Daisies from the Killing Ground

By Frederick Painton

On the Atlantic coast of France, just above the pointing finger of Brittany, Normandy juts out like a green thumb into the blue-gray waters of the English Channel. At this time of year, the lush countryside is lit up with apple, pear and cherry blossoms. Along narrow country lanes, lilacs bloom around stone farmhouses and over ancient walls. Cowslips, daisies and bluets ripple through the wet pastures, interrupted regularly by thick hedgerows. Once again the surging Norman spring is laying down a floral carpet over the old killing ground.

For the Normandy veterans who come back for the first time, the experience often brings a bewildering rush of emotional crosscurrents: nostalgia for the pride and purpose they felt as young soldiers mixed with something akin to guilt for having survived when death randomly took so many friends. At Omaha Beach, where the water's edge turned red from American blood, returning veterans remember the deafening roar of battle, the smoke and confusion. All they can hear now is the lap of a low surf, the keening of seagulls and occasionally the shouts of children playing on the beach. The puzzle is how to connect the remembered knot of constant fear, the moments of horror and exhilaration in combat, with the tranquil landscape beyond the beach. It is a vision by Edvard Munch imposed on a romantic painting from la Belle Epoque. Some of the veterans, now mainly in their 60s, simply sit down on the beach and stare out to sea. For others, the contrast between recollection and reality, that old trick of time, brings tears to the eyes.

Samuel Fuller, 71, a film director and screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles, was 31 when he hit Omaha Beach as a corporal with the 3rd Battalion, 16th Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. A small, intense man with a cigar perpetually in his mouth, Fuller returned this month for the first time and felt a little lost. He could not find the pillbox that his unit bypassed on the way to the cliffs beyond the beach. The tall tree on the heights designated before the landing as an assembly point was missing. In a surprised, almost wounded tone, Fuller noted, "All the wreckage is gone." It was hard for him to believe that all those destroyed landing craft, tanks and trucks had disappeared. "Look at the parking lot and the vacation houses," said Fuller. "The place has turned into a resort!" Still, he was moved by the sight. Hoisting his nine-year-old daughter Samantha onto his shoulders, Fuller moved across the 200 yards of beach to the water line. For a moment he stood there silently, then retraced his steps of 40 years ago with his child, instead of a pack, on his back.

Like many combat veterans, Fuller rejects the idea of any glory attached to war. "We were just doing our job," he likes to say. At Omaha, nonetheless, Fuller won a Silver Star for an act that he refuses to regard as particularly heroic. Ripped by machine-gun and artillery fire as they hit the beach, the Americans lay flat in the shallow water, or painfully dragged themselves up the sand despite being wounded. Fuller was hugging the ground when an officer crawled over and ordered him to find Regimental Commander Colonel George A. Taylor and tell him that demolition teams at last had cleared a path through to the cliffs. Recalls Fuller: "There were bodies and blood all over. How was I supposed to run? I had a horror of stepping on corpses. But I finally reached him 200 yds. away. Then Taylor did an amazing thing. He stood up and shouted, 'Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here.' And then he led us off."

In the chaos on the beach, Fuller recalls a burning ammunition truck, the driver dead at the wheel, careering toward his pinned-down unit. Some unknown soldier leaped into the cab and steered the smoldering vehicle into the sea, where it exploded. Soaking wet on the beach, Fuller remembers a cold so bitter he barely could move his fingers. The weeks of hedgerow fighting that followed have turned into a sickening blur: "You're out of control. You shoot at anything. Your eyes hurt. Your fingers hurt. You're driven by panic. We never looked at the faces of the dead, just at their feet--black boots for Germans, brown for G.I.s."

Even though Fuller made a movie called The Big Red One about his old division four years ago, he thinks war is impossible to convey on film because "you can't see anything in actual combat. To do it right," he says, "you'd have to blind the audience with smoke, deafen them with noise, then shoot one of them in the shoulder to scare the rest to death. That would give the idea, but then not many people would come to the theater."

Above the beach in the village of Colleville-sur-Mer, Fuller headed for an old cafe he remembered and asked for Joseph Brobant, the first French civilian he had seen. Brobant had come running down the road toward the advancing troops, carrying a shovel. "It's a wonder we didn't shoot him," says Fuller. "We were told to shoot at anything that moved on that road." Brobant, who had been forced into virtual slave labor by the Germans, excitedly indicated to the American infantrymen that he had just killed three of his captors with his shovel. Now 82, Brobant at first did not recognize the U.S. soldier who had teased him about his funny hat. Fuller drew a sketch of the white cap that Brobant had worn then, and the old Frenchman's eyes lit up in recognition. Shouting and laughing, the two men bear-hugged each other, overjoyed at finding a living connection to that distant day.

Making that kind of connection is more difficult for most veterans. Often they hunt for the side of a hill, a particular hedgerow or some other now inconspicuous landmark that is burned in their memories. Two Canadians found the precise corner of a pasture they remembered near Arromanches. No trace of war remained. But digging into the soft earth, the two men finally uncovered a rusted Canadian helmet. A former U.S. sergeant spent an entire day looking for the house where he had knocked out a German machine gun. When he found it, he cried, "That is why I came, that is why I came." William K. Van Hoy, 62, a retired postman from Milwaukee, Ore., wanted to show his son the place near St.-Malo where he was wounded on Aug. 8,1944.

