Photograph by Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos
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Return to Normandy
By William R. Newcott, May & June 2004
Sixty years after D-Day, American warriors are back for one last look
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Stanley Saft holds two photographs of himself: One shows a triumphant
21-year-old U.S. soldier in 1945, standing where Adolf Hitler had once reviewed
his troops at Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg. After days of fierce house-to-house
fighting in the city, the Americans were conquering heroes. The other photo is
of Saft at the same spot 57 years later. It is the second one that moves him
the most.
"When that first picture was taken," he says, "it was like a
dream. In all that fighting, my buddies and I had no ideas about being scared.
And I never imagined that someday, a lifetime later, I'd be standing right
there again.
"The people who were with me the second time, I'd been showing them
that first picture for days. There were three busloads of us, and I can tell
you there wasn't a dry eye there."
Saft's journey to Nuremberg—both of them, in fact—began when
he landed in France on June 12, 1944, D-Day plus six. He and his unit fought
their way from France to Austria, stopping in Nuremberg, the German city Hitler
envisioned as the seat of Nazi power. Now Saft is one of thousands of World War
II veterans who, despite age and illness, are making their way back to the
beaches, to the villages, to the battlefields where they helped save the
world.
This June 6 marks D-Day plus 60 years. For most of those who served in
Europe, it's the last big, round anniversary they'll be able to attend.
And for many of them—coming with their children and
grandchildren—it is the first real opportunity to break lifetimes of
silence about the things they saw and the things they did.
Many are simply buying a plane ticket to Paris, renting a car, and driving
to the beaches of Normandy. There is no shortage of local and international
tour companies that run guided tour buses along the beaches, then to the
restored French villages beyond the abandoned Nazi bunkers. Perhaps the most
striking thing about the beaches of Normandy—and there are 60 miles of
them, if you want to visit them all—is the tranquility. The cold waters
lap lazily ashore, tall grass hangs like a bad haircut over the tops of the
cliffs, old Nazi machine gun bunkers look more like benign storage buildings
than death dispensers. And that makes the memories of those who were there in
June 1944 all the more essential to preserving their history.
"Most of the D-Day veterans who visit Omaha Beach are there for the
first time since the war. They've never seen this tranquility," says
Andrew Ambrose, marketing director for the historical-tour company founded by
his father, the late historian Stephen Ambrose. "The last time they saw
it, they were in the middle of the most horrific scene imaginable. Now
they're here, with their kids and grandkids, unburdening themselves at
last.
"It's a process, really. Grandpa will take them someplace, a place
he perhaps remembers for the first time in 60 years, and tell them a story. It
might be tragic, or it could be one of the funny things that happens in war.
They all cry. And in a way, that helps them understand him a little
more."
As the soldiers of D-Day grow older, and the bus rides and the long car
trips become an increasing physical challenge, many are turning to riverboat
travel as their best way to get around to the battle sites of World War II.
Saft was on one such trip with Grand Circle Travel's river cruises, a large
U.S.-based line, when he visited Nuremberg.
The lines all glide peacefully into towns that 60 years ago saw waves of
advancing GIs. I stood on the deck of a Viking River Cruises ship a couple of
years ago as it glided along the Rhine, passing beneath the towers of a ruined
bridge at a town called Remagen. I'd been hearing about the bridge for a
few days—how the Allies captured it, the last surviving span across the
wide river, before the Germans could destroy it. The Allied victory at Remagen
virtually sealed the Third Reich's fate.
Now the blackened towers—all that's left of the
bridge—loomed overhead. A gray-haired man near me gripped the railing,
gazing upward, his knuckles turning white. Fixing his jaw, he was determined,
clearly, not to cry. Then he caught sight of the U.S. flag that flaps daily
from one tower. "Ah…," he said, a little disgusted with
himself as he choked back a sob. He glanced at me, embarrassed. "I was
here," he explained somewhat helplessly. "I was here."
He turned abruptly, adding, "But where's my wife?"
