- World War II Bus Tour to the Beaches of Normandy France
When we were kids spending summer days at Grandma Maule's house, she used to take me and Jake out under the evergreen trees to listen to the wind whip through the branches. The whistling sound this made was the sound of the trees singing and serenading specially to us. Today, the trees sang to us at the Omaha Beach, and Grandma would have liked that.
I am going to start today's entry the same way Grandpa Maule (Donnie) started each entry he kept in his World War II journal, with breakfast. Today I had coffee for breakfast. Mom and I were up at 5, or sooner, to get ready for our early departure. I made the coffee a little bit stronger than Mom has been making it. Partially that was an accident, and partially I was trying to make it a little stronger since it was so early.
We joined our tour group and climbed to the top of a double-decker bus. The sway of the bus put me to sleep almost instantly, but I woke up a little later to hear the tour guides explaining stuff to us. Both the tour guides have this strange speaking cadence. After every sentence, they would swoop up at the end with either "...riiiight?" or "eh?", as if they were asking us to validate the details they just shared.
Our first stop was a museum and memorial to the time between the end of WWI up through D-Day. The museum did a nice job outlining the events that lead up to the start of the Second Great War - especially the focus on the Holocaust and Genocide. I recognize that I can't begin to imagine what it was like to have been a part of something like that, but some of the imagery and statistics offered a brief glimpses of understanding to the incomprehensible. (I was, however, disappointed to see the focus on identifying multiple groups of people, but not the homosexuals. Now is not the time though.)
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| The Great State |
Outside the museum were four different gardens recognizing each nation that played a part in the events on June 6. Primarily this was America, Canada, and the UK, but they also had something for France as the country we are in. We only had time to see the United States garden, and it was a very serene dedication to those involved. Walking into the entrance, we saw the top of an infinity pool that was looking out into the surrounding forest. The path on the side led us through some fragrant gardens to the bottom of the waterfall. The wall behind the falls was lined with an emblem from each state that sent young men to the fronts that day (so all 50 were represented, I think).After lunch we started towards the actual beaches where the attack of D-Day took place, and continued to supply reinforcements for later sieges. At the Utah beach, I stood in the bottom of a cavity from the bombs that were dropped, and I looked upward the 15-20 feet above me at the ground knowing that the ground above was covered with these indentures for miles in both directions. These depressions offered the sieging men a place of cover, but also would have been taxing to run up and down as they pressed forward on the Germans.
At Omaha beach, there were no such recession in the ground. The attacking fighters bombed more inland to avoid raining over our own troops. This meant there was no place to easily take cover, and cost many more lives throughout the ultimately successful day. Mom and I walked the many steps along the winding path to the oceanfront beach itself. Standing at the foot of the large hill, I tried to imagine the emotions and experience of the day. Looking up at the green grass and tailored trees it was difficult to picture the dawn air full of smoke, the noise of the battlefield, and the chaos caused by the flying lead.
As we walked out of the memorial, the trees started singing. I wondered if this was something Grams would have appreciated, or if someone else was getting my attention.
