopers...
Back in the van and on our way to Utah Beach, I was quite interested in the hedgerows we saw. John explained that due to farming technology changes, they are no longer as large as they once were. In 1944, they would have been considered a death trap, easy for snipers to camouflage into and difficult to get over because of their height and nearly impossible to penetrate due to their density.
We arrived at Utah Beach and due to the high tide and it was very difficult to visualize the distances the landing troops had to cover to rest the shoreline the morning of June 6th.
Looking at the English channel--England is approximately 75 km from here....
Looking east towards Omaha Beach...
It became much easier to understand when we visited a very informative and well run museum there with lots of artifacts and military gear that was left on the beach. You could truly spend days looking at the items and we still had a lot of territory to cover.
Landing craft by "Higgins" of New Orleans....
Sherman tank...
Across the parking lot, we had a sandwich at a small restaurant. By chance, the owner asked if we wanted to go down and see the bunker, below his kitchen. Used as a communications HQ by the Germans, it was really interesting and amazing to see...couldn't imagine being down there for any great length of time, as the soldiers must have been as it was very muggy and claustrophobic.One of my special requests to John was to possibly see and walk the area where Lt. Dick Winters and Easy Company made there heroic attack at Brecourt Manor. John wasn't 100% sure where to find this place and he had never been asked before so he asked the head of the Utah Museum. We found it about 2 miles inland and even John was fascinated with the history that took place on this plot of land. Winters was awarded the Distinguished Service Metal for his heroics that day.
Briefly, Winters is credited with stopping the continuous shelling by the Germans on the troops that were landing a few miles away at Utah Beach.” Winters and ten men attacked the fifty man German guard at the battery of (4) 105mms. Then, Germans were dug in behind hedgerows; they had extensive interconnecting trenches; they had machine guns and was mortars and a clear field of fire. Winters' squad-sized group had one light mortar, two light machine guns, and five rifles. But although Winters was outnumbered five to one and was attacking an entrenched enemy, he and his men prevailed. They did so because they used tactics they had learned in training, plus common sense and some calculated courage." (S.E. Ambrose).
The road to Brecourt Manor where a battery of (4) 105mm cannons were shooting at Utah Beach...
The Nazi cannons were on this patch of grass, shooting at and killing the Allies...
Trench line and hedgerow placement of Nazi cannons overrun by Easy Company of the 101st Airborne...
Our next stop, Pointe-du-Hoc, is a battle sight I will remember forever.....
You drive along a plateau and arrive at a parking area. You cannot see the sea, yet you know you are close because of the smell of the salt air. There is high vegetation before you and then out of nowhere a field of about ten acres opens up and there before you are is a huge field of green grass, bomb craters and the open sea and English Channel directly ahead.
This photo gives a bit of an idea of the depth of these craters-even after more than 60 years...
On the point, you see a couple of huge bunkers and look beyond to realize you are 150 feet above the ocean below. On June 6th, the beach at Pointe -du-Hoc was only 30 feet in width and as the flotilla approached, the beach was shrinking rapidly as the tide was coming in, and at high tide there would be virtually no beach. The Rangers then had to scale this 120 foot cliff, take out the bunkers and their guns within that could cross fire on both Utah and Omaha Beach. They also had to take out ships supporting the invasion. All this while being fired upon by the Germans on top of the cliffs. It was unbelievable!
The bomb craters are amazingly deep and they leave a very real inner feeling of what it might have been like in reality in 1944. It must have been hell for both the defenders as well as the attackers. Amazingly enough, when the Rangers did get to the top and took control, they found that the bunkers were empty of the expected big guns and to this day no one can answer why they were not there....was it a ploy by the Germans and if so, why?
Omaha Beach was our next stop. Just a few miles away from Utah, it is now a thriving seaside resort in the summer. Really nice sandy beaches and I'm told quite warm in the summer, yet it was hard to imagine D-Day. Omaha Beach is noted as the place where if the Germans were going to stop the invasion anywhere, it would be here. It was an obvious landing site, the only sand beach between the mouth of the Douve to the west and Arromaches to the east, a distance of almost forty kilometers.
View of Omaha Beach from the American Cemetery...
