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Buzemont, early morning

     I got up at 5:30, yesterday, Sept. 26. I wanted to be awake 100 years to the exact minute that Dad’s machine gun started firing in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Then I realized because of Daylight Savings Times, I was one hour short. It was too late to go back to sleep. So we got an early start and soon were at Vauquois and Buzemont. It was a crystal clear day and, unlike 100 years ago, there was no fog to obscure the view I drove from the Missouri Memorial to the ravine to the Dutch kitchen and into Cheppy, recording the drive on my camera. From there, we drove five hours to Normandy. The drive was uneventful except that when we stopped to have breakfast in Cleremont at 9 a.m., the cafe said it had sold out its breakfasts. We may have been fortunate.

Omaha beach

     The two striking things about the Normandy invasion beaches are how long they are -- it is a 45 minute drive from our hotel at Sword to Point du Hoc, made famous in Ronald Reagan’s ‘The Boys of Point du Hoc’ if not in military history (the American Rangers stormed the cliffs only to find their targets, big German artillery guns had not been installed yet) -- and how tacky it is. For the most part, there are no signs, no interpretative aids, no National Park Headquarters. Instead, the first thing the visitor sees is at Gold Beach where a French entrepreneur has a big parking lot and campground on a cliff overlooking the beach with a gaudy cyclorama. A 40 minute drive through the tiny streets of tiny towns got us to Omaha Beach where the American invaders bogged down and suffered huge casualties. It is Omaha Beach that is in all the movies. To digress briefly, it isn’t fun to meet a tour bus or big French tractor on the tiny streets, particularly when the tractor driver has a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Anyway, Omaha Beach has a parking lot, some flags, and a restaurant, but no interpretation. It is, however, much longer than I imagined, extending more than a mile in both directions and the distance from the water to the protection of the sea wall is several hundred yards. In the invasion, men laden with heavy packs and weaponry had to traverse that distance through water and over wet sand while being shot at. Many, I read, decided not to do this and stayed neck deep in the cold water of the English Channel, hoping they wouldn’t get shot in the head.
For us too, a half hour on the beach was enough.

Omaha beach, Point du Hoc in the background

     We then drove to Courseulles-sur-Mer at Juno Beach to eat. After parking, I walked over to four visitors to ask if it was legal to park where I did. They didn’t know. They were from nearby Caen. My saying that we were Americans elicited stories. One said she is 82 and was here during the landings. Germans occupied Caen, the dreaded SS, she quickly added. The Germans were hostile. The first she knew of the invasion was when she heard the guns from the ships booming in the distance. Her grandfather hurried everyone to the cellar. Rather than fight, the SS fled north. But first, they killed the mayor and two other men who tried to stop them from taking several French women with them. The narrator said her British saviors were wonderfully different. They were kind, smiled, and best of all passed out candy to the children. Another woman said she too was here during the invasion. These stories of the rescued made our visit more memorable than the sights.
     We had a three-course meal at the restaurant for 20 euros, less than $24. The good-looking young man at the next table was sitting alone, trying awkwardly to order in French, marking him as American, so we struck up a conversation. He had graduated from Stanford business school in the spring and his job in New York would start next month. So he was filling the gap with a bike trip through Normandy alone. He hired a company that supplied him with a bike, arranged the hotels, and ferried his luggage. He was doing this because his grandfather had been in the 82nd Airborne Division and parachuted into Normandy. His grandfather didn’t talk much about the war until thirty years ago when his parents decided to visit Normandy. As they boarded the plane, he handed them his journal. They read it on the flight to France and learned of his experiences. That one can come here and hear first and second hand stories of the Normandy invasion is more moving than the sights.
     We spend the morning here and then drive to Paris. I am in the State Department’s speakers bureau and giving talks tomorrow on my Yarrow Mamout book at two schools. So this blog will continue. I’ve had enough of war.