D Day muse
D Day the 6th of June 1944, commemorations already underway for several days, many people visiting the American cemetery at Normandy. At one of the Rotary ballgames for residents of the VA home, I met and chatted with a man whose cap said WW2, he told me he had gone ashore on Omaha Beach that day. He was seventeen.
Our enemy, of course, was Germany and our objective was Germany's unconditional surrender that came just under a year later, a nation obsessed with a madman, that should be but is not, a warning to every citizen of every nation forever. I don't remember the Invasion, though I've read much and watched many old newsreels and documentaries since then. I do specifically remember the May 1945 day when people suddenly came running outside screaming "Germany surrendered".
And I remember the war, wartime, WW2, news in newspapers and on radio, fierce anti-German propaganda, newsreels, pictures of indescribable atrocities, all of which created in me hatreds that to this day I have never been able to overcome. I remember a long row of tables down the hall at Cove School, and our air raid drills, when the bell rang in a certain way (different from the fire drill bell when we filed out to line up at Hamilton Avenue in front of the school) and we filed orderly into the hallway and got under the tables until the all-clear bell rang. But what has carried me throughout this lifetime, the mental pictures of unspeakable human cruelties, stirring hatred that I can't explain to myself and don't fully understand in myself, feelings that even turned back toward myself upon learning of my German ancestry, that I share heritage with what and whom I have most deeply despised.
Today the three-quarter-century marker of D Day, everyone will be seeing and hearing about the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. There are others in the area too, not only our allies, but La Cambe cemetery for German war dead who also were loved. German military buried there range from age 16 up. I remember the June when I was 16 and in love with life, and I can't imagine having died then, as a soldier in war, and on the eternally damned side, and missing life with its fullness.
With everyone else being in the American cemetery, online early this morning, I visited La Cambe and explored a bit, struck by words on the sign out front, "With its melancholy rigour, it is a graveyard for soldiers not all of whom had chosen either the cause or the fight".
Also struck by names of some notable, which is not at all to say noble, Germans there. One is SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, the senior German officer who ordered the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944. And I diverted to read about Diekmann (scroll down). Then to Oradour-sur-Glane (scroll down) of which I've read any number of times, and which, along with Lidice after Reinhard Heydrich, and The Holocaust itself, stirs anew the hatreds deep within, and the horror of what we can do to each other and to ourselves.
One had to be there, alive in that time and space, I guess, to harbor the memories and terrible feelings.
Above: EIN DEUTSCHER SOLDAT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cambe_German_war_cemetery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre
Our enemy, of course, was Germany and our objective was Germany's unconditional surrender that came just under a year later, a nation obsessed with a madman, that should be but is not, a warning to every citizen of every nation forever. I don't remember the Invasion, though I've read much and watched many old newsreels and documentaries since then. I do specifically remember the May 1945 day when people suddenly came running outside screaming "Germany surrendered".
And I remember the war, wartime, WW2, news in newspapers and on radio, fierce anti-German propaganda, newsreels, pictures of indescribable atrocities, all of which created in me hatreds that to this day I have never been able to overcome. I remember a long row of tables down the hall at Cove School, and our air raid drills, when the bell rang in a certain way (different from the fire drill bell when we filed out to line up at Hamilton Avenue in front of the school) and we filed orderly into the hallway and got under the tables until the all-clear bell rang. But what has carried me throughout this lifetime, the mental pictures of unspeakable human cruelties, stirring hatred that I can't explain to myself and don't fully understand in myself, feelings that even turned back toward myself upon learning of my German ancestry, that I share heritage with what and whom I have most deeply despised.
Today the three-quarter-century marker of D Day, everyone will be seeing and hearing about the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. There are others in the area too, not only our allies, but La Cambe cemetery for German war dead who also were loved. German military buried there range from age 16 up. I remember the June when I was 16 and in love with life, and I can't imagine having died then, as a soldier in war, and on the eternally damned side, and missing life with its fullness.
With everyone else being in the American cemetery, online early this morning, I visited La Cambe and explored a bit, struck by words on the sign out front, "With its melancholy rigour, it is a graveyard for soldiers not all of whom had chosen either the cause or the fight".
Also struck by names of some notable, which is not at all to say noble, Germans there. One is SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, the senior German officer who ordered the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944. And I diverted to read about Diekmann (scroll down). Then to Oradour-sur-Glane (scroll down) of which I've read any number of times, and which, along with Lidice after Reinhard Heydrich, and The Holocaust itself, stirs anew the hatreds deep within, and the horror of what we can do to each other and to ourselves.
One had to be there, alive in that time and space, I guess, to harbor the memories and terrible feelings.
Above: EIN DEUTSCHER SOLDAT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cambe_German_war_cemetery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre