June 13, 2022
"We'll start the war from right here." --Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former president, who landed with his troops in the wrong place on Utah Beach
We began our last day at the D Day beaches here at our farm Gite with breakfast. The weather once again promised to be perfect. High’s in the low 70’s, blue skies, light breezes.
Normandy, not just the beaches, offers spectacular scenery and you see it driving through the villages on small, often one lane roads. Hedgerows are everywhere with brown and light grey stone houses surrounding you. You feel like you are driving through a movie set. Everything seems to grow here and flowers climb up into the stone walls lending the whole scene a bucolic charm.
We headed today for the area of the Utah beach landings. I thought I had read a great deal about the invasion, I was continually surprised about how large was the scale of the episode. it is almost an hour drive from Omaha beach to the Utah landings. The entire invasion covers 54 miles of beaches and hundreds of square miles of adjacent countryside.
The story of Utah is different from its bloody sister Omaha. The landings here, while not unopposed, were considerably easier than Dog Sector. The bluffs are lower, the area was better prepared by the Air Force and Navy and the men were able to get on shore and inland rapidly.
No, the story of Utah lay with the Airborne portion of the invasion. These are the tales made famous in the film The Longest Day and the HBO mini series , The Band Of Brothers.
Thousands of men were dropped behind the beaches to cut off German reinforcements and secure vital roads and bridges.
The drops mostly went terribly wrong when , for a variety of reasons, the men were dropped in the wrong place separated from each other and in the dark.
One of the more famous mistakes is when they were dropped into this square early in the morning of June 6th. This is Ste- Merre Eglise. That night, there was a fire in one of the buildings in the square and the whole village, along with their German mentors were trying to put the blaze out.
To their shock, the night sky was suddenly filled with the white blooms of parachutes coming down against the reflection of the flames.
Private John Steele, played in The Longest Day by the clownish Red Buttons, got stuck on the church steeple. He was a helpless witness as he watched his fellow soldiers gunned down and captured. He survived by playing dead.
A number of years ago the town, for the many tourists, placed a mannequin staged on the roof so you can see what happened.
Outside the village there is a less well known site. Yet considerably more drama happened here at the Church at Angoville-au-Plain.
Here two American medics, Kenneth Moore and Robert Wright, parachuted in with the other troops. Here, in the chaos of the first few days they set up shop and treated hundreds of men, including Germans.
German troops on patrol would enter the church at periodic times and were ordered by the American medics to leave their weapons at the door if they wanted help.
They did.
Hundreds of lives were saved.
Both men would survive the war. Robert Wright asked to be buried here in this humble cemetery .
This small bridge over a creek you can easily ignore as you drive by. It is called La Ferme. What is important to know is the Germans had flooded the surrounding fields. The only way through was this small bridge and road.
What followed was a vicious, hours long battle that went back and forth for hours. Many men died for this small strip of concrete.
One final story - The B-26 Marauder medium bomber, like the one in the picture, was a common site over the D Day skies.
There was a pilot on one of these missions. His plane was hit by antiaircraft fire. His plane crashed so hard into the ground that the metal compacted like an accordion. His body was never found.
His name was listed on the wall of the missing at the American Cemetery.
Recently, a group of archaeologists worked on excavating the site. Amazingly they found some remains and after DNA testing confirmed it was him.
He had eight brothers and sisters. His youngest sister is still alive.
Next week he will be interred at the Normandy cemetery with full military honors with his sister at his side. 78 years after he died.
We try to never leave anyone behind, no matter the cost. Everyone has a story. Everyone matters.
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