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History Lessons in Normandy

A Meaningful Afternoon

The Airborne Museum at Ste-Mère-Église has a C-47 airplane like those used to drop American paratroopers on D-Day, surrounded by mannequins of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and members of the 101st Airborne Division, and an American glider that you can walk through to get a feel for how cramped it was.

The main exhibit combines sound, light, dioramas, artifacts and film in innovative ways to replicate what it was like during the invasion.

During lunch at Le Grand Hard, a hotel and restaurant nestled in the countryside outside town, Jean Baptiste, who was 13 on D-Day, talked about his experiences following American troops, who adopted him as a mascot. “They called me Bobby,” he said.

“The troops were already on the ground when I woke up. I moved with them and followed until the end of the war. I washed linens for the medics. At the end of the war, I was brought home. I cried a lot. I had lost all my friends.”

After lunch, Charles Vallavielle, owner of Brécourt Manor, took us to a field on his farm where a key action depicted in “Band of Brothers” had taken place. We stood along a fencerow where four German gun emplacements hidden in the trees had fired on Utah Beach. Twelve men from Easy Company had worked their way along the side of the field and were able to disable the four guns.

On the way to the field, we had our best close-up look at the hedgerows; the slanted embankment upon which they were built was taller than we were.

“They made for a very slow advance,” said Natanson. “Each field had to be attacked separately. They were known as Green Hell.”

Our final stop was Utah Beach. “It is considered the easiest landing, but I don’t like that language,” said Natanson. “But it did have the fewest casualties.”

We walked to the beach in a pouring rain, past a replica of an LST, then dried off in the nearby informative Utah Beach Museum. We got a good look at the beach when we left, and the rain had stopped.

Marcheta and I had coffee across from the beach in Le Roosevelt Memorial Bar, where Pearson signed his name on the wall among those of many other veterans who have visited there.

Personal Accounts

After a free morning the following day and an early afternoon tour of the Bayeux Tapestry and Bayeux Cathedral, we drove to Caen, where we visited the Memorial de Caen, the largest museum in Normandy, before heading to dinner at Café Mancel, located in the ruins of a castle, and our delightful encounter with Marin-Catherine.

“You had to keep quiet and learn how to lie,” she said. “That was very important.”

Marin-Catherine gave a detailed, emotional account of how she and her mother searched for her 17-year-old brother after the Gestapo arrested him. After one brief glimpse of him being herded onto a train to a labor camp, they never saw him again. He died just weeks before the liberation.

Our first stop the next day on the way to Omaha Beach was Pointe du Hoc, a strategic German gun emplacement high on a cliff overlooking the English Channel that Army Rangers captured after scaling the 100-foot cliff.

The site has the remains of German bunkers and numerous large craters caused by Allied bombing, giving it an eerie green moonscape appearance.

“The way you see it is pretty much way the Rangers left it,” said Natanson. “That is why you can see the craters. It is the only place you can see craters today. You have to think whole areas looked like this.”

Our first stop at Omaha Beach was through Exit E1 at Vierville, one of five openings or exits from the beach the Allies had to capture. Hundreds of metal barriers, many topped with mines, have been replaced with tourists walking the now peaceful sand. The only man-made structure on the beach is the iconic metal sculpture “The Brave.”

Our final view of the beach was from the American cemetery at Colleville, the most sobering and emotional stop on the tour.

Long rows of white marble Latin crosses and Stars of David high on a bluff overlooking one of the bloodiest stretches of Omaha Beach mark the graves of 9,387 men and women killed in the Battle of Normandy.

The World War II museum gave each tour participant a white rose to place on a grave. We placed roses on the graves of two soldiers from Kentucky, including one from the division in which Marcheta’s father served. Pearson placed a rose on the grave of the brother of the best man in his wedding.

Return and Reflect

As we headed back to Paris the next day, we stopped at sites associated with the Allied push inland and the German breakout at the Falaise Gap, “basically where the Battle of Normandy ended,” said Natanson.

We visited the small town of Tournai, where 1,500 Germans surrendered behind the town hall after the intervention of a local priest, and walked a narrow path to Le Gue de Moisy, a small ford in the Dives River, one of only two ways the Germans had to escape through a narrow gap between encircling American and Polish troops.

Our final stop was at the Memorial Montormel atop Hill 262, a key point in the fighting, with sweeping views of the countryside and the gap.

“This beautiful Norman countryside was pure hell on earth,” said Natanson.

We had a picnic lunch and visited the museum, which has a lot of personal artifacts found after the battles and informative multimedia presentations.

On the final ride back to Paris, I reflected on what I had seen and experienced. Although I have read much about the D-Day invasion and watched many of the movies and documentaries concerning it, seeing the places where this monumental event occurred brought it into better focus and helped me appreciate even more the sacrifice and courage of the men who helped free Europe from the totalitarian grip of Nazi Germany.

I was also struck by the way the French have recovered over three quarters of a century amid reminders of the past. In addition to many monuments, there were the cows grazing near the La Fiere Bridge, a television antenna in Ste-Mère-Église attached to a chimney pockmarked with bullet holes, the Mulberry harbor skeletons offshore at Arromanches, a German artillery piece decorating a farmer’s garden and, most of all, the vivid memories of Marin-Catherine and Baptiste.

As Natanson said, “The great thing about spending this time in Normandy, you not only see history, but history is still alive.”

For more information on this tour contact the The National World War II Museum Tours at 877-813-3329 or go to www.ww2museumtours.org.