The Battlefields Of Normandy

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.

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 American cemeteries are very large, Americans preferring to interr their dead all together. One of the three cemeteries dedicated to their war dead in Europe is at St James, just across the border in Brittany. It is extraordinarily beautiful, utterly serene. It is a moving experience to wander among the thousands of crosses and Stars of David, seeing bouquets laid on the graves of soldiers from as far away as California, Illinois or Kentucky. One could be forgiven for thinking there that if Europe was liberated by anyone at all, it was by those of Pomeranian, Estonian, Latvian, Slav, Irish, Polish, Greek, Italian, Armenian and Jewish origin, so great is the preponderance of their names, the sons and grandsons of the great 19th and 20th century exodus of the disinherited from Europe to America. That is the paradox at the heart of St James, and one which gives a new meaning to the Beatitude, 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth'. Certainly the peaceful and evocative St James is theirs. It is also, incidentally, with the superb murals in the Memorial Hall, a very good place to grasp the vast scale of the operation and the numbers involved. It all looks so clear cut, so very simple, with all those broad arrows sweeping into the heart of Germany ... The reality lies outside.

Of all those who visit the battlefield and cemeteries the warmest welcome of all is reserved for the veterans, the anciens combattants, whose numbers grow fewer every year. They are the only ones for whom Madame la Patronne will abandon her other guests. From April until October they arrive by boat almost daily at Ouistreham, the port for Caen, these Old Comrades, along with British Legion groups, families, regimental parties doing battlefield tours, parties from Sandhurst and the Staff College doing the same thing, amateur historians gathering material, among WRVS groups, excited school parties, and with those few preferring to travel alone with their thoughts; with anyone, in effect, who feels that something of his past lies here. They include, of course, many Americans, Canadians and Poles. But with their uniform berets, cap badges, blazers with regimental crests on the breast pocket, and regimental ties; their shining buttons and polished shoes, their lapel badges, stick pins, and medals and baggy grey fl annels, and simply because they are older and frailer than anyone else, in many cases carrying their wounds and disabilities with them, but still holding themselves differently and behaving in quite a special way, those who are revisiting the places where they fought as young men are instantly recognisable. It would not be very difficult, given what I have just said about them. But even without their beloved berets and so on they would stand out. It is these old men in their restrained conviviality for whom Madame has a particular tendresse, no matter that she is often less than half their age. 'Que voulez-vous, messieurs?' she asks, knowing perfectly well that the reply will be beer and sandwiches.

I joined one such group recently, for a day of their four-day visit to some of the places where their regiment had fought. They were from the 4th and 7th Battalions of the Somerset Light Infantry, Territorial Army regiments (which meant that the men were all volunteers) represented by a handful of Old Comrades. The remainder were mostly of a younger generation, representing the regiment through the successive stages of its subsequent evolution through amalgamation with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry in the 1960s, until, in the early 1970s, it ceased to exist. The battalions were part of 129 Brigade of 43rd (Wessex) Division which was positioned on the southern flank of the British and Canadian armies as they wheeled eastwards below Caen, which was the pivot of the whole operation. To the west the American armies thrust due south before turning east along the line of the Loire valley, and westwards into Brittany, dividing just south of Avranches, on the bend in the elbow formed by Mont St Michel Bay. Th ose at least, insofar as I remember them, are the general dispositions. Experts will correct me if I am wrong, but I am writing without benefit of references.

I met the party at Tilly-sur-Seulles, a few miles south west of Caen. The battalions were not in action there (the Durham Light Infantry battalions of 151 Brigade were) but there is a little museum in a converted chapel which, better than anywhere, gives the flavour of the small-scale operations which, within the framework of the whole vast undertaking, were crucial in deciding its outcome.

Tilly is a fairly ordinary French village, smaller than its neighbour Villers-Bocage where the weekly market was in progress as I drove through down me de I'Armee Britannique Sharpshooters, a name that set the note for the day ahead. The museum is what you would expect to find, a collection of memorabilia -- weapons, uniforms, printed orders, regimental badges, newspaper cuttings, mock ups -- of the liberation as its inhabitants experienced it. One exotic item is the regimental badge of 'Les Chasseurs d'Irlande' a regiment which owes its origins, I suppose, to Irishmen fighting in the service of the French King or the Austrian Empire. How they came to be on the Allied side in Normandy, where they came from and to whom they belonged nobody seemed to know, though the mayor of Mouen, a nearby village liberated by the Somersets, hazarded a guess that they might have been Belgian ... There is a touching 'Post' cover showing a typical Geordie sergeant, with a miner's forearms and fag in the corner of his mouth, whe eling two ecstatic children along on an army bicycle, the girl perched behind her brother who wears the sergeant's steel helmet, above the title, 'Allons citoyens!. The children would be about my age today, the Geordie, if he is still alive, nursing his memories on Tyneside.