It was a river cruise that brought me to Nuremberg, truly one of the eeriest
places on earth with its crumbling relics of Nazi power. The invading Allies
dynamited the huge swastika from atop the Zeppelin Field reviewing stand within
days of their arrival. Its mammoth colonnade, designed by Albert Speer, was
demolished in the 1960s—ostensibly because it was unstable, but our
German tour guide wasn't buying that rationale.
'When that picture was taken, I never imagined that
someday, a lifetime later, I'd be standing right there again.'
"The Nazis built for a thousand years," she said. "The
colonnade had to come down because this place still looked too
heroic."
There's little heroic about the place today. Kids lounge on the stands,
blasting radios; skateboarders do tricks on the uneven pavement.
Even as Germans struggle with exactly how to handle their past, returning
U.S. World War II veterans are greeted warmly. And if the Americans are still
reluctant to talk about their war experiences, they are overwhelmingly open to
embracing their former enemies.
Phil Economon fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the bitter war-within-a-war
in which the Germans, in their last-ditch effort to repel the Allies, threw
everything they had at them in the forests of Belgium and Luxembourg.
More than 5,000 American soldiers, many of them casualties of the Battle of
the Bulge, are interred at the sprawling U.S. military cemetery in Luxembourg.
The white crosses curve in graceful arcs, surrounded by trees, fountains, and
flower beds. Economon, while visiting one fall day, found himself enveloped in
peaceful quiet.
"I found a headstone for a sergeant from California and I put flowers
on it," says Economon, who lives north of San Francisco. "One of the
things that moved me the most was nearby, in the German cemetery. The Germans
didn't have the ID systems we did, so they buried their men en
masse."
In stark contrast to the bright, ultimately triumphant crosses and Stars of
David at the American cemetery, the German graves are marked by low stone
crosses, dark and rough-hewn. They seem to be growing out of the soil.
"I met several old German soldiers in that cemetery," Economon
says. "It's become kind of a meeting place of German and American
soldiers."
Of course, Europe is a very different place today from what it was 60 years
ago. Sometimes you have to look hard to find evidence of the war. It was on a
shore excursion during a riverboat trip in the Netherlands that I—and the
dozens of World War II vets onboard—discovered a little-known monument to
America's role in the liberation of Europe. The Marshall Museum, located
behind a chainlink fence in an industrial suburb of Rotterdam, has one of the
world's most comprehensive collections of vintage military vehicles. In the
warehouse-style building, mannequins wearing authentic GI uniforms sit behind
the wheels of some 300 jeeps, ambulances, tanks, tractors, and just about any
other type of rolling stock. Every spark plug, every wheel bearing is
authentic—that's the vow of the museum's founder, Jaap de Groot,
former head of the giant Grootint construction company.
"I've never even heard of this place," one vet told another as
they admired a display of war-era motorcycles that looked ready to roar off
with one kick of the pedal. "Why the hell doesn't the Smithsonian have
all this stuff? I gotta come to Holland, for cryin' out loud?"
The museum is named for General George C. Marshall, who engineered the
reconstruction of Western Europe. Economon considers him a true hero of the
war.
"The Marshall Plan saved Germany," he says. "It shows that
American ability to turn the other cheek."
Saft agrees. "You just have to look around a city like Nuremberg,"
he says. "When I was there, it was leveled. Now look at it today. Look at
all of Germany."
It is the new Germany, the liberated France, the indomitable Netherlands and
Belgium and Austria that Saft visits now. But he sees them through the eyes of
one who bears witness to much that, even today, remains unspeakable.
Unless…
"On my next trip, I'm bringing my grandson," he says.
"Well, he's 30 now, so I guess that's not much of a grandson, is
it? But he wants to see these things. And he wants me to show him. And I guess
I'd better do that now, right?"
Now, read about a son's discovery of his father's
ultimate sacrifice over Occupied France, and then take a sneak peek at photos of the new National
World War II Memorial on the AARP Bulletin's website.
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