Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. American troops dive into the
water. By midnight, 132,000 Allied soldiers had landed on
beaches of Normandy - 10,500 died before reaching shore.
Le Figaro, France
Ode to the Liberators of France: America's GIs
"They were
destined for France, a strange land. They would fight for her, without really
knowing what she was like, what her past, her culture, her customs were like.…
this immense and anonymous line of Americans without rank, incapable of
pronouncing a phrase of French or the name of any village in Normandy. The only
word that brought them to this point, to these seven seconds of death or
survival, was spelled freedom. Freedom! How could we ever forget them?"
Philippe Labro pays homage
to the American soldiers who, at risk to their lives, landed in Normandy on June
6, 1944. They knew nothing of France, yet in their thousands they died to
defend an ideal: freedom.
They knew nothing, or nearly
nothing. They were unaware of all these small towns with enigmatic names:
Colleville, Vierville, Arromanches, Grandcamp, Sainte-Honorine, Poupeville.
They were hardly aware of the existence of this region, whose name was,
however, relatively easy to pronounce: Normandie, with a "y"
in their native language, the only one they knew how to speak it, since they
weren't bilingual. They were the GIs, the American soldiers, come from
elsewhere to liberate a somewhere about which no one had taught them much in
school. France. Europe. A continent occupied by a force that had been
identified to them as "Nazi." And they had seven and a half seconds
of survival ahead of them (but this last item, they didn't yet know).
They had been born and raised
in the United States of America, a vast continent, so long indifferent to the
history and geography of the rest of the world. They arrived from the monotonous
plains of the heart of the country: Kansas, Missouri, Indiana or Iowa. And also
the snowy mountains of Wyoming or the salt pans of Louisiana. Others from the
West Coast, California or Oregon, others from New Jersey and New York. Others,
finally, from Texas or Colorado. In fact, they came from everywhere. They had
been blended into units and divisions, the four branches of the armed forces
(Navy, Army, Marines, Air Force), but they had been separated from the Blacks,
whom they most often called Negros.
They were the children of the
Great Depression, born in the 20s, having grown up in the 30s, bearing in their
collective unconscious the memory of interminable lines to get bread and
beans at public soup kitchens in Chicago, Saint Louis or Detroit; the image of
vagabonds and unemployed gathered around a wood fire or a charcoal stove in a
dubious field in New Jersey or Maryland; the hollowed and care-worn faces of
parents at home in front of a meager meal; the lines of trucks transporting uprooted
peasants and destitute farmers on the dusty roads of Oklahoma in the direction
of a mythical land where they would gather the grapes of wrath;
the elder brothers who were forced to sell apples on the street corners of Los
Angeles or Charlottesville, despite degrees earned in colleges. They came from
all ethnic families, Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Greek, Slav, all
Americans. All convinced that they were going to war for a just cause, their
pride wronged by the violation of December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor,
all animated by a unanimous outpouring of patriotism such as their nation had
never before seen, and will likely never live to see again.
At the beginning of the decade,
they had volunteered, five million of them, and pounced on recruitment centers
on the gigantic military bases of Florida, Alabama or Kansas. In 1944, there
would be 10 million recruits. They had put on with pride the light khaki
uniform and helmet whose design was so much more aesthetic than that of their
future enemies, and they had been taught how to handle the rifle, the grenade,
the bayonet, the submachine gun, the machine gun, the flamethrower, the dagger.
And that had pleased them. After long months of preparation, they had embarked
for the British Isles. There was, in their still-innocent eyes, the flame of
faith in a just cause. They didn't really know what was awaited them … Seven
and a half seconds to survive.
What did they leave behind?
They left a nation entirely
devoted to the most popular war in American history. Women and Blacks played a
role, a harbinger of other struggles. Among the 12 million candidates for
positions in Civil Defense, were over 100,000
women in the WACs
[Army], the WAVEs [Navy] and
the SPARs [Coast Guard], the
female branches of the four armed forces. Meanwhile, other Americans were
abruptly transitioned from the status as housewives to that of specialized
workers in the armaments industry. Until then, fiancées, spouses and mothers of
GIs were confined to roles of waitresses, nurses, hotel or office assistants.
