Return to Normandy 2001

With Memorial Day and the anniversary of D-Day fast approaching, I have chosen to serialize a memoir I wrote in 2002, which was previously published in The Flak, the newsletter of the 552nd AAA Battalion Association (that's anti-aircraft artillery, for those who might wonder). This is part one.



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Return to Normandy 2001

Technically, we were not returning to Normandy. We had never been there but were going as proxies for my dad, since he was unable to return to France and the scene of the greatest invasion in the history of the world. My husband James, our then-seventeen year old daughter Haley, and I were making our way across the width of France from southeast to northwest, having begun our journey by car in Rome on the 4th of April.

It was after visiting the famed cathedral of Chartres and as we approached the large region of Normandy that I began to read aloud from Stephen Ambrose's D-Day, preparing us for what we would see when we reached the towns and villages hugging the windy shores of the Cotentin, that peninsular thrust of historic Norman coast chosen by the Allied powers who fully understood the necessity of deceiving the German high command about their planned invasion site.

We read about the naming of the beach sectors, about the carefully laid plans that would first drop the paratroopers behind enemy lines, next the Rangers to breach the beach and its defenses, then the engineers who would open up the lanes in to the seaside villages from the beaches for the troops to pour through. We learned of the special skirts made to float tanks, about the design and production of the Higgins boats, about the hundreds of thousands of troops bivouacked in English cities and hamlets. We knew from Daddy's reports that the 552nd had waited in Wallingford, near Oxford and the Thames River.

Stephen Ambrose's straight-forward account of the events leading up to and carrying through to the end of the D-Day invasion took us through a range of emotions, and at times the reading stopped abruptly when the words would not make it past the lump of emotion that welled up in the reader's throat. The vivid descriptions swept us back into that moment in history: the descriptions of boys and men who parachuted into flooded fields and didn't make it out; those who never got to shore because their loads were so heavy and the water so deep that they drowned when they debarked; those who never exited their Higgins boats at Omaha but were cut down by the slashing enfilade from the pre-sited German machine guns; those whose vessels collided with submerged mines; or took a German artillery round; or who, once making it to the shore, were cut down by one type of weapon or another.

At this point our story switches to the present tense, and we take you along with us. The beautiful French countryside skims alongside our car as we contemplate what we have read, thinking about what our countrymen did more than 65 years ago. The rain stopped before we left Chartres, but the sky is busy, and the wind is cold. In Brezolles swans glide on the smooth surface of a small lake in the center of town. Beautiful streams and rivers crisscross the pastoral scene, and the topography begins to change as we come into Normandy; we are climbing gently. Near Vimoutiers, just to the east of Falaise, namesake of the Falaise Gap battle, we encounter tall pine trees and logging, hills, and hedgerows. We learn from Ambrose that the hedgerows in today's France are not the same as the ones which proved to be the next deadly obstacle to our forces after they got off the beaches code-named Utah and Omaha. Today's hedgerows are much lower, not built up on dirt mounds like those in 1944 Normandy. Caen is our destination for the night, and it is growing dark.
(To Be Continued)