TriumphAnt

Utah Beach - June 6, 1944

As I mentioned previously, this American beach was the objective of the IVth Division, a unit with an assistant commander of significant US pedigree: Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. In “The Longest Day”, the 53 year-old Roosevelt, played by Henry Fonda, is portrayed with a cane and is shown receiving permission to take part in the landings only after submitting a petition over the head of the division commander, “Tubby” Barton. Both characterizations are accurate. Roosevelt had arthritis and turned out to be the only general who participated in the first-wave D-Day landings. General Roosevelt, however, also suffered from a heart condition and did not survive the war. Ironically, just a month after D-Day, he was felled by a heart attack. His actions on the beach on June 6, however, won him the Congressional Medal of Honour. When he learned that his entire force had somehow missed its landing by almost 2 km, his cool appraisal of the situation produced his famous, “Alright then, we’ll start the war from right here” assessment. His leadership that day was cited years later by General Omar Bradley, when Bradley was asked to name the most heroic combat action he had ever seen. He answered simply, “Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach”.

His Medal of Honour citation sums it up nicely:
"For gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty on 6 June 1944, in France. After 2 verbal requests to accompany the leading assault elements in the Normandy invasion had been denied, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt's written request for this mission was approved and he landed with the first wave of the forces assaulting the enemy-held beaches. He repeatedly led groups from the beach, over the seawall and established them inland. His valor, courage, and presence in the very front of the attack and his complete unconcern at being under heavy fire inspired the troops to heights of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. Although the enemy had the beach under constant direct fire, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt moved from one locality to another, rallying men around him, directed and personally led them against the enemy. Under his seasoned, precise, calm, and unfaltering leadership, assault troops reduced beach strong points and rapidly moved inland with minimum casualties. He thus contributed substantially to the successful establishment of the beachhead in France."

(For the literati in the room , JD “Catcher in the Rye” Salinger was also among the US troops in the landing.)

Also among the units landing on Utah was the First Engineer Special Brigade, who built roads and airfields with such astonishing speed after the landing that US Air Force Thunderbolt fighters were able to fly support for post D-Day operations throughout the summer of 1944 from two airfields just minutes inland from the beach.

The presence of the Engineers in the Utah landing is also the reason why much of this beach’s memorial and museum’s focus is a tribute to the units that support the front line combat soldiers.

I have the feeling that Roosevelt, very much a “soldier’s soldier”, would be quite happy that his most visible memorial on the beach is a bar and restaurant built around a concrete bunker that was used as a communications centre by the Germans.
On D-Day, after being captured the bunker was swiftly turned to precisely the same purpose for the Allies and became the hub of ship to shore communications through which all the later Utah traffic was co-ordinated, eventually landing almost 850,000 men, 220,000 vehicles and 725,000 tons of equipment between June 8 and October 31, 1944.

For our part, we took advantage of le Roosevelt’s offering of an internet connection (which only worked on our second visit; our first effort produced a classic Gallic shrug from the bar’s owner and an apology for the link’s having failed to work “for the last seven months”) to send a message home and also to discover the answer to the one burning question from the home front that the news junkie in me had to know: who won the Canadian general election?

Leslie and I actually shared several glasses of wine and calvados in le Roosevelt. The bar is drenched in character and its walls are packed floor to ceiling with densely displayed memorabilia, but especially dozens of old two-way radio sets and the electronic miscellany of wartime communication.
Over the years, the countless veterans who have visited have left autographs and brief biographical notes on pretty much every writable surface in the bar, from tabletops to the face of the bar itself. On one of the tables at which we sat, one intrepid veteran related a service career that included naval service aboard one of the ships supporting the invasion, then aboard separate ships during both the Korean and Vietnam wars and even a stint as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton”. Another – in the top left corner of this photo – was probably written with a nod to the author’s lucky stars: “Josef Horn, German vet, wounded and captured at ‘Holely’ (?) by the 101 Airborn 6.6.44”.

