This Great and Noble Undertaking

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(this is an old D-Day piece of mine, I thought I’d share it with SitD in this 78th D-Day Anniversary…)

How many times have I heard an athlete praised for exhibiting courage? This kind of grandiloquence is especially prevalent in football.

Numerous awards throughout football list courage as one of the traits they recognize. It is said it takes courage for a player to play with injuries. It is said a quarterback displays courage in standing in to throw a pass knowing he is about to be knocked silly by a linebacker.

I would humbly suggest we ought to be more careful in the way we use certain words.

The film Saving Private Ryan is a visceral and brutal homage to the sacrifices made by so many young men in the service of their country.

Scenes at the beginning and end of the movie take place in the American cemetery near Colleville-sur-mer. The cemetery sits on the bluffs above Omaha Beach, looking down on what was Easy Red sector. The name was half right.

I visited this cemetery a few years ago. After leaving the bus, I passed through a protective ring of trees, and there came upon row after row of gleaming white crosses and Stars of David.

The grounds are immaculate. The hedges are neatly trimmed, the grass carefully clipped, the water in the reflecting pool clean. The serene beauty of that hallowed place is a seductive contrast to the unspeakable ugliness that laid those men in their graves.

I walked the peaceful paths, and looked down on the beautiful beach, and I thought what a debt we owe. So many of my fellow Americans went through such anguish and terror just to stand where I was standing then. And this cemetery represents only one corner of the war, the casualties from a few weeks of fighting in NW France. How many other cemeteries are there that hold the remains of soldiers who fought so I wouldn’t have to?

As the vivid colors of the present pale into shades of gray, as memories of the deeds of generations of American soldiers gently fade into the past, may we never take for granted the freedom we enjoy in this country. May we always remember the price so many paid for that freedom.

I don’t deny it takes willpower and discipline for a football player to play with pain. But the next time we hear such a performance described as courageous, remember what happened on a Norman beach that Tuesday morning in June 1944.

After hours at sea, thousands of young men climbed over the side of their transports, and in the pitching seas descended into the landing craft. When the boats reached the shore, the ramps went down, and the world those soldiers knew changed forever.

Many were shot down before they even left their boats. Many drowned in the ocean under the weight of their equipment. Machine guns, mortar shells, and German artillery turned Omaha Beach into a killing field. Bodies and pieces of bodies were everywhere. Those who saw Omaha later that day said they could almost walk across the beach without touching the sand.

But those who survived the initial hell made their way across the beach to take shelter at the seawall and beneath the cliffs. Wet, cold, many of them wounded, without a coherent command structure, the broken bodies of their comrades and brothers all around; those soldiers could have given up. They didn’t. In small groups they blew holes in the wire, made their way through minefields, climbed the bluffs and secured the beachhead.

That is courage.

3 thoughts on “This Great and Noble Undertaking”

  1. I was able to fulfill a bucket list item and visit Normandy in July of 2019 and took the Band of Brothers tour (the only one that gives you access to the field at Brecourt Manor). My notes:

    We “waded” (the sand is about 6” deep!) to the shoreline for our history lesson. The place looks quite serene now. The beach is long and sweeps in an inward crescent in front of the bluffs, which are green and soft looking. As our guide spoke, a stiff breeze off the Channel made us shiver. Yeah, I’m sure it was the breeze.

    The curve of the beach was one of the reasons it was so deadly; on each end the Germans positioned their dreaded “88s”; 88-millimeter cannon, pointed not at the sea, but along the beach, creating a devastating cross fire to go along with the machine guns and other artillery that accounted for about 90% mortality for the first wave.

    A Colonel Taylor told the men frozen by the carnage that there were only two types of men on that beach; those that were dead, and those that were about to be. They had to get off the beach and up those bluffs. Eventually, all of them made it: the ones that fought their way up, and the ones that were carried there and laid in a temporary cemetery that ultimately was dedicated as the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

    You’ve seen photos of the rows upon rows of white headstones, in crosses and Stars of David, 9,380 of them, on the immaculately kept, impossibly green grass. I can’t even begin to do it justice of what it’s like being there in person. A perpetual hush is thick as the grass is over the place. I, and the guide, took off our hats as we came through the plaza and walked down closer to the reflecting pool with our group. The guide spoke in soft tones as we all leaned in to listen. The sky had become a brilliant, crystalline blue, and there was so much for the pool and for us to reflect upon. Looking to my right, a wide path leads through an opening in the trees, through which you can see the English Channel, and if you go out far enough, Omaha Beach itself.

    Before you even get that far, though, you walk through another crescent, in limestone, that cups the garden and steps that lead up to the plaza at the head of memorial. The curving, light-colored walls are known as The Walls of the Missing. Carved into these are the names of the 1,557 men that the Army knows came to Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 – but of whom no trace could later be found. Over the years, bits and pieces have been identified as technology has improved. When a missing man is identified, a black rosette is placed by his name on the wall. The most recent recovery was a man from Minnesota, Staff Sergeant Gerald “Jerry” Jacobson, who was returned in 2017. I found his name on the wall and included it here.

    Dominating the plaza is a black sculpture of a man ascending to the clouds. Entitled “The Spirit of American Youth Rising From the Water”, it signifies the sacrifice the youth of our nation made on foreign soil. I tried to get a good, up-close photo of it, but the bright sky – and the limitations of an iPhone screen – made it kind of difficult. I tried to massage the image a bit with filters, and in doing so created an image of the sculpture so black that it looked more like a hole in the sky, than a sculpture. I decided that described the loss to all the families, and used that one.

  3. There is also a meticulously maintained cemetery in St. Avold, France, the Lorraine American Cemetery. My sisters worked with another distant relative on a family genealogy project. They found family of my grandfather in Illinois, before moving to Minnesota (and coincidentally where my mom was from) and my grandmother’s family in Iowa. One of our Iowa family members, is buried there. What they learned was that he was a corporal in the 753rd tank battalion. His tank was hit by enemy fire on January 8, 1945 near the German border. He was wounded and despite treatment by a Wehrmacht medic, he died of his wounds. It’s on my bucket list to visit.

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