But the item that really commands attention is a model of Tilly as it was left after the fighting. There is not a single house with a roof, and not all have their four walls. Contrast this with the blow-ups of photos of Tilly taken pre-war which hang on the walls, and the pristine neatness and contented air of the place today, and it is difficult to believe they are one and the same, so complete was the destruction. It seems more natural to assume that the one was substituted for the other, with nothing in common between the two except the name.

There are many such small museums, too many perhaps, the cynic may respond. But they all help to put the visitor in the picture, much more intimately than the grander exhibitions, and the Battle for Normandy was a mosaic of little battles fought usually among a confusion of small fields and orchards and tiny hamlets. So their scale is right, and if a village is proud of the great events that came its way half a century ago and wishes to commemorate them in a way that is comprehensible to those who were not there, we should be grateful.

After Tilly the party went on, south west to Livry, and Briquessart, tiny places difficult to find on an ordinary touring map, the site, nevertheless, of the kind of typically hard fought infantry action that the nature of the landscape dictated. So small are they that one is hardly aware of having reached them. But they both exacted their toll in dead and wounded. Then, following the course of the fighting, we went south east to Aunay-sur-Odon, Mont Pincon, and Lenault where M le Maire was waiting with a small reception committee, including an ancien combattant wearing his medals and carrying the Tricolor. A year ago the commune erected a plaque on the wall of the Mairie to commemorate their liberation by the regiment, the first allied troops to reach it. The plaque says, quite unambiguously, Merci nos Liberateurs. Whatever General de Gaulle said about France being liberated by her own efforts, '... the Fighting France, the Eternal France ...' must have escaped the attention of those at Lenault. An officer who had taken part in the fighting laid a wreath, another quoted Laurence Binyon's words, there was a moment of silence and that was that, the sort of thing repeated countless times the length and breadth of this part of France. It was time to return to the hotel in Caen. They would be visiting places east of Falaise the following day, including St Lambert-sur-Dive where Major Currie won his VC.

All highly personal, of course, with a meaning hidden from most of us who had not been there. But Mont Pincon was different, the same sort of battle but of a different order of magnitude. It required a brigade to take it. It looms darkly over the surrounding countryside, a smooth dome dominating everything for miles around. One could see why it had to be taken, irrespective of the cost. There is something a little sinister about it, amid that green and fecund landscape, with its skirting of pine and silver birch and the furze and bracken above. It is one of those hills that seem to go on forever. It does not have an actual summit, just a series of false crests culminating in a long plateau, a 'killing field' if ever there was one. And so it proved. It was taken, of course, (Of course! How often does that phrase slip off the keyboard when writing about these things! In plain fact of course there was no 'of course' about it) but at frightful cost, by the Somerset Light Infantry and the Wiltshire Regiment suppor ted by tanks of the 13th/18th Hussars who have put up a little memorial on one of those false crests. They deserve to commemorate it since the infantry could never have taken it alone, a fact which they were the first to acknowledge.

The attack began at 3pm, the Light Infantry leading, having ridden up to the start line on tanks, in shirt sleeves because of the August heat. They were, as the officer recounting the events put it, 'giddy with the noise of engines and diesel fumes'. By nightfall they were shivering with the cold, having made very little progress, pinned down almost before they had started to climb the slope by intense fire from spandaus in well prepared positions. 'I remember', said the same officer, describing how he had moved forward, accompanied only by his batman, to take command of the battalion after the CO had been killed, 'crossing an open field towards a small stream at the foot of the hill, and seeing the turf literally disintegrating in front of me...' there was a long pause, and then, almost apologetically, '... Well one can't simply turn round and walk back, can one?'

To the reader comfortably sprawled before a good fire it may seem a little stagey, as if he was speaking for effect. If so the fault is mine. It did not seem so, standing there buffetted by the strong wind, with the clouds racing overhead and a dark smear of rain on the horizon, and an eighty year old man in an old cloth cap, 'leaning', slightly to misquote the poet Norman MacCaig writing in another context, 'his English accent on a stick'.

