OMAHA

The tour for today, Sunday, Sept 23^rd, was of Omaha Beach, and Pointe de Hoc, under the guidance of a Bayeux resident named Christof. It was pouring with the wind blowing at 40 mph for most of the day. (People in jeans got soaked. I got soaked, too, but the travel pants dried quickly.) These were not the ideal conditions we dreamed of for what many of us considered to be the most important day of the Beyond the Band of Brothers tour.

But Christof really made the battle come alive. Our first visit was to a German Cemetery. The crosses there are arranged in groups of 5. After the war Germany could not afford a burial site anything like the US Cemetery, but it had its own sense of sadness, perhaps best exemplified by the mostly black crosses in German cemeteries. The Germans had many casualties on 6-6-44 as well. Years after the war the German people planted  trees along the road between Bayeux and the Normandy coastline—one for each dead soldier. One of the decisions that the German government made then was not to separate the graves of Wehrmacht troops from those who were SS. This was done mostly to prevent desecration of their graves.

In all there were more than 20 battlefield cemeteries. Men buried in freshly dug graves on both sides were later exhumed and reburied in a central location, and then moved again as Allied forces moved east. In the early 50s families were given the opportunity to have their loved ones’ remains returned to the US or reburied in what is now the US Cemetery at Omaha Beach. About 60% chose to bring their sons and brothers, fathers and uncles home. The remainder from Normandy are buried here.

Not all died on D-Day. It took over a month to liberate the Normandy province. There are also unique graves like those of a father and son, the father killed on Normandy, the son about two weeks earlier in May 1944. The father did not know his son had been killed. Sadly the telegrams from the War Department arrived at their family home within an hour of each other.

This may seem like a macabre topic but at the same time it is an important one. Certainly it was not possible to bury our dead soldiers in permanent graves as the troops rapidly advanced. The US Cemetery, to me, is sacred ground. It is not about death but sacrifice. These young men, some as young as 16 or 17 knew they had to do what they did if they were to save the freedoms we still enjoy.

The wind was dreadful. The rain was dreadful. Some of us got soaked, some merely wet. (Don’t wear heavy cotton blue jeans in a torrential downpour.)

Although I have repeated many of Christof’s sad stories there were some incredibly brave stories to be told. What they spoke to was American and British ingenuity and doggedness in the face of terrible odds.

I was at the US Cemetery in 2011 with Seacoast Community Chorus. That was a warm, sunny days. We could walk the cemetery at will. Today much of the site was closed to visitors. I don’t know whether or not it was the rain or preparations for next year’s 75^th anniversary celebration. Perhaps a bit of both. Yet there was a single rose laid at each grave. And the rain added to both the solemnity of the place--and our wonderment that these young men gave their lives for an abstract cause called freedom. 

I am having trouble uplaoding pictures will add tomorrow.