D-Day +65years: personal connection

This year’s 65^th anniversary of D-Day is a couple of months away, and sadly, will probably be the last significant anniversary where there will be more than a handful of survivors able to attend. My own father is 88 this year, and there are now only one or two of his former comrades from the RAF still around.

He will be coming to Normandy, as usual, this summer for a visit. He did not land in Normandy in 1944, but in the south of France in August, near St Tropez, in what was called the D-Day of the South, but which is now almost entirely overlooked. He had been fighting in Corsica before, so it was an obvious outcome as the northern invasion was making progress. It was no easy trip: landing on a beach under fire. His best mate beside him was shot dead as they ran; could have been him.

As the participants fade away, the facts become increasingly lost in the fog of Hollywood films and inventions. Few people, for example, seem aware of the tremendous importance and breathtaking innovation of the floating Mulberry harbours, which made the invasion possible, or know that of the five landing beaches only one was not an immediate success.

For the 60^th anniversary of D-Day, we took my father to the extraordinary and moving Memorial museum at Caen. This is dedicated to peace not war, and puts the emphasis on the people and not the hardware. When the staff knew he was an ancien combattant (veteran), we were all given free admission, and the constant help and attention of the incredibly soignée hôtesses who are the guides and attendants.

At one point, one of them kneeled beside him – he has to use a wheelchair these days – and said ‘Merci, merci pour tout vous avez faites pour la France’ – thank you for everything you did for France. As she said it the other people around were in tears, she was in tears, and though he tried hard not to let it show, so was my father. Later he said that this was the first time anyone had ever thanked him personally, and it was the first time he had realised that no one ever had.

Many of the exhibits in the museum are around the occupation, not just D-Day and its aftermath, with documents such as death sentences for resistance members, photographs of events, people and hardship – everything from death to starvation, and the resistance. My father also said later that this was the first time he had ever had to think about the occupation and the lives of the people they were invading, effectively to rescue.

We now rarely think of the reality of those days, or of the people, particularly civilians, who died during the occupation and the liberation. The photo at the top of this page is of the war memorial at Ouistreham, where all the western crossing ferries now land. It is outside the wonderful Romanesque church that you can see at the end of the road to the centre of the town as you drive out of the port. The names are categorised: soldiers, deported to the concentration camps, shot, and just ordinary civilians killed (this group of names is continued on the other side of the memorial).

I hope that those who visit Normandy for the anniversary will see the events for what they were, and not just the raw material for another wretched shoot-em-up computer game. There were no second lives, no-one got up and had another go. The dead from the invasion and the war overall are still dead.

The Caen Memorial is off junctions 6 or 7 of the peripherique nord, the northern ring road, and there are good public transport links from Caen. It is imperative if you want to understand the reality of war and D-Day.

My father has written his memoirs – not badly, as it happens – and there are copies in the Imperial War Museum and the RAF Museum. The memoirs  have been published on Kindle as an eBook from Amazon, and more details including chapters to read on this website.

Don't mention the war

In the same way as the disaster of Omaha Beach means that the other four invasion beaches can often be overlooked, the enormous importance, and overall success, of the D-Day landings obscures the fact that for the preceding four years, France was occupied by foreign soldiers.

The occupation had many implications for ordinary people. Some were active collaborators, as in Vichy and the Petain puppet government, some were passively cooperative, some avoided the German rule as much as they could, and of course some joined the Resistance. Every town and village had people in all these categories, and even now there are sensitivities and undercurrents not obvious to outsiders.

Many people do not want to talk about the war and the occupation, including those who were not born then, but who know of aspects of that time and how what members of their families did, or did not , or were suspected of doing. Who knows how we would have behaved in that situation? Certainly, the example of the occupation of the Channel Islands shows some of the issues.

If you look carefully in many of the towns in Normandy, you will find the occasional plaque on a wall stating that the person named was shot by firing squad at that place, or hanged, or otherwise killed. Many people were taken away, to prison, forced labour, or worse.

If you visit St Lo, you will find the centre, where the Saturday market takes place, inside the wonderful medieval ramparts, but completely destroyed by the American bombardment in June 1944. All that remains of the old town centre is the church tower, deliberately not repaired, and part of the gatehouse of the old castle. In the gatehouse is a large brass plaque, recording the names of everyone from St Lo who died during the war. It starts with French soldiers killed in action during the defeat by Germany, then has members of the resistance killed in action, resistance members executed, and all those deported to concentration camps: many of these are just the family name 'and 4 children'. The last two categories are civilians killed during the bombardment, and members of the resistance held in the prison. Liberation was not cost free.

My now deceased neighbour, Madame Laforet, was one person who had lived through the occupation, and able to talk about it. She mentioned that her eldest son had to be hidden in effectively a pig sty at the bottom of a distant field for some months, because the Germans were rounding up all the teenage boys for slave labour in Czechoslovakia; virtually none returned. She talked of other occasions when animals and crops were taken, of people disappearing.

She also talked about the invasion itself, pointing out where an allied bomb had fallen just the other side of the garden, and how a German sniper had killed two British soldiers in the lane. The sniper was killed by a German tank, commandeered by a young woman from the village.

Some other people, mostly women, who were children during the war, have memories of fear, hunger, and people vanishing, some to other areas to resist, some to prisons, some dead.

By the time the invasion moved away from Normandy, many towns were completely destroyed, many people had been killed, and a few scores were settled.

A French politician, I believe – I can't trace the quote – said that after the war, there were more members of the resistance than there were people. Human nature being what it is, I don't find that surprising, and there could have been few people who did not emotionally support the resistance, even if they like most of us lacked the courage, or the freedom from responsibility for others, or the right opportunities, to participate actively.

The Memorial museum at Caen is a museum to peace, not like the Imperial War Museum with its toys for the boys, and has a hugely moving range of displays of life under the occupation. It is at junction 7 on the Caen Peripherique (ring road) and is informative, sad, and ultimately I think encouraging, and an excellent antidote to many of the other commercial museums which glorify the fighting, the weapons, and the glamour of combat which is experienced only by the uninvolved, the uncaring and the unimaginative.  It has produced a film of the D-Day events, with archive film from both sides shown on a split screen. One side shows the landing craft, the other the blockhouse and gun emplacements being manned. Where one side shows soldiers being machine gunned by planes, the other shows the view of the piloy=ts at the same moment. More reality.