D-Day

Saturday and Sunday:

War is probably the stupidest mistake that mankind has ever made. Of all the ways to solve problems, to move through to a solution, to figure out who should manage things, war is the least efficient and most traumatic. In most cases, it makes things worse. It has caused more destruction by far than any other human invention; in fact, the museum of human invention is mostly stuff that destroys people and their world.

And the best weapon we've found so far, at least until atomic weapons, is the human soldier. I have been strongly drawn to the psychological mystery of why humans – overwhelmingly male, at least up to now – have thrown their bodies and lives into the war machine.

Most wars are not good wars; they are wars of selfishness and power and mental illness, of anger and rage and jealousy and lust – and are sold as anything but, to the ordinary people whose lives will be destroyed. Millions die because “I want! I want!”

And millions still go to war, voluntarily, like sheep to slaughter. I would, someday, like to understand this.

A good war is different; as we have seen occasionally in history; it is usually fought to reverse the impact of a particularly bad war; to save the world from slavery and oppression. WWII is generally included here; it is actually called The Good War, and though it wasn't entirely good (were the atom bombs dropped as a warning to Stalin?)(Was Curtis LeMay a hero or a villain?), its primary and overwhelming purpose was to destroy the evil that had infested Europe and the Far East and let everyone return to normal life.

There is something in these young men who stride into battle that resonates with me, that stops the breath and swells the heart. Could I do that? I don't believe I could. Knowing that I would die painfully before I got out of the landing craft, as I waded through the surf, as I dug into the unyielding sand, would I leap from the boat? Stride the surf? Charge over the sand? I can't believe I would – unless I believed that by doing so, some good was done.

So I'm thinking about all this as we embark on our Normandy Invasion weekend. After Bayeux, we spent the next day and a half visiting the beaches the Allies landed on, now either bright with the beach clothes of families and tourists, or empty, left to themselves, clean and unspoiled once more.

This anniversary, this June 6, is the 80th anniversary of the invasion, and the preparations for the day are huge. Parking lots are transformed into covered auditoriums for world leaders; the four flags – US, UK, France, Canada – are literally everywhere, including on the reception desk of our hotel in Bayeux*. Closer to the beaches, every other telephone pole has a small banner with the picture and name of someone who died on the beach; each one says “Normandy Hero.” Everywhere you look, they're staging equipment and materials needed to welcome massive numbers of people.

Gold Beach

We walked the beaches, including Gold Beach (above and right), where Mulbery Harbor was established, a monumental temporary port protected by breakwaters of scuttled ships filled with cement, and concrete caissons. All Allied men and materiel that arrived in the north of France between June and November 1944 – including, it turns out from the chronology our guide gave us, my father – came ashore at Mulbery Harbor. Many of the breakwater elements are still visible at low tide, when we were there, including some that had been washed on shore. We walked out to Pointe du Hoc, between Utah and Omaha beaches, to see where US Rangers, incredibly, scaled a cliff with ladders, swarmed over the top and neutralized the big guns protecting that part of the coast. We went to two museums, one dedicated to Operation Overlord as a whole, and one dedicated to the airborne operations of the night before and the day of. One paratrooper got stuck on a church spire, and to this day the church has a life-size mannequin hanging on the spire from a real parachute.

There is a real sense here in modern Normandy, even without talking to any modern Normans, that no one is going to forget what happened here in June of 1944. At the next big anniversary, the 90th, there will be no one left who was actually there – but it won't matter.

On Sunday morning, we went to the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, just above Omaha Beach. Abbey was really tired, so stayed in the bus and slept, and I went on my own. The rest of the group happened to take a different, longer but more scenic route to the cemetery, so when I got there, I was the only one there for a while.

It was a dark, cloudy morning with mist, perfect for a walk in a cemetery. The memorials were immense, quiet and solemn. The graves were identical white crosses – 9,688 of them** – that went on and on in perfect formation ("On the Walls of the Missing, in a semicircular garden on the east side of the memorial, are inscribed 1,557 names. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified."). I just didn't know how to feel about being there, but I was feeling something. As I walked along one side of the cemetery, I could see Omaha Beach below, the sea still and glassy, the beach quiet and peaceful. What maybe struck me most was the precision with which everything was maintained – the landscape, the paths, the memorials, the markers. There was a sense of respect that came from fury, from anger, from duty, as if perfection would somehow – I don't know, would somehow mean something to those lives.

Omaha Beach

I still can't think of all this without being profoundly moved. All those brothers - including my father, a calm and cheerful man - who waded ashore in Normandy and Provence and Sicily and Anzio, who took that town, held that bridge, advanced through fierce resistance to put a stop to fascism. And to support the guy next to him. I may never understand it, but I know that it reveals something terrifying and glorious about the human spirit.

I'm sorry - it's too big to put into words. We'll remember, silently. I hope that some learning goes on as well.

And so, back to our hotel in Bayeux, where it was “dinner on our own” again. I had laundry to do, so we hiked to the laundromat and figured out how to work the machines, which were connected digitally and controlled from a central panel whose instructions were in French. Abbey walked around looking for somewhere to get dinner, and came back with two little packaged tuna sandwiches from a convenience store, and two wonderful pastries from a nearby boulongerie. Dinner in the laundromat.

Which reminds me – Abbey told me that I had not paid close enough attention to the spell-checker (which is not really much good with French) and had spell-checked “boulongerie” (pastry shop) into “boutonniere” (flower for the lapel button). Sorry. Still don't know how to spell “boulongerie” right.***

Monet tomorrow.

NOTES:

* - Bayeux, where the tapestry is, was the first town to be liberated. Without a shot, the day after the invasion. Its proximity to Gold Beach made it a transit hub for many months.

** - The American Battle Monuments Commission notes: "... most of whom lost their lives in the D-Day landings and ensuing operations."

*** - But, apparently, my desktop at home knows how to spell "boulangerie." No more boutonniere.