A few years ago, my wife asked if our next big vacation could be a visit to France. She had recently lost her mother, and wanted to visit Paris, and in particular Notre Dame, as a form of pilgrimage in her mother's memory. These are places her mother had dreamt of seeing, but had never been able to visit because of ill health.

I quickly, and wholeheartedly, agreed. This could also be a pilgrimage for me. I had always wanted to see Omaha Beach, in Normandy, long before "Saving Private Ryan" had even been conceived. Like so many teenagers in the Sixties, I had been a ravenous reader of anything written about the history of World War II. In fact, through my high school years, I must have read as many as three hundred history books on the subject.

As it happened, the Sixties were not so far removed from the war that curious little boys and teenagers couldn't ask their fathers, uncles, or even grandfathers, "What did you do in the war?" "Did you have to kill anyone?"

Traveling to France meant I finally was going to fulfill my dream. On our sixth day in France, we made our way to Honfleur, a beautiful little town distinguished by a beautiful old harbor. Omaha Beach is only a 70 to 90 minute drive from there. The roads along the way are very well marked; we had no trouble finding where we wanted to go. We drove through Caen, then Bayeux, and finally picked up the "D-Day, Le Choc" road, a well-marked trail that allows any visitor to find all of the significant beaches, monuments, and museums, as well as the all-important American Cemetery.

As we drove down the road towards Port-en-Bessin, we spotted the amusing museum of the "D-Day Wrecks." Someone had purchased the salvage rights to all of the material left underwater, off the Invasion Beaches. This included ships, planes, landing craft, tanks (Figure 1), and more. To someone like myself who had privately memorized and catalogued all the militaria of the war, this was like being in a small candy shop. The D-Day Wrecks Museum had M4 Sherman DD (Duplex Drive) tanks, an M5 Stuart tank, a Sherman tank bulldozer (Figure 2), and an M7 Priest 105mm self-propelled gun. All this equipment had been raised from its watery grave sometime in the Seventies or Eighties, sprayed with a form of fixative, and put on display, barnacles and all.

My wife and I drove on to the American Cemetery, a one hundred seventy-two acre piece of land that overlooks Omaha Beach, and which stands atop the bluff where over two thousand Americans died on June 6th of 1944 (Figure 3). Two thousand men! There are over 9300 Americans buried in the Cemetery, veterans from both World Wars. The symmetry of the grave markers (Figure 4), and the manicured order of the terrain, belied the chaos the men must have experienced in their last moments of life. I couldn't believe it. Here was the place I had been reading about, and had tried to visualize for so long. The solitude, and the spirituality of the place, was equal to that of any of the cathedrals we had visited on our trip.

Since the movie, "Saving Private Ryan," there has been a tremendous increase in the number of visitors to this cemetery. There are great hordes of Americans, in particular D-Day veterans, who are making their own pilgrimages to see their lost buddies, or to bring their families to tell them about the fight.

We spent several hours walking around, taking pictures (Figure 5), and looking down over these famous bluffs that had proven to be so murderous on June 6th. I told my wife all I could remember about details of the battles, what happened and when. As she asked questions, I only hoped that I was doing justice to the story as it actually had happened.

I described how three Congressional Medal of Honor recipients were buried there. I was curious to see whether these three markers were treated any differently, and soon saw how they were. One of the recipients was Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., son of President Teddy Roosevelt. We stood amidst the hundreds of rows of markers when I noticed one not fifteen feet away from us. It stood out because it was lettered in gold, instead of the standard letters simply carved into stone. There was my answer: the grave of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Medal of Honor recipient (Figure 6). He was a man older than most of his troops, and had received special permission to accompany his division there, and then again, to be included in the first wave on June 6th. He survived the horror of D-Day, but died of a coronary heart attack on July 12, 1944. He was buried in the American Cemetery next to his brother Quentin, who had been killed in aerial combat during World War I.

We went on to see some of the beach defenses, including the murderous Position 62 (Figure 7). The gun emplacement is still there, the concrete strong and still covered in earth, with a perfect view of the full length of Omaha Beach. I could easily imagine the ungodly noise, and the smell of gun powder that those German troops must have experienced as the naval gunfire was raining down on them, trying to kill them just as they were killing the Americans down on the Beach.

As I stood there looking out (Figure 8), I kept asking myself, "Why did they have to come here? To this beach? What lunatic selected this place?" Omaha had to be one of the most "perfect" killing grounds ever chosen in the history of warfare. With these questions ringing in my ears, tears came to my eyes. I swear I could hear things from times past. My wife held my hand reassuringly. But why these emotions? No one in my family had fought here. My father's war had been in the Pacific. I could only chalk it up to a deep-felt connection between what I had read, and what I now could see, understand, and appreciate so much better.

Our beautiful spring day in May was drawing to a close. The hundreds of Americans walking around were silently taking in all that I too had seen. And there was one more revelation for me: the vast majority of people at the Cemetery that day were French citizens. The French easily outnumbered the Americans, ten to one. These weren't the Frenchmen of the D-Day era. Instead, in large part, they were young families, parents in their thirties and forties, with their children. They were explaining the significance of all the markers, and about the sacrifices made by young men who had died and been buried there. These "strangers" had been willing to fight on behalf of France to free them from an evil these parents hoped their children or grandchildren would never have to experience.

©2007 Rick Oldano
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