Seventy years after the Allies’ historic landing on the beaches of
Normandy, the sacrifices of those brave young men still profoundly move
visitors. On the following pages, Dan Carlinsky gives us an update on
how the memory of the war is lovingly preserved in Normandy and reviews
the latest developments in World War II tourism—which to everyone’s
surprise continues to increase as the years go by.
The 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy
was marked by more parades, speeches, reenactments, special exhibits,
fireworks, general hoopla—and traffic jams—than ever before. In the
run-up to the observances, organizers, tourism officials and journalists
on both sides of the Atlantic all agreed on one thing: This would be
the last big one. After all, veterans of the Allied forces and civilians
who had lived through the war were pushing 70 and older. Everyone said
that as fewer and fewer of those who remembered June 6, 1944, could
travel to No
rmandy, interest would fade.
Everyone was wrong.
As it turns out, World War II tourism has transitioned comfortably to
the next two generations, fueled in part by family connections (“Let’s
go see where Grandpa fought during the war”) but even more by enormously
popular television, movie and book treatments of the conflict’s high
points—a sort of “Greatest Generation’s Greatest Hits.” In 1995, The
History Channel launched with such a steady menu of WWII documentaries
that some took to calling it “The Hitler Channel.” Its spinoff network,
Military History, and competitors have kept the drumbeat going
round-the-clock ever since. In 1998, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks
released Saving Private Ryan, and Tom Brokaw published The Greatest Generation—both wildly successful. A few years later, Spielberg and Hanks collaborated again, this time with Band of Brothers,
a blockbuster 10-part TV miniseries destined to rerun often and sold on
videotape and DVD. The effect is still being felt in this
70th-anniversary year.
Nowhere is this more evident than at the Normandy American Cemetery
at Colleville-sur-Mer, which looks out over Omaha Beach. About
one-and-a-half million people come each year to this solemnly beautiful
place where 9,387 GI graves lie beneath an immaculately tended green
field dotted with white marble crosses. The nearby Pointe du Hoc, where
U.S. Rangers scaled sheer cliffs under heavy enemy fire, has seen
visitors double to about a million a year.
Shane Williams is director of operations for both sites, which are
maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. In recent years,
he says, many people have come because they’ve watched and read some of
the history and want to see for themselves. “They have a good sense of
the importance of the events and the places,” Williams says. “They’re
helping to keep the memory alive. It’s wonderful. It’s the way it should
be.”
Other key attractions in both the American, British and Canadian
sectors have experienced similar upticks. Two of the most popular on the
American side—the Airborne Museum in Sainte-Mère-Eglise and the Utah
Beach Landing Museum in Sainte-Marie-du-Mont—have responded by investing
millions of euros in ambitious expansions. Charles de Vallavieille,
deputy mayor in charge of the Landing Museum and son of the founder,
explains the goal: “My father’s number-one interest was remembrance.
That is still the aim of the museum: to preserve the memory with respect
and gratitude.”
period militaria, notably vintage Allied and German vehicles.
Even today, the flotsam and jetsam of battle still turn up in attics and barns, in fields and on beaches. Several years ago, a British collector made perhaps the find of all finds when he stumbled upon a forgotten German gun battery in Grandcamp-Maisy, a few kilometers from the Pointe du Hoc. There were cannon mounts positioned to pound the beaches as Allied troops came ashore on D-Day, plus acres of underground bunkers, a radio center, storage rooms, offices and hospital areas, all overgrown with weeds and brush. He bought the land and turned the place into a tourist site. There are some discoveries, though, that even the most avid collector would prefer not to make: Scarcely a month goes by without an unexploded shell or bomb being uncovered somewhere in Normandy, often in populated areas.
Annual ceremonies are another indication of the continuing interest
in D-Day and the Battle of Normandy—the largest are attended by heads of
state and witnessed by incongruously huge throngs in what is still a
largely rural region. Often lost in media coverage, however, is the fact
that even the smallest villages have their story to tell and their way
of remembering. Tiny Angoville-au-Plain is a good example. On D-Day, two
medics parachuted in and set up a field hospital in the hamlet’s
12th-century church; Bob Wright was 20, Ken Moore 19. For three days, as
fierce battles raged in the churchyard and surrounding fields and
streets, the two cared for some 80 wounded soldiers, American and
German, as well as a French child. Today, new stained glass windows
memorialize the episode, and heavy bloodstains remain on some of the
pews—an ongoing reminder of the Americans’ sacrifice. Each June, the
mayor leads a ceremony of tribute in the shadow of the church. Other
Norman towns hold similar observances, frequently with a visiting
veteran—or, these days, more often a veteran’s children or
grandchildren—in attendance.
American and French associations also help to keep the heroes of the
Battle of Normandy in the public consciousness by decorating graves of
U.S. soldiers buried in France. The American Overseas Memorial Day
Association, a nonprofit group whose motto is “Lest We Forget,” annually
places flags on graves of U.S. soldiers killed in both World Wars and
buried in Europe. French citizens honor their liberators through an
adopt-a-grave group called Les Fleurs de la Mémoire, whose 4,000
volunteers decorate specified graves at the two large American WWII
cemeteries in the region. “We might look silly with our little
wildflowers,” a volunteer told France 3 television last year, “but these
flowers are priceless, like the lives of these men. They gave their
lives for us. These flowers are our way of saying to them, ‘un grand merci.’”
There are also groups that traditionally help find hosts for visiting
veterans at anniversary time; now they have begun to extend their
services to vets’ families. Anouchka Leblon-Maro has been welcoming
American veterans and their families to her home in Carentan since 1995.
“I have three young children,” she told Ouest-France. “It’s important
for us to remember what happened in ’44. It’s a way to pass this along
to future generations.”
The big worry now is not that interest will fade but that in time,
the physical remains of the Nazi occupation and the battles that
overcame it will disappear. Eric Delouche, a photographer from Barfleur,
has snapped 6,000 photos of the vestiges of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall
still scattered among the dunes and nearby fields. “We see blockhouses
every day,” he explains, “but we tend to forget them. They’re bound to
disappear, mainly from erosion. We have to keep a record as evidence for
generations to come.” In Arromanches-les-Bains, concrete blocks visible
offshore—remnants of the famous Mulberry artificial harbor—suffer from
storms and the perpetual whipping of the tide. Officials are lobbying
for inclusion of all the landing beaches on the UNESCO World Heritage
List, hoping that the honor would help attract the money needed to
stabilize the remains.
Anyone watching the D-Day ceremonies this June will notice another
important development since the 50th anniversary: Germany now has a
place in these annual events, with German veterans joining in the
ceremonies and German paratroopers taking part in reenactment jumps with
their American and British counterparts. “You’ve got to forget
sometime,” one American D-Day veteran told an interviewer after watching
a German military band play at a ceremony at La Fière battlefield.
“It’s good that they are here. Maybe the world will be better off
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