Normandy’s Bucolic Battlegrounds
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Dairy cows lazing in meadows of shimmering green, half-timbered farmhouses blanketed in mist, and beautiful beaches where it’s too cold to swim: At first glance there is little in the topography of Normandy that hints at the region’s place along the fault lines of history. But despite its bucolic allure and well-deserved reputation for good eating (think Camembert and caramels), Normandy is foremost a land of memory. William the Conqueror had his moment in the sun – or, more likely, fog – but it is D-Day and its aftermath that reverberate virtually everywhere here today.
It can be easy to forget in D-Day’s 60th anniversary year that despite the thunderbolt of June 6, 1944, freedom wasn’t bought in a day. Unless, that is, you break free from Paris and head to Normandy, where the sky-high price of liberty is understood like nowhere else in France, and where in recent months every community from the largest town to the tiniest hamlet successively commemorated its liberation from the Nazis as the long days of the summer of 1944 unfolded. The pro-American spirit in these parts has never dimmed. This year it is a common sight to see shop windows painted with images of GIs and the rallying cry “Let’s Go!,” the Stars and Stripes fluttering alongside the French tricolor in more places than usual, and special exhibits and events to commemorate the liberation throughout the region.
One of the most significant dates in the Battle of Normandy was July 18, when Saint-Lo, a strategic inland transportation hub, was finally liberated. My grandfather, who landed at Utah Beach on June 6, participated in that struggle. Sixty years later to the day, I found myself in the heart of Saint-Lo with my father and brother. Were he still alive my grandfather wouldn’t recognize much of the town, labeled a “capital of ruins” in the wake of a bombing campaign by Allied forces so violent that the dead were literally shaken from their graves. Nearly everything had to be rebuilt, and the few original structures left standing are scarred by traces of shrapnel and sniper fire.
Our visit was part of a three-day sweep of D-Day battle sites in the Norman districts of Calvados, Bessin, and Cotentin. It began on an appropriately somber note with a wreath-laying at a monument for Major Thomas D. Howie, killed in action as he led the American troops of the 116th Regiment into Saint-Lo against heavy German resistance. A sizeable French military contingent was on hand to witness the ceremony, as was a smaller one of U.S. and French veterans who led an emotional procession through the town, followed in earnest by hundreds of residents who still remember July 18, 1944, like yesterday.
A car is essential for exploring Normandy, particularly the meandering coast. We had taken a two-hour train ride from Paris to Caen (tickets available at www.raileurope.com; $39 second class, $52 first class), where we rented a car. From Saint-Lo it is a short drive north to Carentan, home to a soaring Gothic cathedral, and beyond that Utah Beach, where we paused to explore the wide swath of sand where my grandfather had pushed into occupied France on D-Day. There is a small museum at the beach and numerous austere stone monuments erected by the American Battle Monuments Commission and the French government.
Beyond Utah Beach is Sainte-Mere-Eglise – the first French village to be liberated and one that hasn’t forgotten it. Streets are named for American soldiers who fought here. Around the severe Norman church, begun in the 12th century, are clustered stores with English names such as “Airborne All the Way” which proffer U.S. military surplus and battle relics – a bit of a detour from the standard French assortment of boulangeries and cafes (but they are there, too, and by all means pop into one of the latter for a pitcher of apple cider). As for the church, it has a unique claim to fame: on D-Day, an American paratrooper named John Steele landed, by accident, on its roof. He played dead well enough (and long enough) to survive the battle raging below him.
Today a life-size model of Steele adorns his spot on the roof, while inside a large stained glass window depicts not scenes from the lives of the saints but rather American paratroopers falling from the sky. Proof that sometimes salvation comes from surprising sources.
Travel almost any direction in Normandy and you will end up somewhere with at least one story to tell. One place with a tale of epic proportions, and that also happens to be an excellent springboard to the D-Day landing beaches, is Bayeux. This ancient French town, whose roots predate the Roman conquest of Gaul, is celebrated for its beautiful Cathedral de Notre Dame and the monumental tapestry said to have been commissioned for it. The Bayeux Tapestry, in actuality an embroidery of colored wool on bleached linen, is nearly 2 feet tall and 230 feet long and depicts in vivid detail William the Conqueror’s invasion of England. Castle construction, boat-outfitting, dispensation of armor, and the Battle of Hastings in 1066: it’s all there, a medieval antecedent to another Norman battle at the opposite end of the millennium. The tapestry is displayed in all its glory behind glass panels in the Centre Guillaume le Conquerant, a stone’s throw from the gargantuan cathedral.
While the city of Caen is bigger and has clearer links to the Battle of Normandy (and is home to the highly regarded Memorial de Caen, a museum dedicated to the causes and consequences of war), Bayeux is prettier and more conveniently located for those exploring the key battleground sites. There are decent hotels in the town proper, but two traditional and noteworthy ones I discovered are on the edge of it: the Ferme de la Ranconniere (Route d’Arromanches, Crepon, 33-2-31-22-21-73, www.ranconniere.com; rooms $68-$124), a renovated but still agreeably rustic 13th-century fortress with 35 rooms, and the Chateau de Sully (Route de Port-en-Bessin, 33-2-31-22-29-48, www.chateauxhotels.com/sully; rooms $121-$167), a comfortable renovated 18th-century country manor where we stayed. The latter is just north of the town center and closer to Omaha Beach and the Normandy American Cemetery at Collevillesur-Mer.
For many Americans, the cemetery is the central element of a visit to Normandy. It is certainly the most moving. No matter how many pictures you may have seen of this hallowed ground, nothing can prepare you for its 9,387 graves aligned in one precise row after another, a heartrending vista of sorrow that spans nearly 173 lush, flawlessly maintained acres. Behind the central memorial, with its powerful 22-foot bronze statue of “The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves,” is a garden dedicated to 1,557 soldiers who went missing during fighting in the vicinity.
Regardless of how many people visit the Colleville site on any given day, silence always reigns. It follows you as you descend a path that snakes through brush and dunes to a section of Omaha Beach, where the bloodiest moments of D-Day occurred. The more compelling view is arguably not of the beach itself but rather back toward the vine covered bluffs from which the entrenched Germans systematically mowed down the Allied soldiers now at rest behind them. There is perhaps no other World War II site, in France or anywhere else, as evocative.
But no less dramatic is the Pointe du Hoc, eight miles west of little Colleville-sur-Mer down a winding road that follows the chiseled contours of the coast. This is where the 2nd Ranger Battalion, under the command of LTC James E. Rudder, managed to scale a 100-foot cliff under heavy German resistance on June 8, 1944. The 30-acre windswept site, turned over to the United States in 1979, is pockmarked with deep bomb craters and remnants of German bunkers that are often disarmingly intact. Smiling European tourists and shrieking seagulls notwithstanding, here it feels like the guns stopped shooting yesterday.