Inscribed on the walls of a small, sunlit chapel in France are the words “Through the Gate of Death May They Pass to Their Joyful Resurrection.”
The invocation is in English, not French. That’s because this chapel sits button-like on the bluffs above Omaha Beach in the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. If you have seen Saving Private Ryan, you know the place. The movie’s opening and closing scenes were filmed at this serene site where where 9,385 soldiers and four civilians are buried.
I recently spent two days in a minivan with a local guide touring the Normandy battlefields. Being there moved me in ways I had not expected. Maybe it’s because I was at the cemetery near dusk when “Taps” was played, and I stood with my hand over my heart to honor men braver than me. I fought back tears. I still do when I think about them.
Maybe it’s because my Uncle Charles, an artillery battalion officer, landed here shortly after D-Day. It was the largest military assault in history and involved nearly 7,000 ships and more than 10,000 aircraft and 150,000 soldiers. (The D in military terminology represents an unknown day when an event will occur.)
He suffered bombing, endured shelling, saw freed slave laborers, and fought his way into Germany, a pistol on his hip. “There are many things I could tell you all, but they would only tend to make you worry,” he wrote his parents.
I had seen, more than once, the ponderous 1962 John Wayne epic, The Longest Day, and I had read the eponymous mega-bestseller, but I realized I knew nothing of that June day in 1944 when the Allies invaded northern France with the goal of defeating Nazi Germany. I had no comprehension of what went down on Omaha Beach.
So, on a chilly, windy early spring afternoon I stood there. Today it’s a beachgoers mecca, thanks to its golden sand and gentle slope. I saw strollers and watched trotting horses pull passengers in sulkies, two-wheeled racing carts.
I had not realized that Omaha Beach was at least 900 yards long. (It was one of several landing sites that ranged over 50 miles of coastline.) Vast enough to accommodate an armada of flat-bottomed freighters, tanks, and trucks, it lay adorned with a hell-quilt of mines and hedgehogs, x-shaped black iron obstacles that looked like jacks thrown by giant, wanton children.
Nor had I understood that the first wave of the Allied attack landed here at low tide. Cold, wet, seasick, and lugging guns and gear, they ran, staggered, stumbled, and crawled fully 400 yards to reach pebbly scrabble under the bluffs. Most soldiers did not make it. About 2,400 Americans were either killed or wounded there that day.
To learn more, I turned to the masterful D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. If you want a comprehensive and detailed account of D-Day from its planning to its air, land and sea execution, make this book your pulse-rousing road map.
Soldiers struggled ashore “shellshocked, leaderless, unorganized,” writes its author, Stephen Ambrose.
“The most extreme experience a human being can go through is being a combat infantryman,” according to the late historian who also penned Band of Brothers. “And nowhere in World War II was the combat more extreme than at Omaha in the early morning hours of June 6.”
That’s because Germans spent months building hidden gun emplacements and calculating precise angles for gunning down invaders.
You feel sick reading quotes from those who survived the metal hail. When Private. Ray Moon reached the top of the bluffs he looked back down. “The view was unforgettable," he commented. "The beach was a shooting gallery for machine gunners. The scene below reminded me of the Chicago stockyard cattle pens and its slaughter house.”
Sergeant Warner Hamlett inched his way up, too, but was soon wounded. “As I painfully walked back to the beach, thousands of parts of bodies lined it,” he recalled. “They were floating—heads, arms, legs. I realized what being in the first wave was all about.”
If there is a reason not to read Ambrose’s history, it would be to avoid confronting his anecdotes. They bleed through dozens of pages.
A GI comes across a soldier whose “eyeball and teeth and jawbone were plainly visible. It looked like one of those medical drawings. . . . I asked him how he was doing. He said he felt OK.”
A seaman watches an amphibious truck strike a mine. “I saw the bodies of two crewmen blown hundreds of feet in the air twisting around like tops up there,” he recalled 45 years later. “It was like watching a slow-motion Ferris wheel.” Later his ship, a small patrol craft, is hit. “Blood was gushing down the gunwales of that boat like a river.”
Anyone who says the supposedly stoic Greatest Generation never spoke of their war experiences must not have asked the right questions.
Troops were told the landing would be a cakewalk. Allied bombers pulverized the coastline. At Pointe-du-Hoc, where rangers used rocket-fired grappling hooks and ropes to clamber up the cliff, the Allies dropped more than 10 kilotons of explosives, equal to the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
“Huge chunks of concrete, as big as houses, are scattered over the kilometer-square area, as if the gods were playing dice,” writes Ambrose. I toured an intact, still-gloomy pillbox. Car-sized craters dotting its moonscape will haunt the concrete chamber for centuries.
Following the bombers, battleships pulverized the bluffs “like Zeus hurling thunderbolts.” Lieutenant Cyrus Aydlett of the attack transport USS Bayfield recalled, “It was like the fireworks display of a thousand Fourth of Julys rolled into one. The heavens seemed to open, spilling a million stars on the coastline before us, each one spattering luminous, tentaclelike branches of flame in every direction.”
“This was the critical moment in the battle,” writes Ambrose. “It was an ultimate test: could a democracy produce young men tough enough to take charge, to lead?”
But the Germans were dug in. What kept Omaha from being a disaster? How did the men get off the beach?
Ambrose explains how the Allies fooled the Germans into thinking the invasion would happen elsewhere. Their command structure was “a disaster.” Tanks kept inland stayed put because Hitler had to order their use. He was asleep. No one wanted to wake him. Behind his back, top generals whispered about his Wolkenkuckucksheim (cloud cuckoo land) ideas.
While German officers and enlisted men feared taking the initiative, “the men fighting for democracy were able to make quick, on-site decisions and act on them.” That as much as anything else, Ambrose argues, is what turned the day.
Faith in God helped, too. Back home, “the impulse to pray was overwhelming,” he writes. Church bells in Georgia sounded at 3 a.m. The New York Daily News replaced lead stories with the Lord’s Prayer. In Columbus, Ohio, the mayor ordered factory whistles blown as a call to prayer.
On the beach Father Joe Lacy, “a small, old, fat Irishman,” dragged wounded to safer positions. He told Rangers if he caught any of them praying “I’m gonna come up and boot you in the tail. You leave the praying to me, and you do the fighting.”
Generals and privates alike realized that to survive they had to get off the beach and get up the bluffs, and that’s what they did singly and in small groups. Private Robert Zafft, a 24-year-old infantryman, said, “I made it up the hill, I made it all the way to where the Germans had stopped us for the night, and I guess I made it up the hill of manhood.”
Sergeant John Robert Slaughter knew the predicament of being trapped on the beach “turned the boys into men. Some would be very brave men, others would soon be dead men, but all of those who survived would be frightened men. Some wet their britches, others cried unashamedly, and many just had to find it within themselves to get the job done. This is where the discipline and training took over.”
As for Sergeant Hamlett, who saw body parts carpet the surf, unlike his namesake, he was decisive. After recuperating for two months in England, he went back into action and was wounded twice more. “I would do it all over again to stop someone like Hitler,” he said.