Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, or Victory in Europe Day, aka the official mark of victory of the Allies in 1945, ending World War II on the European front with the official surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied Forces.
While it is easy to understand the significance of May 8, 1945, what gets me is when I pause to think about the fact that just about every person in America, Europe, Japan, and perhaps elsewhere knows at least one person who was directly impacted by World War II. Whether that person served in the armed forces, was relocated due to conflict, was taken prisoner of war or forced into a concentration camp because of their race or religion…we all know someone. For me, that person – that group of people – would be my grandfather and three of his brothers. Three of them served in the Navy in the Pacific, one served in the Army and remained stateside. All four of them, plus their other brother and sister, have since passed on, so I’m taking it upon myself to research their stories and find out as much as I can about their wartime experiences. It is not easy work, but I hope to write more about their stories in the coming months leading up to V-J Day in August.
Since none of my relatives served on the European front, I wanted to pay homage to the 75th anniversary of V-E Day by reflecting back on a trip my dad and I took a few years ago to London, England and Normandy, France in late May of 2012. My dad always had a bucket list dream to walk the beaches of Normandy. We’d briefly visited Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery on a trip to England and France when I was in high school, but we only spent a day there – not nearly enough time for us two history nerds and WWII buffs. So we planned a father-daughter trip, accompanied by two of my dad’s friends who were also big WWII history nerds, so we could walk the beaches of Normandy together. That trip still to this day is marked as one of my all-time favorite trips, mainly because of the person I got to travel there with. It would be one year later, in May of 2013, that my dad would be diagnosed with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a condition that attacks the nervous system and temporarily paralyzes its victim. My dad is still in a wheelchair seven years later, which makes the fact that he got to walk those beaches a year prior all the more special to him and to me, as the person who got to experience that with him.
While I won’t recount the entire trip in this post (we spent 10 days touring parts of London and all five Normandy beaches and surrounding countryside), I would like to highlight some of the most pivotal moments of that trip for me – the moments when I would pause and reflect on the sacrifices made by so many during those war-torn years.
Bayeux War Cemetery
After spending a few days in London, we made our way by train to Paris, then to Bayeux, where we would stay during our time in Normandy. On our first day in Bayeux, we decided to visit the Bayeux War Cemetery, the largest World War II cemetery of Commonwealth soldiers in France. Most of the men buried here were killed during the Allied invasion of Normandy. I have, still to this day, seen nothing quite like it. When a British soldier was killed, their family could write personalized messages to have engraved on the soldier’s headstone. Walking through that cemetery, reading the messages, it affected me in a way I can hardly describe. We all know millions died in World War II, but to see their headstones; to read the messages from their mothers, their fathers, brothers, sisters, wives…these men who sacrificed all for King and country had families, had lives they were desperate to get back to but that were cut short by the brutality of war.
When we study history, and the wars throughout the centuries, we learn about the countries involved, the political alliances formed, the battles fought and major strategies of either side. We learn the facts, the figures, important dates to remember. But seeing those headstones in a place like the Bayeux War Cemetery, it is a gentle reminder that war is not simply about alliances or enemies. It isn’t simply military tactics and who has the best warfare technology. At the end of the day, World War II was not simply fought by the Allied vs. Axis powers. It was fought by ordinary men and women forged into extraordinary circumstances. We must always remember this – that is the true cost of war. Not the treaties or reparations, but the sacrifices made by millions of individual souls like you and like me. It is sobering.
Poppy in German Battery Field
One of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken came from this trip. We were touring a German battery a few miles inland from the Normandy beaches (I can’t quite remember which one, either Utah or Omaha), and I noticed this small poppy sticking up through the wheat field. Remembering the symbolism of the poppy and war veterans, I immediately began shooting photos of it. As we walked along, I noticed another one. And then I looked up toward the open field and there, among the wheat, were dozens of poppies, blowing in the wind. It was in that moment that I felt such a strong connection to that place; it all at once became sacred to me – the significance of where I was standing struck me in my core. I paused to think about the men who fought and died within those miles of beaches and fields and pastures. While the single poppy holds great significance for me, I take heart in remembering the dozens of other poppies growing up around it, reminding me we are never truly alone, even in death.
Angoville-au-Plain Church
While visiting Normandy, not far from Utah Beach is a church – Angoville-au-Plain – that was used as a medic station by Robert Wright and Ken Moore of the 2nd Battalion of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment (101st Airborne) during the D-Day invasions. Blood stains can still be seen on some of the pews, and the most striking characteristic of this church are the stained glass windows commemorating the 101st Airborne Division. This church is small, in a quiet area of Normandy, almost unknown to most tourists. We were the only ones there the day we visited.
