大象传媒

In 1984 and 1985, the 40th anniversaries of the D-Day and V-E Day, I was fortunate enough to escort and guide a number of tours to the Normandy campaign area.

The first one, with a single client, was on the occasion of the actual 6th June anniversary. My client, a plumber from Lake Placid, Iowa, had saved for many years to come on this trip, with his wife. He had been in the 92nd Airborn Div that parachuted onto the Cherboug peninsula.

Following the ceremonies commemorating the landings, we went to the enormous US cemetary at St. Laurent sur Mer. My client had one particular grave he wished to visit. As we stood looking down at the immaculate white marble headstone, he told me the brief but pathetic story of the G.I. which it commemorated.

This man had been his company sargeant but had been stripped of his stripes for persistant drunkenness [where was he getting the drink? I forgot to ask]. Now a plain G.I. again, he continued to drink and one day blundered, singing, half-cut, across the fields away from the position the unit was dug in to. He was shot dead by a German sniper.

As we stood in the cemetary a German man who recognised my client's cap badge came up to him and said "We captured your commanding officer" but followed this up with a laugh and "but you guys captured us and got him back!" The two old combatants fell to swapping stories about all this and to my amazment were joined by a Japanese veteran. The three of them made a remarkable sight, talking in amicable, even jovial terms, about times when their mission in life was to destroy the lives of the others. The whole thing was recorded on tape by a young Irish boy who's father, an Irish radio producer, had packed him off to Normandy with a tape-recorder. It is a moment of internationalism and reconciliation of which I'm proud to have witnessed.

I took my client on to St. Lo, where his war had ended. He had been detailed to the grim job of front-line body-bag duty. He and his mates had established a base under some trees where they laid out the bodies of their dead comrades. A shell exploded in the branches above them, my client was wounded and that was the end of his wartime action.

We made a trip to Brest, where tens of thousands of US troops had come ashore during WW1. Thousands - many more than were killed in action - died there of the flu epidemic which swept the world in 1917. My client's uncle was one of them. Search as we might, we never found the cemetary where all these Americans were buried, before they had a chance to fight.

On another tour, as we walked off Omaha beach into the sand dunes one of my party, a surgeon Colonel in the US Medical Corps, pointed over to one side, in amongst the marram grass and said, "I saw my first dead German right there." He went on to tell us that as they were advancing off the beach-head area, a G.I. came to report that a local had said that there were some wounded French civilians in a near-by farm house. My client sent a couple of orderlies off to do what they could to help. They didn't return. After a while, my client asked for a section of infantrymen to go to find out where his medics had got to. They came back to report that they had found that the French civilians had cut the throats of the medics. The G.I.s had killed the French civilians. A grim story which illustrates that not everyone was happy to see the Allies land.

One of my clients had been in the USAF. He was a very experienced pilot who could fly anything as long as it could leave the ground. He spent his time in Normandy moving aircraft around from operational bases to maintenances bases and back again, when the crocks had been repaired. His younger brother was also serving in the liberation capmaign, flying a P52 "Mustang". One day his brother went out on a mission and didn't come back. My client obtained a bicycle and built a small petrol motor which drove the front wheel, as the French did later with the "Mobylette" scooter. He fueled it from the contents of drip-trays under leaky aircraft fuel tanks. In his spare time he rode his home made Mobylette all over the place, trying to find out what had become of his brother. He never found out. He and his family had had no trace of this young flyer after receiving the telegram "Missing, presumed k.i.a"

By chance, we visited a cemetery some way inland, on our way to Paris. There, in the register and inscribed on a wall, was the name of my client's kid brother. He had been shot down over Belgium and somehow his name had come to be added to the register of this U.S. cemetery in rural France. It was a moment that affected the whole party.

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