In Normandy: Bloody Omaha

Nick on Omaha Beach, Feb. 2014

            Everything went wrong on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.  For days, or perhaps months (unclear exactly what our guide said. Roel, pronounced “Rule,” is Dutch living in France and he could have learned English in Scotland, the way he expands his vowels, plus the winds was howling and we were all keeping our mouths tight to keep from swallowing too much sand), the allies had been bombing the coast of France to clear away all the mines and obstacles and guns and troops the Germans had deployed there anticipating just this attack. Or at least they thought they had been bombing the coast but because of cloud cover, they had been bombing inland, leaving the Nazi defenses and the medieval farms and villages in which they were hidden intact.

            34,250 Americans landed on the beach that day and the several days after. The clouds had lifted, enough for the first ashore to see they were walking, or floating, or sinking into a bloodbath. But the waves of men had to keep coming to make it ashore before the tide, which would cover up the mines and booby traps, spiders made of sharp steel that would rip tanks or boats to shreds right before the bombs on top blew those shreds, along with arms and legs and skulls and good luck charms and helmets and boots and blood, lots of blood, like confetti in a cold wind.

            Roel showed us a picture of a landing craft with men packed in like rush hour on the A train. One veteran told Roel that he stood for two days on a raft waiting for the tide to flow right. The only time he sat was when the slipped in the vomit covering the metal floor. When he finally got off, he jumped into the water over the opened-up back of a guy he had grown up with in Ohio.  Thousands died on or near that beach.

            Bloody Omaha, Roel kept saying, when he ran out of facts and pictures. Bloody Omaha.

            In Paris, everywhere we go, I feel like we are walking on the dead. The bodies of black plague victims topped by street-fighting revolutionaries, then kings and priests, and some more revolutionaries, plus all the perfectly normal casualties over thousands of years -- old age or murder, or getting mowed down by a taxi cab.  At home, in our big and young country, we spend far less time treading on spirits.  But even Paris didn’t prepare me for Bloody Omaha.

            The beach is so empty now, hard to see it as it was, even with Roel’s pictures, even with the images from Saving Private Ryan still floating around in my nightmares. The last of the veterans who survived D-Day are dying now, and all the space on Omaha Beach says to me that the ghosts of their comrades are leaving too, dying a second time on that damned beach, old men who never were.