Part of the American cemetery in Normandy
Two years ago, I made a trip to Normandy specifically to remember D-Day (June 6, 1944), the day the Americans and British launched the offensive which would liberate Nazi-occupied France. Somehow in the recent WordPress upgrade, I seem to have lost my post. Although all travel is time-travel in that each trip supersedes the previous one, and often moving sights are relegated to a visual memory scrapbook that seems to shift and shimmer like a mirage, the sheer magnitude of the cemetery–which contains unclaimed American bodies–seems to demand one more remembrance.
Outside the cemetery-I think it is at the site
of the first paratrooper drop
unknown soldier
Scholars and museums have documented the engineering feats of building offshore barges which functioned as staging areas for the attack, and also the extra-large personalities of generals Dwight Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery. Both the facts and the fiction bring memories into sharper focus, but the raw bravery of very young men is what carried the day and changed history.
Each death was a tribute to what might have been, and another look back is the least I can do.
Leave a Reply