History in the Margins

Road Trip Through History: Lest We Forget

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On Memorial Day, My Own True Love and I make sure we attend a service in honor of the fallen. This year we were in Normandy on Memorial Day, enjoying a D-Day tour. In some ways, the entire tour was an extended Memorial Day experience, defined by General John Logan, the holiday’s founder, as “cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foe.”

American cemetery Normandy

My Own True Love and I expected the Sunday before Memorial Day to be a gut-wrenching experience. The schedule included attending the official D-Day memorial service at the American Cemetery near Omaha Beach.* It soon became clear that the official service was too distant to have much impact. Instead our guide led us through the cemetery, telling us stories about fallen soldiers, love, loss, and heroism. The National World War II Museum, which organized the tour, had provided a flower arrangement and a large number of white roses. The members of the tour improvised a small service of our own. One member suggested that we leave the arrangement on the grave of an unknown soldier. Another suggested that the veterans in our group present the arrangement. It was a powerful moment. Tears were shed. (In fact, I am tearing up typing this after the fact.) As a ceremony, it had all the impact that the official celebration did not.(Leading me to suspect that intimacy is an essential ingredient in a Memorial Day service.) Afterwards, we scattered to place individual white roses on graves.**

As I walked back to the bus, I heard the sound of a lone bugle playing “Taps”–the end of the official celebration. I stopped to listen with a lump in my throat and an ache in my chest.

Remember the fallen.  Thank the living.  Pray for peace.

*Not the first time we’ve visited an official American cemetery abroad.  It is always a moving experience.   The Visitors’ Center at the cemetery in Normandy was closed due to the ceremony.  Rumor has it that the exhibits are excellent.  Quite frankly, I don’t think I could have handled any more.

**I would have liked to place mine on the grave of one of the four women buried in the cemetery. (I am pleased to say that one of the male members of the tour asked where they were buried before I could.) Unfortunately, they were all buried in a portion of the cemetery that was roped off to protect the ground due to recent weather conditions. While I am perfectly willing to kick open a door when there is a good reason, this didn’t seem to be one of these times.

From the Archives: Antony Beevor’s Second World War

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While I continue to struggle with the next blog post about a stop on our D-Day tour, I thought I would share this review from the archives on a related subject.  With any luck I’ll have successfully found my way into the Grand Bunker museum and out again by next week.

 

When Antony Beevor’s The Second World War arrived in the mail*, I was intimidated. I read and write about war-related topics a lot, but I wasn’t sure I was up to almost 800 pages of pure military history.

I didn’t need to worry. Beevor begins his broad-sweeping history with the story of a single Korean soldier whose experience of the war took him from Japanese-controlled Manchuria to the Allied invasion of Normandy. The vignette is a perfect metaphor for the narrative structure of the book, which Beevor begins with the Japanese defeat by the Red Army at the battle of Khalkin Gol in August, 1939–one month before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. It reminded me that Beevor is known for his lively style, cinematic vignettes, and ability to evoke the experience of the ordinary soldier in the battlefield. All of which he uses to good effect in this work. Secure that I was in good hands, I dove in.

Reviews of The Second World War uniformly describe the book as epic and authoritative. It certainly deserves both adjectives. But what caught and held my attention was not the undoubted excellence of the broad narrative, but Beevor’s underlying awareness of the war as “an amalgamation of conflicts” rather than a single war. He looks at individual conflicts as self-contained units as well as placing them in the larger context of global war. He moves from sharp political analysis to clear descriptions of battles** to the experience of individuals caught up in the overwhelming forces of war. In addition to the old horror of concentration camps, he gives us the new horror of Japanese cannibalism in their prison camps. In short, Beevor has managed the hat trick of looking at history on a broad scale and close up at the same time.

Beevor’s The Second World War is an excellent, if demanding, read. Well worth the time and shelf space for anyone interested in military history in general or the history of the early twentieth century in particular. If you’d like a quick introduction to Beevor and the book, check out History Today’s interview : Beevor by the Book

* As anyone who spends much time reading blogs knows, I’m required to tell you that the publisher sent me a copy of this book for review. My personal position is that if I don’t like the book, I don’t review it. No bashing. No puff pieces. No kidding.

**With equally clear maps. Thank you, Little Brown.

Road Trip Through History: Gliders and Pegasus Bridge

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The image of pilgrimage came to mind again as soon as we began to visit key sites related to the Invasion of Normandy, beginning with the museum at Pegasus Bridge.

Pegasus Bridge

Pegasus Bridge, June 1944 (From the collection of the Imperial War Museum

The capture of Pegasus Bridge was a key objective in the first moments of the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. Here’s the short version:* Six Horsa gliders carried 181 members of the British airborne infantry, led by Major John Howard, from Dorset to Normandy, with orders to land, capture both Pegasus and the nearby Horsa Bridge,** and hold them until relieved. Pegasus Bridge was captured ninety minutes after the gliders took off from England. The operation’s success played a key role in limiting the effectiveness of the German counterattack.

The museum has the actual bridge, but as far as I was concerned the glider exhibit had the most impact.*** The exhibit juxtaposed an actual section of a glider fuselage from World War II with a full-sized replica of a Horsa glider, built according to the original plans. Just like the little two-man gliders that I enjoyed rides in several decades ago, military gliders were towed aloft by powered airplanes. Once they reached an assigned position and altitude, they were released and flown using rising and falling air currents. Unlike the gliders I knew, they were BIG: they were capable of carrying thirty armed paratroopers, a jeep, or an anti-tank gun. (Obviously I knew this in my head, but there is nothing like seeing things in person to give you a sense of scale.) They were also terrifyingly fragile, made of wood and canvas to conserve metal: in the months after the invasion, desperate French civilians broke up abandoned gliders for firewood and building materials. (And who can blame them?)

One detail in particular caught my imagination: Allied planes and gliders were painted with black and white “invasion stripes” on the fuselage and wings to distinguish them from German planes. Because of the need for secrecy, the order for the paint job, which involved thousands of airplanes, wasn’t issued until two days before the invasion was scheduled to begin. Because of the size of the job, civilians joined ground crews in painting the stripes. Some used brooms rather than standard painterly gear. Even those who had brushes didn’t have time to mask off the stripes. In many cases the paint was still wet when the aircraft took off.

* If you want to know all the details, I hear good things about these accounts of the operation: Stephen Ambrose Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944 and John Howard with Penny Bates. The Pegasus Diaries: The Private Papers of Major John Howard. I haven’t read either of them.

**The local names were the Bénouville and Ranville bridges. In honor of the operation, they were renamed Pegasus after the emblem of the British airborne division and Horsa after the gliders that brought the troops in. Similarly, the names by which we know the beaches on which American, British, Canadian and French forces landed–Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno, and Sword–were their code names during the planning of the operation. I don’t know why this surprised me, but it did.  Perhaps because the accounts I’ve read of the invasion have only used the code names.

***The upside of the tour was that we had an excellent guide narrating the history for us. At some museums, including the museum at Pegasus Bridge, we also had a private lecture/tour/talk by a museum guide/curator/docent. The downside of the tour was that we often didn’t have time to look at museum exhibits in detail. It is quite possible that we learned more from the guides than we would have from the exhibits, but it was a bit frustrating for a hard-core museum fan.