On April 19, 1985, I was 11 days shy of my 18th birthday, but I accomplished one of my travel dreams. It was to visit Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, which has become famous for one of the most bloodiest and costly battles in history. It was a personal journey for me because from the time I could understand history, Mom told me the story about my Uncle Al on her side of the family and his experiences on one of the biggest days in military history, June 6, 1944, Operation Overlord--D-Day. It was a very personal trip for me, and I was looking forward to it since I booked my trip to France with my high school earlier that year.
The group that took the trip to France from East Providence, Rhode Island in 1985 consisted mostly of the French Club, about 27 teenage kids along with six of their chauffeurs and teachers. I had done a lot of heavy reading and research on Normandy before leaving Rhode Island, and I felt I was ready to conquer Omaha Beach in my own modern-day invasion.
Our home base was in the small Normandy town of Dinard, and the trip to Omaha Beach was on our last day in Normandy and Brittany before heading back to Paris that afternoon. I was so excited, I was ready to explode with anticipation of seeing Omaha Beach. I spoke with our guide, this cute English guy named Jonathan, about Uncle Al's experience in Normandy during World War II most of the way there, and I took a little teasing from my French III teacher M. DuLude and a couple of other teachers as we were getting off the bus once we arrived there.
After getting off the bus and taking a short walk to the Omaha Beach Memorial, I got an eerie chill as I looked at the English Channel and imagined what it was like for the brave soldiers who lost their lives coming off the landing barges from the big ships in the Channel and came under the most hellacious German machine gun and mortar fire as they tried to conquer the beachhead.
Uncle Al was part of the second wave of the American invasion of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. The Allied Invasion of Normandy was an Anglo-American effort and covered five beach heads on the Normandy Coast. The British and Canadian troops were to take Sword, Gold and Juno Beaches while the American troops were to take Omaha and Utah Beaches. Operation Overlord had been postponed for 24 hours because of bad weather, and June 6 dawned rainy and cloudy, and the Channel was very choppy, but the powers that be said the invasion had to go on, and the choppy waters made several soldiers toss their cookies overboard in their landing barges.
But tossing cookies was the least of their problems. Hundreds of soldiers died drowning as they disembarked from their landing barges because the barges stopped too far from shore, and the soldiers couldn't swim with their heavy packs on their backs. The ones who survived going ashore were pinned down or hit with heavy German fire from the pillboxes on shore. Uncle Al was almost decapitated by German barbed wire that was laid out across the beachhead. For the rest of his life, Al had a faint scar on his neck from where the barbed wire went across.
It took over a month before the Allied invasion troops broke through Normandy and were able to push through to Paris. Over 5,000 American soldiers died on June 6 alone and thousands more were to perish during the battle for France and the push into Germany.
Today, Omaha Beach is a shrine and cemetery for the 5,000 soldiers who died at Omaha Beach. Several of the landing barges lie rusting in the English Channel as a reminder of the battle to future generations.
After France, Uncle Al's unit under General Courtney Hodges fought through Eastern France into the Ardennes, where on December 17, 1944, Al was in a foxhole on his 20th Birthday. The Battle of the Bulge had begun the day before when the Germans began their co