D-Day

Growing up, World War Two seemed so very long ago. Those B&W films we watched on Boston Movietime – Purple Heart, Bataan, Corregidor – might as well have been early talkies. Kids in the 1950’s may have been siting in front of B&W televisions, but when we went to the movies everything was Technicolor. Those war pictures? Ancient history.

But for us first-wave Baby Boomers, World War Two was really just yesterday. When I was born (December 1949), the war had only been over for four years and change. It just seemed impossibly removed from us.

Perhaps this was because the majority of first-wave Baby Boomers had fathers who were in the war. It was about them, the old folks, not about us.

But, because of those Army-Navy-Marine dads – and a few moms: my mother’s closest friend was a WAVE – the war was something we were all well aware of.

The only people who used fancy plaid picnic blankets were the Cleavers and other TV families. Our picnic blankets were cream-colored wool, with a blue stripe along one edge, and U.S. Navy stamped on it. If your father was in Army, those picnic blankets were greenish-brown.

We wore our fathers Navy gob-caps upside down, like buckets. We carried our fathers khaki canvas-covered canteens into mock battles.

My sister Kath and I had Navy blue spring Sunday coats made out of our father’s dress blues, and white shorts made out of his whites. He did yard work in his khakis.

I know a bit about my father’s war.

He was stationed for a couple of years in Trinidad, which was an important oil transport station, and a staging area for anything happening in Africa. Was he in any danger? Only when he was at sea, getting to and from Trinidad, when the waters were full of U-Boats. But he was never shot at.

After Trinidad, he was stationed in downtown Chicago, at Navy Pier.

As my father said, ‘you went where Uncle Sam sent you.’

My father was an excellent story teller, and had plenty of stories about his wartime adventures, but he was one of the lucky ones. He hadn’t seen combat.

Pretty much all of my friends fathers had served, but I don’t know all that much about who saw what by way of any action.

My friend Marie’s father was a Marine and he was at Guadalcanal, but he got there after the worst of the fighting.

My friend Michele’s father was a medic and he was, I believe, in the Battle of the Bulge.

A classmate in grammar school once brought in a can of her father’s C-Rations for us all to ooh and ahh over. He’d landed on Omaha Beach. On D-Day? I don’t know. (Just googled his obit, and all it said was that he served in the European Theater.)

So while we may have grown up thinking of the Second World War as well in the past, we all grew up knowing about it – if only the propagandistic fare we watched on Boston Movietime, from the “stuff” (blankets, canteens…) that we played on and with, and from the bits we gleaned from our fathers’ stories.

And now, here we are in 2019, and World War Two actually is far in the past.

Seventy-five years on, and most of those who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, have died. Any survivors – those we were just kids on that day – are now in their nineties.

I’ve been to Normandy.

My husband I were in Paris and decided to take a day trip.

Our hotel’s concierge arranged for a driver to take us there and back.

Our first stop was the D-Day Museum in Caen, but what we were really after was Normandy Beach.

The year we went, the area was being rehabbed, made more tourist-friendly – a muck-filled construction zone. But we got to stick our heads into a German bunker, take a look at the washed-up battle materiel the studs the beaches, and peek over the cliff at Pointe du Hoc.

Pointe du Hoc was where the Rangers somehow made it up that cliff and took out a German gun emplacement that was firing on the troops landing on Utah and Omaha Beaches.

The weather was terrible that day we spent in Normandy: cold, blustery, rainy. As we tramped around – just about the only tourists on that early May day – we were up to our ankles in mud. The rain was lashing. Despite our rain gear – and a blown out umbrella – we were soaked to the skin.

We thought of those Rangers, those brave, tough boys.

On D-Day, the weather had been pretty nasty, too. We were miserable, and we weren’t rappelling up a cliff. And no one was shooting at us either.

Those brave, tough boys.

Our last stop was the American cemetery that overlooks Omaha Beach. There, over 9,000 American military personnel are buried. “Military personnel.” So cold. So impersonal. How about boys, young men, as most of them were. Maybe not all of them were as tough and brave as the Pointe du Hoc Rangers. But they were plenty tough, and plenty brave. (A handful of women are buried there, as well.)

A frequent trope of those World War Two movies I watched on Boston Movietime was the squad made up of fellows (all white) from all over the states. The wise-cracking Irish kid from Boston. The hulking Polish fellow from Chicago. The Italian kid from Philly who kept the card game going. The Jewish guy from Brooklyn who knew everything – slightly older, he was called Pops. The sweet boy from Kentucky who’d never been out of the hollow. Lanky Tex with his languid drawl. The All-American farm boy from Iowa.

But when you walk around the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, what strikes you as that, at least at the macro level, that trope was the reality.

The grave markers note the states where the fallen are from, and they’re from all over. And there are Irish names. Polish names. Italian. Jewish. German. Scandinavian. English. Spanish…

When you’re walking through those rows, reading all those names, it’s hard not to be moved (to tears).

Seventy-five years is a long time, but in some ways World War Two seems closer now than it did when I was a kid.

Today, the president will be speaking at the ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day. He is one of the minority of Baby Boomers whose fathers did not serve in World War Two.

Not that Fred Trump didn’t “contribute” to the war effort. He provided housing for Navy personnel working in East Coast shipyards. (And was twice investigated for – surprise,  surprise – profiteering.)

Anyway, I hope that the chip off old Fred’s block sticks to his prepared script. If he does, he will no doubt sound wooden, strained and inauthentic, as he generally does when he’s reading something written for and handed to him. If he goes off-script, it will no doubt be an embarrassment to all of us. Here’s hoping he just reads his lines.

That is, if he shows up. Last year, he skipped a memorial event in France commemorating the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One. Because it was raining.

It can be nasty out there, on Normandy Beach, on Pointe du Hoc. Rainy, windy, cold.

All those boys. Those poor, brave boys.

Seventy-five years. Not all that long ago…