“You must have seen some terrible things” said the young French woman gently touching my arm as I stared out along Omaha Beach. Well, I had but I didn’t want to relive the whole Leeds v Chelsea semi-final. Then I realised as I walked back to the US war cemetery for the poignant flag lowering ceremony, she’d mistaken me for a 99-year-old world war two veteran. AND an American…..

As I often do, I was taking people on a tour of something historical and trying to learn from it. This time it was the Normandy Beaches, the invasion of which on D Day 1944 had heralded the liberation of Europe.

Sword

At Sword Beach my grandad had landed with the 27^th Armoured. They arrived a bit late but made the difference. He always said “I lost a finger at sword beach. If you’re ever there have a look for it for me”. It was only when he died and I had his army book that I found out he’d actually joined up without that finger. In fact, he’d lost it working in the tram sheds of Leeds in the 1930s I began to wonder about some of the other stories he’d told me. Was Marilyn Monroe maybe not really my mother…..

Pegasus

The first Allied casualty on D Day was at the Pegasus Bridge where British troops (crash)  landed by glider. Sgt Den Brotheridge from Smethwick took out a German machine gun and then got hit in the back of the head by a sniper. This was 6 hours before anyone had even landed on a beach. We visited the Café Gondree where the owner broke out 98 bottles of champagne previously hidden from the Germans and handed them out to the British on D Day. We bought a sandwich and a calvados. Across the road the next café owner wasn’t so lucky. A proud resistance fighter he greeted the liberating Brits with ‘Vive les Anglaises!” and was immediately shot by Germans, who hadn’t quite been defeated then. Probably not his preferred famous last words but better than “I keep thinking it’s Tuesday”

Omaha

The aim of D Day was to take the nearby city of Caen (and a couple of ports). Years ago we’d visited the area to offer our daughter an alternative to Disneyland. Festyland on the edge of Caen was maybe a let-down, with its tyres on ropes hanging from trees and corrugated plastic bus shelters (it may have changed in 20 years) but situated in the Carpiquet area of Caen it was the site of the grimmest of tank battles in the attempt to break out of the D Day beach head. Festyland indeed.

Festyland

I mention all this because people make choices. Some of their own volition and others because they have to. Nobody thinks, I know I’ll jump off a landing craft and wade through the water then up a beach while people fire at me. And nobody imagines they’ll jump out of an aeroplane and get their parachute caught on a church tower then hang there while the battle rages around them. And not many people know how they’d react if they woke up one morning to find the people coming to liberate you were starting by bombing your house. 17,000 French civilians were killed during the liberation.

Poignant is a word that we could use a lot here.  It was poignant that the machine gunner on the clifftops at Omaha firing devastatingly into the American ranks turned out to be Polish and that the US soldier that reached him first was Polish American. I expect he explained to him in very reasonably terms the irony of the situation they both found themselves in.

Humanity

And it’s poignant that in the US war cemetery a reading of the names on the crosses and stars of David encompass the whole of humanity. Schmidt, Schnek, Schneider, Dominguez, Da Silva, De Piero, Novak, Nieman, Newman. A one world nation of one and many people. Brought to that spot to fight and defeat Fascism. A system that, had it triumphed, would seek to stamp out that variety, that diversity and that humanity.

So, we wouldn’t want anybody to have to run up a beach being shot at or jump out of a plane being shot at. But we’re glad they did.

The other plan of course is to stop Fascism before it even gets that powerful. Hitler, of course, started by tricking people into voting for him….

A Gallery of Liberation from Fascism