On the Hussar memorial there is a quotation from Chester Wilmot's The Struggle for Europe which says that the battle for Mont Pincon was one of the most important of the whole campaign since it required a demonstration of all those qualities the Allies would need to draw on if they were to defeat the enemy. These qualities were quite apart from the superiority in numbers and equipment which, thanks to the United States, they already possessed. But as the recital went on I found myself thinking that we might have been standing on an escarpment of the Quantocks, or the Brendons, or the Blackdown Hills or the Mendips, so familiar was the countryside around us, the same mixture of undulating pasture, woods and fields and coppices, of orchards and small farms with sheep and cattle grazing peacefully and the season's first swallows swooping about. Not far away was Lonlay l'Abbaye built by the de Courcy family who later endowed the church at Stogursey in Somerset of which Lonlay l'Abbaye became the mother house (Stogursey = Stoke Courcy). In a very real sense, it seemed to me, the bereted old men now arguing quietly below me over who had been injured or killed and where, had been fighting for their own almost as much as if it had been Bristol rather than Caen which was the hinge of the whole operation, and we were due to visit High Ham next instead of Lenault. Such thoughts lead on into unprofitable and unconnected channels, encouraging one to speculate about Renan's observation that Northern France is in its ethos essentially Protestant, closer to England in sentiment than to the south, and certainly Normandy was one of the main areas of Huguenot influence. But it seems a pity that so much high endeavour, from the vision of the de Courcy family in the twelfth century to the self-sacrifice of the men of 129 Brigade in the 20th, should now have dwindled into calculations about exchange rates and harmonisation.

Sidney Jarry, who recounted his experiences as a platoon commander with the Somerset Light Infantry in this campaign in his book 18 Platoon describes them as essentially quiet men. They were reflective, understated. And this capacity for reflection gave them an important edge in battle since it led them to be innovative. They thought hard about what they were doing, and if it did not work, did it differently, until it did. All very much as a matter of course. Whether this is a West Country characteristic alone I doubt, but something in the West Country air may help to deepen it. Whatever the explanation it is a very precious quality. General Nivelle, with his fantasies about 'la Gloire' and the imperatives of attack, would have cut no ice with them.

Coming back fifty years later it all seemed very different, insofar as you could remember anything at all. There was never time to look around while it was happening. Things were moving too quickly; you had hardly reached one position before you were ordered on to another, and if you stopped you ate or slept. It was either very hot and dusty or very wet and muddy and your steel helmet kept falling over your eyes. Moreover you were carrying enough at times to fell a pack horse. And casualties were high; you could not expect to be with the same mate throughout, and new drafts kept coming in all the time. The pressure had to be maintained. You knew nothing of the broader picture, your job was to 'stick it out', and, as Montgomery had explained, 'to search out and kill the enemy', and that, really, required all your concentration. Add to all that the failing memory of age and the fact that so much has changed, hedges, ditches barns, orchards all swept away and muddy tracks now tarmac roads, even the Villers-Bocage road now part of the Paris-Rennes autoroute. So it is hardly surprising that you should occasionally differ in your recollection of events, even as to the very spot where you were wounded or your mate killed.

One searches, inevitably, for some literary analogy. Corporal Trim? Pistol, Nym, Bardolf? Justice Shallow's men? Gibbon's militiamen? Kipling's Soldiers Three? None quite fits. They were, I decide finally, their own men. Speaking in the House of Lords debate on the sweeping reforms of the army introduced in the late 1960s Viscount Montgomery had this to say, (and I quote from memory), '...It is a wonderful regiment... It marched with me from Alamein to Germany and never put a foot wrong. They are magnificent soldiers...' He was referring to the men of Durham, the Durham Light Infantry, then about to be disbanded, and how well they deserved that tribute. I was with them, on that last occasion in Colchester when the battalion was paraded to hear the CO say that it had all come to an end, over 200 years of unbroken service. How casually, almost, we shape the tools that suit our purposes, and how casually discard them, forgetting that in the meantime men have given them their hearts and an identity of their own. This is not the sentiment only of the Colonel Blimps of this world, nascent or in ripe retirement. As I walked off parade that summer day it was my Colour Sergeant who was in tears, the seventh of his family to have served. It was that kind of regiment. But it diminishes Montgomery's tribute not at all that it should have been running through my head as I left that handful of old men from Somerset later in the day.

But one must see all things in perspective, in context. 'Come along lads, we're late', called the officer leading the party as they straggled back to the bus, long overdue, from lunch in Aunay. 'Come along, Corporal Millicent', to an RAMC orderly who had served with both battalions, 'we'll need to look sharpish'. 'I'll thank you, Major, but I'm not having any of your 140 paces to the minute, not at my age. So I'll cut along at my own snail's pace, if you don't mind'. 'They never change', sighed the major. 'I've always believed that the real heroes on this sort of occasion are the bus drivers'.

Samuel Johnson has it somewhere that every man thinks a little less of himself for not having been a soldier. If so then every soldier must surely think a little less of himself for not having been in battle. Those who have may think differently. That is their prerogative.

Sir Allan Ramsay, later a diplomat, served with both the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry and the Durham Light Infantry.

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