From then on, for a majority of them, the war effort had given them access
professional namadism - rarely were mobility, relocation, changing cities,
states, or habits as frequent - and the world of work, with the apprenticeship
of power, of a role in business, the growing awareness of the independence of
their sex, part of their identity. The Second World War was the founding
crucible from which emerged, much later in the second half of the 20th century,
the desire (and the victory) of equality for American women.
And at this beginning of the
decade of the 1940s, Blacks, finally, although daily victims of the cruelest
segregation, unemployment, poverty and racial oppression, the Ku Klux Klan and
its fiery cross, also experienced a semblance of emancipation, thanks to the
Army and the war, because although they were confined to 100 percent Black
units, they learned a trade, garnered dignity, and were able to one day
consider leaving behind their condition as a sub-nation. Their militarization
(13 million Blacks, 16 percent of whom wore the uniform) permitted many of
these young people to escape the terrible urban riots of Detroit in February
1942, of Harlem in April 1943, because at home no one yet had any idea of or
desire for "integration," which would occur much later, in the
'60s.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
But the GIs, who had been
from then on installed in all of the bases in southern England, were no longer
well-informed about what continued to unfold there, in their native land. They
were being prepared to cross the English Channel to land on unknown beaches
that the strategists, under the command of a man with the face of a father,
General Eisenhower, had baptized with familiar names: Omaha; Utah. For the time
being, the GIs left the hundreds of cities and villages of Great Britain where
they had experienced fleeting romances with the English who had been conquered
by their smiles, their exoticism, their chewing gum and their gifts of silk
stockings. They had invaded pubs, cinemas, hotels and restaurants, established
hundreds of bases and air fields and had been squeezed, since the end of May,
into a myriad of ships, boats, barges, rowboats and other vessels destined for
France, a strange land. They would fight for her, without really knowing what
she was like, what was her past, her culture, her customs. This time, this was
it, it was the dawn of the longest day.
Then?
Then, seized by fear and
anguish, vomiting their meals, crying or praying, impatient or faint,
scribbling on scraps of paper their last messages of love to their wives or
sweethearts, tossed and shaken by a stormy sea in LCA [Landing
Craft Assault] and LCI
[Landing Craft Infantry] barges or amphibious carriers, boys of 18, 20, 25
years, responding to the easygoing names of Jim, Tim, Steve, Bill, Tony, Diego,
Jack, Donald or Ray, their ears deafened by the terrifying roar within which
were combined the bombardments of friendly aircraft and the shell blasts of
German cannons, frightened by the rattle of machine gun bullets coming from
bunkers striking the iron shell of the barges, stood face to face with these
beaches littered with mines, barbed wire, pyramids, iron hedgehogs, pickets and
points, floundering pathetically in water already reddened by the blood of
comrades who had run aground in the same unforeseeable and abominable disorder.
In the violent rising tide, in the midst of corpses and the debris of barges,
equipment scattered, the bullets of light arms whipping the surface around
them, these crazed heroes, whose names figure today on thousands of small white
crosses in the calm of the Normandy greenery, made the horrible discovery that
they had about seven and a half seconds to get themselves to shelter, cross the
water, crawl on the sand, lie on the ground … survive.
Hell
on earth: GIs hit the beaches at Normandy, France,June
6, 1944. They had on average seven seconds toreach cover.
No one had told them that it
would be like this. The first hours and the first waves of assault were
terrible, catastrophic, disastrous, confused, petrifying, indescribable in
their horror, and those who succeeded in crossing that fateful barrier of seven
and a half seconds owed it as much to chance as to unconsciousness, to hazard
as to bravery, to will as to the mania for victory. All heroes. They belonged
to the "Greatest Generation," historians from all shores would say
much later, this immense and anonymous line of Americans without rank, incapable
of pronouncing a phrase of French or the name of any village in Normandy. The
only word that brought them to this point, to these seven seconds of death or
survival, was spelled freedom. Freedom! How could we ever forget them?
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR ELIE WIESEL AND OBAMA AT BUCHENWALD
