I returned to Toledo for spring break prepared to quell the persistent urgings of my sister. For months she insisted that I listen to Hamilton: An American Musical. “You’re a dancer. You’re a history major. This is a musical about history. Why are you not obsessed with this?!” Ok. I gave it a shot. As I listened through the cast recording, I was struck by a recurring theme battling with what history is, what it means, and how it is told.
In a newly independent America, the musical’s antagonist, Aaron Burr, fights an ideological crusade for power against Alexander Hamilton. He considers his place in history and American collective memory:
“Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints. It takes and it takes and it takes. And we keep living anyway. We rise and we fall and we break and we make our mistakes” (“Wait For It,” Act I).
He continues this idea in Act II:
“History obliterates every picture it paints. It paints me and all my mistakes […] I survived but I paid for it. Now I’m the villain in your history” (“The World Was Wide Enough,” Act II).
As I walked Utah and Omaha beaches, I thought about how history obliterates. I pondered historical memory as Burr does throughout Lin Manuel-Miranda’s musical. I considered how we remember these areas and this war. The waves of the beach rolled in and out as I watched the tide ebb farther from view.
I looked at the beaches and thought of the men who fell there. Some took only a few steps onto to the beach they were preparing to storm for months. I saw only broken shells, crab legs, and fine Normandy sand.
I tried to imagine the sounds of bullets. I heard the roll of the low tide in the distance and the whispers of my classmates.
I watched for the German cavalry in the projections of my mind. Instead, I saw three Frenchmen racing horses down the coast. I heard the clicks of their hooves, as steady as a metronome.
Depleting resources caused Germany to be more reliant on horses than mechanized division towards the end of the war (Musee du Debarquement de Utah Beach).
Three Frenchmen race horses down Utah Beach.
I pictured the Atlantic Wall, a massive German defensive construction. I saw only a piecemeal barbed wired fence enclosing the perimeter of the beach.
The war obliterated. Time slowly erased the brutality of these battles. The beaches once littered with stuff—human stuff, as journalist Ernie Pyle wrote in his columns—no longer suggested this history. Save for a few plaques and memorials along the entrances of the beaches, one would never consider such picturesque scenes as sites of such horror.
Manuel-Miranda’s Aaron Burr concerned himself with the collective memory of his life and legacy: “Now I’m the villain in your history.” We travelled from the beaches to the German, American, and British war cemeteries. Standing in the green Normandy grass by these graves, it was suddenly harder to identify the villains in history. There was no visible enemy shooting across a line. Strangely, the cemeteries had obliterated these distinctions.
Gray stone slabs and crosses lined the German cemetery. A sea of alabaster head stones spread as far as the eye could see in the American cemetery situated on the coastline. The British remembered their dead with flowers and personalized graves displaying phrases of love, rest, sacrifice, and faith.
Concrete crosses throughout the German cemetery.
A sea of white stones in the American cemetery.
On these grounds, history obliterates nothing but the villain. They did not paint the mistakes of the Allied or Axis powers. They showed, as Burr acknowledged, that death does not discriminate between the sinners and the saints.
“History obliterates. It exhibits no restraints […] It takes and it takes and it takes. And we keep living anyway. We rise and we fall and we break and we make our mistakes.” The beaches of D-Day and the cemeteries underscore this notion. History obliterates; death does not discriminate. We remember the past through relationships to victory and villains. As we watched the afterbirth of a new world post-WWII, the memory of the D-Day landings began to be washed away with the tides of their beaches. We remember the Invasion and its actors not through pictures of mistakes and villainy, but through respect and sacrifice.