There are five draws or ravines that sloped gently up to the cliffs above the beach. Our guide took us to Vierville, a tiny village atop the bluffs at the west end of Omaha. As Ambrose states, "no tactician could have devised a better defensive situation". A narrow battlefield, many natural obstacles for the attacker to overcome, an ideal place to build fortifications and a trench system, and high ground for shooting down at the invaders, Omaha would be a killing field. 40,000 men and 3,500 motorized vehicles were scheduled to land at Omaha Beach on D-Day. This battle area was almost abandoned midway through the day on June 6th as the soldiers could not break through the German resistance and only because of individual efforts and scattered heroism did the Americans finally, and just by a hair, get off the beach and start to move inland by the end of the June 6th, 1944.
We stopped for a few minutes to reflect. The tide was out and after 60 years all you could see were people strolling the beach, picnicking and a beautiful spring day being enjoyed by one and all. After a quick ice cream at Omaha, we had one last calling- our visit to the American Cemetery. This would become our second amazing "moment" in Normandy that came totally unexpectedly. We had no idea how meaningful and way beyond expectations the visit to this sacred location would become.
We arrived at the American Cemetery at 4:30. It is one of the most tranquil locations I have ever experienced. Situated high on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach with the English Channel in the distance, every single blade of grass is in perfect order and the grounds are immaculate. There were probably 1,000 people scattered throughout the 170 plus acre grounds. We became absolutely focused on our timing as the Cemetery closes each day at 5pm. There are approximately 9,400 grave sites, all facing westward towards the United States. The names of 1,557 Americans who lost their lives in the conflict but could not be located and/or identified are inscribed on the walls of a semicircular garden at the east side of the memorial. The memorial consists of a semicircular colonnade with a loggia at each end containing maps and narratives of the military operations. As you can see by the scale with the handrailing here, these maps are enourmous!
This one shows where each of the different countries landed on June 6th. The English Channel is at the bottom of the map...
Here the English Channel is at the top...
The sweet scent of the blue and pink hyacynths greeted you before you ever even saw them! These flowers always remind Susie of Easter and she said that she thought it was fitting that they'd chosen this particular flower as it makes her think of Christ and the Reserection.
I chose to walk off into the middle of the headstones to see the different States represented on each cross and just to have a few minutes to reflect on my own. Photographs can't begin to capture the emotions of being there but hopefully these will give those of you who haven't been here a glimpse....
While names of soldiers who died, but whose bodies were never found, are inscripted on the semi-circular wall memorial mentioned above, unidentified soldiers' bodies were burried in the cemetary. Their crosses bear the inscription "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God"....
After a while, I noticed that most of the visitors were headed to the main gate yet Charlie, Di, Susie, Sarah and John, our guide, were in deep conversation with three men so I slowly wandered over. It turned out they were speaking with the Superintendent of the American Cemetery, the Head Gardener and a local news reporter. They were engaged in converstation and the reporter was doing an impromptu interview with Charlie, Di, Susie and Sarah to gather their impressions of where they were and what they were feeling as they walked through this hallowed site. Charlie gave a very meaningful overview of his thoughts and feelings as he reflected. Although his father was stationed in the Aleutian Islands during the war on a naval ship, he knew it was men like all our fathers that were with these fallen soldiers in spirit and accomplishment. I turned to the Superintendent and asked how long he had been in Normandy... He said, "Only a few years" as he was formerly the Superintendent in the Philippines, where the largest American Cemetery is located.
The Head Gardener, a Frenchman, had been at the American Cemetery for twenty-two years and we all thanked him for doing such a remarkable job....not a blade of grass was out of place. The head Superintendent remarked that about 1.2 to 1.4 million visitors come to this Normandy location between May and September. By now it was nearing 5:30 and when we turned around to head for the exits, the entire Cemetery was empty. Here we were standing in the middle of the American cemetery and had it all to ourselves! It was completely silent and here we were standing with all the fallen heroes. I must say that we were all humbled, fascinated, awe struck and mostly Thankful!
This moment made the trip absolutely, as Charlie said, "Magical"!
Outside the cemetary, we all solemnly got back into John's van and on the way back to Bayeux decided a debriefing over a glass of French Rose would be a good way to end the tour. We went to the Lion d'Or Hotel's bar and did just that.
This photo, over the fireplace, is a shot of John Wayne and company from the movie, "The Longest Day". He, and many others from the cast, stayed here during the filming...
We went back to our hotel and did a quick change before dinner. Here are some shots of our last night out with Charlie and Di...we sure had a great rendezvous with them!
