History in the Margins

Road Trip Through History: German Bunkers and Reinforced Concrete

By on

At dinner on our first night in Normandy, we ended up in conversation with two men at a neighboring table, a pair of British history buggs who were also touring D-Day sites in Normandy. They had already spend several days looking at the remains of the battles over Normandy, and one of them made a comment that stuck with me for the rest of our time in Normandy: “The Germans sure loved reinforced concrete.”

We soon found he was right. The remains of German bunkers and gun batteries bite into the landscape of Normandy: squat ugly concrete constructions with none of the grace of ruins from earlier ages.*

In our first day of touring alone we saw two fine examples: The Grand Bunker Atlantic Wall Museum at Ouistreham and the German gun battery at Longues-sur-Mer.

I must admit, the gun battery at Longues-sur-Mer was of only passing interest to me. It was the site of a key incident in The Longest Day.*** Seeing it gave me a sense of physical place, but did not change my understanding of the event. The serious D-Day buffs on the tour were more enthralled, and spent a bit of time quoting their favorite lines from The Longest Day to each other in situ.

The Grand Bunker Atlantic Wall Museum, also the site of a memorable incident in The Longest Day, was a different experience altogether. The concrete tower was the German headquarters in charge of gun batteries the covered the entrance to the river Orne. The top floor was a 360-degree observation post overlooking “Sword Beach”, where the British landed on D-Day. On D-Day, the tower housed two officers and fifty men, who formed the last pocket of resistance after the British landed. For three days the German garrison held off Allied attempts to take the tower with heavy machine gun fire and grenades thrown from the roof of the Bunker. On June 9, the German garrison surrendered to Lieutenant Bob Orrell and three other members of of the Royal Engineers, who blew open the armored door of the bunker. (A four-hour process.)

Today, the fully restored tower is a museum that gives visitors an understanding of the cramped and claustrophobic experience of life in a bunker. The interior of the bunker is a multi-story corkscrew of small rooms on uneven levels, that house a radio transmission room, an electrical generator, ammunitions storage, bunk rooms, the original range finder in the observation post, and a medical bay that makes a Civil War hospital look like a modern surgical theater by comparison. In addition to German artifacts, the museum includes exhibits about the creation of the German system of coastal defenses and fortifications known as the Atlantic Wall****

An illuminating stop by any history buff standard.

*The Romans loved their concrete, too. They used it to build temples and coliseums and the renowned Roman roads throughout an empire that stretched from Persia to Britain. And while I suspect the people they conquered hated their Roman invaders as much as the people of Normandy hated the Germans,** the concrete constructions they left behind them are beautiful.

**Based on the regular revolts against Roman rule from one end of the empire to the other.

***Both the book by Cornelius Ryan and the 1962 movie based on the book–a three hour blockbuster with an ensemble cast that included virtually every male star in Hollywood.

****Built between 1942 and 1944 using conscripted French labor. By June 1944 the Atlantic Wall extended eight hundred miles with some nine thousand fortified positions. Not that it did the Germans any good.

Road Trip Through History: Lest We Forget

By on

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

By on

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.