Standing in the middle of that church, I tried to picture the scenes of what it was like in the summer of 1944. I thought of the medics tending to the wounded – both American and German soldiers. These men did not have time to care whether they were helping an American, a German, a French. There was no nationality or allegiance in that church – except to humanity. Those medics had one job to do in their minds – save lives; save lives in the midst of horrific battle.
La Cambe German War Cemetery
This is by far one of the most haunting and sobering places I think I’ve ever been to, with the exception, ironically, of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. When people think of Normandy, they remember the D-Day invasion – the Allied forces storming the beaches, the paratroopers dropping from the sky into surrounding countryside, and the battle forward toward Paris. What many don’t stop to consider are the Germans fighting the defensive battle for a cause they didn’t quite understand or believe in themselves. While driving on a highway back to Bayeux one day toward the end of our trip, our guide veered off the highway toward an unknown destination – she wanted to show us something. A place with no signs pointing toward it, no markers signifying what it was. We pulled up to it, got out, and were greeted by black stones scattered in straight lines in an open field, and a giant mound with a statue of two people weeping under a cross jutting out in the middle of it. A cemetery. A German cemetery. La Cambe German War Cemetery.
Contrasted with the British cemeteries and the American cemetery we’d seen previously, this place brought me to near tears. We silently began walking among the graves as our guide explained to us the significance of the stone coloring and the structure in the middle. At the end of the war, the German government did not have the funds to expatriate the bodies of fallen soldiers back home for burial. Instead, German soldiers were buried where they were slain. For tens of thousands, that final resting place is Normandy, France. And it is here, at La Cambe, that over 21,000 German soldiers are buried, many buried two to a headstone and almost 200 unidentified buried in a mass grave in the middle (the mound). As I looked down at the dark stones memorializing the dead, I wondered just how many more thousands of German soldiers are scattered throughout Europe, family members never having the chance to visit the graves of their loved ones or knowing what became of them.
Reading the headstones that surrounded me, I realized just how desperate the Nazis had become toward the end of the war. The men buried at La Cambe ranged in age from mere teenagers to men well into their 60s and 70s. The message was clear – these were not Nazis buried in this cemetery, but German men. Men forced to leave their homes to fight for a cause they did not believe in. Perhaps they believed they were fighting for the motherland, to protect their homes and their way of life. But I refuse to believe the 16 year old boy buried next to the 60 year old man were fighting for Hitler’s cause. They were men and boys, thrust into the brutality of war, forced to fight for a man who stood for evil when they themselves were good and decent and kind. It was in those moments in that cemetery that I realized for the first time – World War II was not a war fought for such a black and white cause as I thought. It was not always just good vs. evil, freedom vs. oppression, right vs. wrong. By the war’s end, it was simply men fighting to get home to their wives, their mothers, their families, to any sense of normalcy. There is no denying Hitler was evil, and the Nazi cause was not a noble cause worth fighting for; and yet, these German soldiers were still just men; perhaps men not so different from their Allied counterparts. Any loss of human life is a life worth mourning.
The Beaches
If you’ve ever stood in a place where something significant in history took place, you know the feelings I’m about to describe. The same feelings I felt standing on the beaches of Normandy were the same feelings I felt walking alone through parts of Auschwitz-Birkenau, or standing in the middle of Notre Dame Cathedral or Westminster Abbey. When I look into the eyes of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, when I saw the Declaration of Independence up close for the very first time, or standing in the middle of the battlefields of Gettysburg. Walking the halls of Hampton Court or the Tower of London. Standing in the middle of the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial or staring into the fountains at the 9/11 Memorial. When you are up close and personal to history, it does something to you. Something inside of you stirs, and your soul is forever changed.
Those were the feelings I felt standing on the beaches of Normandy. We visited all five that were part of the D-Day landing invasion. And regardless of if we were standing on Omaha or Utah, Sword, Gold, or Juno, the feelings were all the same. The feeling that something significant took place there. Men died there. If you are still long enough, you can almost hear the cries of men in combat, machine guns and artillery fire. When something so significant happens in a place, that place becomes sacred. Forever memorialized as part of history, our history. It doesn’t matter how much time passes. Buildings are rebuilt, people try to find a new sense of normalcy, but those places become hallowed ground.
The trip my father and I took to Normandy in the summer of 2012 had a profound effect on me and on how I view history, war, and the world at large. I hope and pray the world never experiences a world war on such a scale ever again. I have hope that mankind will persevere over evil and good will win out every time. And it is because of this understanding that when I think of the church bells ringing out throughout America and Europe on May 8, 1945, I feel hope; I feel a sense of peace. War is never kind, but it is out of war that man becomes more kind. I have hope.