The Museum and Visitors Centre is likewise an extremely well-mounted exhibit dedicated to the units whose jobs involve getting the front-line troops safely onto the beaches and supporting them once they’re there. The Museum’s notes describing their exploits, however, were marred by anything but efficiency. Their English translation is done so appallingly badly that it has produced several pleas for correction in the Museum’s guest book. I took a photograph of one – on a display of German soldiers’ equipment – and believe it or not, this isn’t the worst.
From its “These symbols of evil are shown in order to do not forget” beginning to its “Those who tend to forget the Past are convicted to come alive again it” ending, it was representative of an overall labelling effort that looked like an assembly of the products of the runners-up in a high school English as a Second Language class contest. (Come to think of it, I should probably apologize to ESL high schoolers everywhere.)

But that’s over-emphasizing the one negative aspect. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to this museum. And it did give me one of my louder laughs of the trip, when I discovered the much more peaceful – and certainly necessary – use to which another of the Atlantic Wall’s former defence bunkers just outside is now being put. (Note the sign on the right.)


Here are a couple more shots taken inside the Centre. The first one shows, in the lower right, the entrance to an actual defensive German bunker over which the Centre is built.
The black cone-shaped object in centre is the turret from a French Renault tank, which was turned into a bunker-mounted defensive machine gun position by the Germans. And the vehicles in the background are US landing vehicles called DUKWs. (In a happy military coincidence, the amphibious craft came to be called almost universally “ducks”, even though the designation is based entirely on practicality. The name comes from the model naming terminology used by the manufacturer, General Motors. “D” indicates a vehicle that was designed in 1942, “U” is for “utility (amphibious)”, “K” is GM’s indication for all-wheel drive and they used the “W” to indicate that its two rear axles were both powered – take notes; there’ll be a test later.)


In the second photo, visible outside the oval window are two different designs of beach obstacles – one a concrete pyramid shape and the other a vicious asterisk-shaped piece of iron – embedded in the sand by the Germans. Underwater at high tide, either could be – and frequently was – fitted with explosives to act as a mine that would destroy a landing craft or amphibious vehicle. And this is a photo taken outside.
The tank is a Sherman – the workhorse of US forces during the Second World War, and the statue in the background is a memorial to the countless Naval units who landed the troops and ferried their supplies to shore once the toehold became a foothold became a beachhead became the gateway to Europe.

Finally, take a look at this photo of a photo, also in the Utah Beach Museum, of US soldiers emerging from a chapel after a church service.
Heavily damaged by shellfire and bullets, the chapel was nonetheless employed for its originally intended purpose – as a small centre of worship – from the first days of the landing. As it happens, the Chapelle de la Madeleine is a mere few yards down the same road as our gite and it is today
a fully restored quiet place of contemplation. This is not the last time a sense of the living history of Normandy – and later Paris – would make itself felt to us visitors.

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Frankly, we could have used the organizational efficiency of an engineering battalion for our next assignment – a drive into Carentan to try to solve the so-far non-functionality of our PIN-less credit cards. I mentioned earlier that we would eventually discover that one of our four cards – my Gold VISA – did in fact come with an embedded pin. But even today, I can’t write that without steering a quiet snarl at the issuing banks, not one of whom mentioned to us the need for a PIN, even after we called them to notify them of our upcoming trip so that the sudden wave of charges originating from France would not set off any foreign-sourced alarms. But on the positive side, we found an “above and beyond the call of duty” employee at the Carentan Tourist Office who let us make as many long distance calls as we needed to try to resolve the problem. And once we found that we had one pre-PINned card of the four, celebrated with a lunch at a pub obviously geared to attracting visiting US vets, The Swampy.

Incidentally, French draft beer, rendered on bar menus as “bière pression”, is fabulous. As a rule, it’s much hoppier than the products of the big Canadian brewers. I found that the one I enjoyed most, even though it usually was among the least expensive of the available brews on tap, is called “1664”, a pale lager made by Kronenbourg.

Up next – one of the most meaningful days of my war-related pilgrimages on this trip – the Canadian D-Day experience – Juno Beach.