Normandy and Le Havre August 2024

Normandy and the D-Day landings are part of every American’s memory above a certain age. In 1944, I was 10 years old so, I was aware of WWII and the battles as just a part my growing up. There is a Hotel and restaurant oddly enough called the D Day House just off Omaha Beach so in the spirit of authenticity we went there for lunch. The service was prompt and our meal arrived after a short while. The French, as usual, have their own way of doing things and my Fish and Chips had a strange topping. .

Keeping in the spirit of strangeness, I ordered a local brandy Calvados to warm me as there was a breeze chilling things down in the open air restaurant. After a few sips, it wasn’t so cold after all.

Normandy started out violently when in 911 the region was ceded to the Viking chief Rollo by Charles III better known as Charles the Simple. Simple refers to his life style rather than his mental state. In any case, constant warfare was a fact of Middle Age life. This state of affairs continued until 1066, when William of Orange or William the Conqueror, as he sometimes known, gathered his army, crossed the English Channel and defeated the English at The Battle of Hastings. This may have changed English history but the wars continued though diminished. William the Conqueror, or perhaps his half-brother the Bisop Odo left one other mark on history, he commissioned the tapestry that graces the walls of the museum at Bayeux. We passed through Bayeux on our way to the battle field at Juno beach but did not stop to see the museum. The tapestry itself is perhaps 230 feet long and depicts the Norman Conquest and the events leading up to it. All in all an excellent rendering of history showing the Norman point of view.

We are almost a thousand years removed the period and the images are almost incomprehensible to me without an explanation.

Charlotte Corday more formally known as Marie-Anne Charlotte deOnn Corday d’Armont left Normandy early in July 1793 and went to Paris. Believing Jean-Paul Marat responsible an event called the September Massacre, she met with Marat and stabbed him to death in his bath. She was only 25 when she was executed by guillotine four days later. To make this story even stranger, she posed for her portrait while while waiting to be guillotined. Oddly enough the authorities did not think a woman was capable of acting alone and accordingly had a autopsy performed to check for virginity figuring a man must be involved. Surely there was man involved and sharing her bed? Alas, the autopsy showed she slept without male companionship and remained a virgin… Normandy could go back to sleep and did so thru out the three republics, until June 1940 when the Germans arrived and ended the Third Republic.

Igor Rosen our French tour guide showed up in Le Have in a rental van for our ride to the battle ground. His mother had told him about the German occupation saying 1940 the majority of the French decided to go along with the occupation or “collaborate”, possibly in the sense of “it’s not my war”. This differs from the official British or American version we hear where the resistance was very active. The Germans were on their best behavior too, they didn’t want to go to certain death in Russia.  The officers lived in any nearby estates in the grand manor house while the enlisted men were billeted wherever a cottage could be expanded to have a reluctant guest. Later in the war the Germans were replaced by Russian prisoners who had been drafted into the German Army and were quite brutal in the treatment of the local population. We gradually made our way down to cemetery passing through the little town of Bayeux where the museum that houses the Tapestry depicting William the Conquerors invasion of England in 1066..  A visit to view the Tapestry was not to be.  “The tour has a schedule to keep.” As we got closer to the battlefield the roads got narrower, the hedge rows gradually closed in until we could just barely see down the road much less to either side.  I have a few pictures but they don’t show much.  The guide had a lunch deal with the D Day hotel and restaurant so we went there. 

After that we looked seemingly endless pill boxes and various sized cannon.  A little concrete wreckage in the ocean is what is left of the portable harbors that were towed over from England.  There are some better larger harbor pieces arranged along the road. Everyone knows the battle for Normandy began on June 6, 1944. Battle aficionados know it ended some some 48 days later with the battle of Saint-Lo when the Americans broke through the German lines. After the war the beaches were gradually cleaned up by scrap dealers and salvagers until most of it was removed.

There are perhaps 27 Cemeteries scattered around Normandy providing the final resting place for the 130,000 soldiers from both sides.

In the American Cemetery there 9,388 buried there: there are 45 sets of brothers, two are named Roosevelt. One is Quentin who was Theodore’s youngest son who was killed in World War I and the other is Theodore or (Ted) who died on D-Day with a heart attack leading his troops on Utah beach. After the war, the Roosevelt family requested that Quentin be relocated to the American cemetery so he could be along side his brother.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln provided the best eulogy when he delivered the Gettysburg address some 80 years earlier:

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.