With this blog, I write about my experiences in France, where we stayed in Bayeux and Paris. Bayeux is a sleepy town in the Normandy region, with old, thin streets and stores that mainly close by 10 pm. Paris is the polar opposite, and is the cultural capital of France. Bayeux mainly feeds on tourism brought on from the D-Day Invasion, while Paris has moved on, and is a business capital of the world. In this blog I will talk about many things, like the invasion beaches we saw, Pointe du Hoc, war cemeteries, and museums.
Bayeux in World War Two is a rather interesting case. The Germans stationed here were not a cutthroat division, and retreated from the Allied Invasion, leaving the town nearly unscathed, although I’m not sure of what happened in regards to bombing raids. Paris also went relatively untouched and was occupied by Nazi Germany for much of the war.
In American memory, Omaha seems to be one of the most remembered beaches, with the opening of Saving Private Ryan being there (it was filmed in Ireland), and more casualties happening here than others. So, what was found was a bit surprising: beachfront properties. The land wasn’t preserved much, but a monument opens to the beach. There’s no museum accompanying the land, but restaurants are named after it nearby.
Utah Beach was a more preserved beach, with sand dunes marking the nearly untouched area. Surrounding the beach were a museum, monuments, and decaying war memorabilia (like a German Flak gun). The water was also at a lower tide when we arrived, meaning the water was receded like it would have been on June 6, 1944. Standing at the edge of the water watching the waves ebb and flow, one could not help but to think that we were seeing what an American soldier would have seen over 70 years ago. Needless to say, Utah Beach was a very touching place to be.
Pointe du Hoc was a German controlled area invaded by Army Rangers on D-Day. These Rangers were tasked with disabling artillery guns which could have been problematic in the beach invasion. Once these men scaled the nearly vertical rock face, the guns were not found in the expected site, but were found and disabled soon thereafter using thermite grenades. The site is now an American monument site and is pocked by huge craters from shelling and Nazi bunkers. Actually being there and seeing the effects of naval bombardment was mesmerizing, as I had always seen footage of ships firing cannons and not thought about the effects on the the receiving end of the firing. Besides going into the craters, going into the bunkers that were occupied with Nazis also had another humanizing feature. Hearing our own voices reverberate against the concrete, it is hard to imagine how deafening the shelling would have been.
View of Pointe Du Hoc
In our time in Bayeux we were also able to tour cemeteries for America, Britain, and Germany. The American Cemetery was gorgeous, with views of the Norman coast and pine trees dotting the land. The markers are also phenomenal, with either a white cross or Star Of David marking burials. Inscribed on each is the name of the soldier, rank, division, state, and date of death. While there, I was blessed to place an Ohio State flag on the grave of John W. Atkinson Jr., First Lieutenant with the 101st Airborne Division who was killed on June 8th, 1944. He grew up in Portsmouth (very close to Chillicothe, my own hometown) and attended The Ohio State University. There are twelve Buckeyes buried in the cemetery.
The British Cemetery was a jarring experience, because according to British belief, all soldiers deserve a respectful burial. These led to graves for not only Britt, but also Americans, Australians, Canadians, Czechs, Germans, Italians, Muslims, Poles, Russians, and likely more that I did not see. This display led to a remind that World War Two was a truly global conflict. The tombstones also included an inscription from the family of the lost, which was especially jarring.
The last cemetery I can discuss is the German War Cemetery, which was very different from the other two. The cemetery had to play the line of how to honor war dead from a country, when the country was under one of the worst regimes in history. This complex question has raked my mind often, and I think that the best answer is in the cemetery we toured. The tombstones are flat at ground level, typically with two soldiers buried in each plot. In the middle of a cemetery there is a hill with a cross with two Germanic figures underneath it, and the hill has unidentified bodies interred in it. As we walked past it, a French teenager stood at the peak and sang a Whitney Houston song at the top of his lungs. Even though this was a cemetery for Germans who defended Norman beaches from Allied forces, I could not help but to be extremely bothered by the disrespect I witnessed.
German Cemetary
The last part of the French portion I want to discuss are the museums that we saw. Generally, these museums shared a common thread of discussing the war and showing artifacts. Typically, the French museums offered portions on the French resistance and the Free French Forces. In nearly every one of them, a picture of Jean Moulin (who briefly united Resistance forces under General de Gaulle) is shown. What was missing bothered me, there was barely a mention of the Vichy government, of France’s surrender in 1940, or many things that could paint France in a negative light. If you did not have background knowledge of the war and toured some of the museums, you would think that France fought gallantly, then some years passed, and General de Gaulle led forces into the heart of Paris and drove out the Germans singlehandedly.
In one example at the Caen Museum, there is only one picture from the roundup of Jews in the Paris Velodrome d’Hiver. Accompanying it is only a small description and no further explanation of the role that the French played in the Nazi regime. 13,152 Jews were arrested by French police in the two day round up, and they were then sent to extermination camps. The Caen museum was the only one that I saw that mentioned this; not even the Musée de l’Armée in Paris spoke of it. In a later discussion, we learned to be aware of who designs museums, as they may slant the museum to shine lights on some things and ignore others. It seems victims of French-Nazi collaborators are a group that has had the light taken away from them in the collective French memory, which I find to be a travesty.
We now go eastwards to Krakow, Poland. After learning more about D-Day and the Normandy campaign than I ever thought I would learn, I look forward to seeing a different viewpoint of the War. In my eyes, the Norman region thrives off tourism related to the 1944 invasion. Paris enjoys being one of the most renowned cities in the world, with barely a mention of a world war two in sight (asides from occasional plaques commemorating the heroic efforts of the French resistance). I look forward to portraying my experience to you all again soon.
Au revoir,
Beau Bilek