Izulde in Normandy: A Very, Very Mini IRL Dynasty

[Izulde]

14 years ago, I was 14 years old. It was the summer of 1994, the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

I was touring Europe with my mother and my uncle, but my uncle left after we arrived in Paris. My grandfather had wanted us to go to Normandy to see the 50th anniversary celebrations. I, being 14 for one, and in the grip of a depression that would plague me for the next several years for two, didn't want to go and Mom didn't insist.

Grandpa died in the fall of 2003 and I've bitterly regretted not going ever since.

Now it's the fall of 2007 and I'm 28. As my Granada thread informs, I've been here in Spain studying for the semester, but will be going to Paris tomorrow morning.

Thursday morning, bright and early, at 6:30 am, the bus picks me up at my hotel for a tour to Normandy.

Including Omaha Beach, where my grandfather landed with the rest of the 8th Division Infantry Artillery Headquarters Battery on July 4th, 1944.

More background detail in the next post, whenever I make it.

I'll close out with a picture of my grandfather from that year, in his military uniform.

[Izulde]

I never learned much about my grandfather's military service and neither did anyone else in the family.

The one time I asked him about it, we were driving home from Parkside one afternoon and I mentioned we'd watched World War II propaganda films in History of Film class. He said he watched those too on his way over there. I asked him what it was like over there.

He just went silent, changed gears, and kept on driving.

The only thing we knew for certain was that he'd been through Cologne (Koln with umlauted o) and that the church there had been completely bombed out. I visited that church 14 years ago, but couldn't appreciate the significance of it then, because 14 year olds are generally stupid about that kind of thing, or at least I was.

I found out a few days ago that the only thing he told Mom was that it'd been real bad over there.

Fast forward to this morning. I woke up at 6:00 to shower and shave before the tour bus picked me up at 6:45. I was feeling really good and looking forward to this tour, because as I've said before, I vowed that when I went to study abroad, I would go to Normandy and rectify the mistake I made.

Bus was on time and we drove the 3 hours to Normandy. It was rainy, cloudy, cold and generally miserable. Our tour guide told us it was actually perfect D-Day weather and a fair approximation of what conditions were like on June 6th, 1944.

On the way, we stopped at a gas station/convenience store/bakery. I ordered coffee and pain au chocolat in surprisingly passable French, thanks largely to my Spanish, ironically enough. Both were very tasty and I also picked up 1.5 L bottle of strawberry water and flat French buttery type cookies with chocolate chips, which are serious crack as I found out later.


When we arrived to the part of Normandy where our tour was centred, we stopped first at Pont de Hoc, where Germans had kept their best guns in casemats (essentially protective shelters for guns). Ironically enough, when the US Rangers scaled the cliffs just before D-Day to the point to take out those guns, losing many lives in the process, the guns... were no longer there.

The officer in charge, thinking the fighting was going to be elsewhere, had moved them. (The whole D-Day campaign was largely successful, in fact, thanks to some brilliant subterfuge and deception that had the German High Command believing the Allies would attack at Calais).

So the Rangers went into the tunnels to hunt down the 200 German soldiers believed to be there. There were actually 300 German soldiers and as a result of the blind fighting the Rangers had to do in those tunnels, in addition to the cliff scaling, by the end of the mission, only half of the 225 Rangers who set out were able to continue service. The others were either dead or wounded.

In addition to a casemat and a replica of one of the guns, we visited a bunker and a lookout point that offered a fair, but not spectacular due to clouds view of the cliffs.


The casemat we visited

Following Pont du Hoc, we came to Omaha Beach. 10 minutes, our guide told us.

I ran out on to the beach and within 10 seconds after my feet touched the same sand my grandfather did, I was crying.

14 years of regret for not having come here when I was 14, all the years I struggled with myself, all the time I lost in those struggles, all the missing of my grandfather these last four years... it all came out as I cried.

After I regained control of myself, I took as many pictures as I could. There's houses now on the ridges and hill above Omaha Beach, but in the 1940s, there was nothing there. It was all land and hedgerow, perfect terrain for the Germans to snipe the American soldiers as they tried to run across the 300 yards of beach to the land.

It could've easily been much worse, for had not Hitler been convinced that Calais was the real target and D-Day the decoy, the Germans could've inflicted even more damage than they did.

