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The Battlefields Of Normandy

Contemporary Review, June, 2001 by Allan Ramsay

A few miles to the north of us are the battlefields, the memorials and cemeteries of Normandy. It was here, the British decided after the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, that the battle for Europe would be lost or won. Not even the huge conflict in the Soviet Union can really challenge that assessment, for France is (or was still then, to most of thinking people) European civilisation, like it or not, and the battle for France was what it was all about. Once the United States had entered the war it was Churchill's objective to persuade them to give priority to the battle for Europe, instead of the Pacific. It is one of his greatest achievements that he should have succeeded. Once they were persuaded the Americans set about the task as only they can, with apparently unlimited energy and thoroughness. Nothing was to be left to chance. From that moment the die was cast.

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The Germans took a great deal of ejecting. They fought obstinately, from the moment of the Allied landings on 6 June 1944, increasingly so the closer they were driven to the German frontier. Despite differences of opinion in the German High Command the initial aim was to destroy the Allied landing on the beaches, before it could secure a bridgehead inland. Anyone who has stood on the beach at Arromanches with the grey waters of the Channel behind him, and looked up at the deceptively shallow slope in front, and then reversed his position to look seawards, will understand what 'deceptive' means in this case, and why photographs in the small museum there show so many American dead littering the ground. It also, as my youngest son, a serving officer, remarked, makes the film, 'Saving Private Ryan' look cheap. The Germans had had plenty of time to prepare themselves, even though expecting the main assault to be in the Pas de Calais.

When forward defence failed to stop the invasion in its tracks the Germans fell back, contesting every inch of ground thereafter. The casualties on both sides were huge and the expenditure of materiel enormous. The Americans opted for saturation bombing of key targets like St Lo, the German advance communications HQ, nothing of which remained afterwards. But practically every place in Normandy, even the smallest, bears witness to the fighting and there is scarcely a town or village that escaped it. Even those on the periphery, like ours, out of the direct line of the fighting, bore their share since it was there that the Resistance were activated, to protect the Allied flanks, acting as a screen and sabotaging the movement of German reinforcements. The German reprisals, pre-emptive in some instances, were swift and severe. The tale is told in full on village memorials, so many deportes, so many fusilles. All this is so well known that it is perhaps unnecessary to repeat it here. I do so for those, like me, w ho do not have a retentive memory.

Until then the realities for people living in Normandy had been those of the Occupation. Though their sufferings were great they were, in a curious way, isolated from the war as we, for example, in Britain were not. Emotionally they were quite unprepared for the invasion, especially in those places where the Germans had behaved reasonably well towards the local population. Nevertheless it was greeted in every sense as a liberation. It was only later, when the people began to count the cost that the grumbles were heard. They also had to live, for some considerable time afterwards, with the shame of the epuration, and the bitterness felt by hundreds and thousands of French prisoners of war and those repatriated from forced labour camps.

Today, now that everything has been rebuilt and reputations restored, all that is forgotten and the sense of gratitude for deliverance remains, inculcated into the youngest child at school and expressed in the immaculate care of otherwise forgotten out of the way memorials, like that to three Americans killed when their reconnaissance tank was ambushed just down the road on the way to Laval. A fourth member of the crew, terribly wounded, crawled into some nearby bushes where he was later discovered by members of the Resistance, one of them a woman. She and one of her colleagues succeeded in taking him through the German lines to hospital in Laval, an action that undoubtedly saved his life. But there is also a very warm French welcome given to the visitors who come every year in their thousands to see the landing beaches and cemeteries. It is good for business, of course, but there is more to it than that. The memory of the dead is respected, by visitor and host alike. Their cemeteries are everywhere, poignant places with an atmosphere peculiarly their own. The British, so beautifully maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, are usually small, the dead being buried near where they fell. They are wonderfully intimate and comforting and have an unmistakably English quality about them. Their atmosphere is the same the world over, all grown from the muddy and disheartening plot of ground so vividly described in Kipling's story, 'The Gardener'. But having visited, among others, those at Kut-al-Amara and Baghdad, I know where I would prefer to lie. Somewhere like St Charles de Percy on the edge of a small hamlet, with apple orchards all around and the smell of cow dung in the air. But soldiers cannot, alas, choose where they may die.

The Battlefields Of Normandy

Contemporary Review, June, 2001 by Allan Ramsay

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