The Longest Day Lives On

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.”

With the 70th anniversary quickly approaching, museums and monuments throughout the region are rolling out fresh video presentations, smartphone and tablet apps, and GPS-guided itineraries. Both the Caen Memorial and the Juno Beach Centre in Courseulles-sur-Mer have cleared portions of underground German command posts and tunnels on their properties and opened them to the public for the first time. New privately owned museums have also sprung up, among them the Normandy Tank Museum in the tiny commune of Catz, near Carentan, and the Overlord Museum across the road from the entrance to the Normandy American Cemetery. The Overlord Museum—“Overlord” was the code name for the Battle of Normandy—grew out of the collection of a buff who had gathered thousands of items of
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