There's two memorials on the beach, a metal one on the beach proper and a stone one on the landing by the steps above the beach. I didn't really look very closely at them, I'm afraid, because we had so little time. I took pictures, however. Mainly they were to show what it's like now, which is what my grandfather most wanted to see...


Me on the beach, holding a printed picture of my grandfather


Omaha Beach today and part of the hill above it

I think the rest of our five-person group saw me cry when I got on the beach, because one of the wives found a shell and asked me if I wanted a shell from Omaha Beach. I thanked her profusely and said yes. I don't know how I'll keep it from getting broken and the the grey thin layer covering it is already starting to peel, but I've taken pictures in case something does happen to it.

After Omaha, we went to the American Cemetary nearby, the larger of the two American cemetaries in Normandy. First, we saw a sculpture called Youth Rising that's part of a semi-circular structure on the walls of which are written the names, divisions, and home states of all the American soldiers whose remains were never found. There's maps of the European theatre, the D-Day operations, and a few other things there as well, by the sculpture itself.


Through the gates of the semi-circle, with the back of the Youth Rising statue visible in the distance

The cemetary is actually built on the site of where the Germans looked out over the ridge to watch and snipe the soldiers as they landed on the beach and so we went to the lookout point and saw just how easy it was for the Germans to defend from that territory, even on as bad a weather day as today was.


A straight-on shot from the lookout point. Omaha Beach in background naturally.


Me at the lookout point. Now with hat off!

Progress was quite slow on D-Day. So slow that the furthest they'd gotten at the end of the day was about halfway across the beach, and even then that was only in pockets. It would not be for several days that they finally managed to secure the beach and it was a month/a month and a half before they were truly able to progress inland. That's how strongly the Germans had that section of what's called the Atlantic Wall fortified.

So it was, I realized after I found that out, that when my grandfather first landed on Omaha on July 4th, 1944, the Allied troops still were in the general area of Omaha and fighting to break deeper into France. Small wonder, then, that he told my mom it was so bad over there.

Then we visited the cemetary proper. Some 9,000+ graves of men, young men in most cases, who gave their lives on that foreign shore. It was a sombre moment, even more so than the Gallopoli cemetaries in Turkey, for these were my own countrymen, and furthermore, my grandfather might've known or been friends with some of these men.

A much needed break came in the form of lunch next. A delicious cheese dish made of an obscure Norman cheese, excellent salad with surprisingly tasty nuts, chicken that was okay, a scrumptious baked apple cut in partial slices, and three desserts: a strawberry spongecake, a vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry spongecake, and a vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream. To drink, we had black currant liquer with white wine, our choice of merlot or chardonnay, water, and coffee. The black currant with white wine was absolutely fantastic, but the merlot was, I'm sorry to say, dreadful.

Avorranche (sp) was our last destination, where we saw the remains of the artifical port built by the British in an astonishinghly short amount of time, visited a small museum and went to see a 360 degree panoramic short film.

I teared up during the 360 film. It was a brilliant composition, blending past and current Normandy and showing old footage and sounds of World War II. The sound editing in particular was done so well, I got a small sense of what it was like for my grandfather as he marched through the French and German countrysides during that terrible, terrible war.

And I understand a little better now why he and so many others who were there have been so reluctant to talk about it.

I was not the only one in our little group who had familial ties to the European theatre. One of the wives had a grandfather (still living) who was part of the third wave on D-Day. She unfortunately didn't seem too interested in it though, and in fact she hadn't even known about it until her husband had talked to him about Normandy and the war over Thanksgiving dinner.

The husband told me that while his wife's grandfather had been willing to discuss the war in part with him, there were some subjects he wouldn't speak on and he said that he never wanted to go back there.

Interestingly enough, the husband had a relative involved in the European theatre as well, an uncle who was in England as part of the real preparations (as opposed to the decoy ones that had the Germans thinking Calais was the target).

The uncle broke his hip two days before D-Day in a softball game, of all things. But this turned out to be fortunate, for while the rest of his squadron was in a plane in France, the Germans shot the plane down, killing every single person on board.

Breaking his hip had saved his life.

I couldn't imagine living with the memory of that. To know that the men who had become your comrades, maybe even your friends, had all died and the only reason you hadn't was because of a freak accident, a twist of fate.

After the 360 movie, we returned to Paris. I know there's a lot of stuff I'm probably missing here from the day and it'll come back to me piecemeal, but here's some of it at least.

I will say, I feel much more complete and much better for having finally made the trip to Omaha like Gramps always wanted me to.