What sticks in Van Hoy's memory even more vividly, though, is an incident during the attack on St.-Lo. "I had just lost two of my best friends," he says. "They were picked off right next to me. Then, in St.-Lo, we had just seized an artillery battery and taken all these prisoners when our own artillery started hitting all around us. I jumped into a bunker hole with two of the Germans. They marked on the side of the wall that they were 17 years old and had bicycled for three weeks from Germany to get there." Says Van Hoy, his face full of wonder, "You know I actually felt sorry for them."

For 37 out of the past 40 years, Theodore Liska, now a hotel manager in Mons, Belgium, has returned to Normandy for the anniversary of Dday. Liska, a native of Chicago, was a sergeant in the 4th Infantry. As a survivor he feels a debt to "the men who won the war, those who gave their lives. The rest of us didn't." Compared with Omaha, the landing at Utah was easy, but a mile or two inland Liska's unit began to take heavy casualties. The Germans had flooded a swath of fields nearly a mile wide. Liska and his men kept their sea-landing life jackets on for the first 24 hours, as they struggled through waist-high water. Says Liska: "We were just like sitting ducks for the Germans, sitting ducks in a pond." Human corpses became so familiar to Liska that by an odd flinch of his mind he vividly recalls instead pastures full of dead cows. "They were all lying there on their backs with their legs in the air," he says, "and I remember thinking that I never had seen a dead cow before."

By the same selective memory, veterans dwell on spontaneous displays of mercy in combat rather than on acts of brutality. Although no one wants to be reminded that both sides occasionally shot prisoners, usually because they lacked the time or means to guard them, one notorious exception is the 12th SS Panzer Division's murder of nearly 40 Canadian and British prisoners in a chateau garden near Bayeux. Liska's unit ran into a handful of soldiers in German uniforms from the conquered Eastern territories who had probably been pressed into service. Said Liska, "They kept saying they were Russians or Poles. The Americans didn't know who was who so they shot them."

Then there were the sudden gestures of respect for the enemy that occasionally graced the killing. Edwin Schmieger, a former parachutist with the German 3rd Parachute Division, is one of 100 or so German veterans who chose to settle in Normandy after the war, mainly because the Soviet army had overrun their former homes in Poland and Germany. A skilled carpenter who restores old furniture, Schmieger recalls coming under fire from three American tanks. "One of my comrades was wounded in both legs," recounted Schmieger, "and without thinking I left my cover to put a tourniquet on his wounds. The American tanks were shooting us like rabbits, but during those minutes while I was exposed, they held their fire. Forty years later, I take my hat off to those men for the nobility of that gesture."

Roger Lantagne, a medic with the 101st Airborne, married a Frenchwoman when the war ended and retired nine years ago to Enghien-les-Bains outside Paris after more than three decades of military service in Korea, Viet Nam and Europe. Lantagne, a native of Lewiston, Me., remembers that he was tending German and American wounded in a village church not far from Utah Beach when the village was recaptured by the Germans. "A high-ranking German, accompanied by troops with automatic weapons, suddenly burst into the church. They looked at us, at the bloodstained pews and the German wounded, then turned around and went out without saying anything." Lantagne has befriended some of the German veterans of the campaign. "The Wehrmacht soldiers were ordinary guys," he says, "but the SS troops were something else. They gave no quarter."

One of the crack German units was the Panzer Lehr Division, in which Colonel Helmut Ritgen served. Ritgen, who retired eight years ago from a military career and now lives near Hannover, says that Allied fire power in the Normandy campaign was overwhelmingly greater than anything he had faced on the Eastern Front. "We felt superior to the Russians," he recalls. "At first we were even convinced that we would be able to throw the Allies back from the beaches. But just moving up toward the front in Normandy under air attack discouraged us."

For Ritgen, as for most veterans, the war is never far from mind. On a trip to Scotland last year, he visited Culloden Moor, the site of the last battle fought between the English and the Scots. Says he: "I would like to think that Normandy began the last battle between West Europeans. It was the start of a new Europe in which we have had 40 years of peace."

It is in the same spirit that the Normans recall the bloody beginning of France's liberation. Many French families were forced to house and feed the German occupiers. Resistance was dangerous and reprisals murderous, yet a minority accepted the risks out of a youthful idealism that they look back on with something close to awe. On Dday, the Germans executed 92 Frenchmen who had been held in the Caen prison on charges of helping the Allies through sabotage or intelligence activities. Among the French survivors of that time, though, there is no undercurrent of anti-German feeling today. Liberation--and time--healed their wounds.

Michel de la Vallevielle, mayor of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, a village above Utah Beach, lost two brothers during the German invasion of France. His family farm was occupied by the Germans, who deployed a battery of 88-mm guns in the orchard. On Dday, U.S. paratroopers mistook De la Vallevielle for a German and shot him five times. A sixth bullet split his billfold. He explains his survival by citing a thought from his grandfather, a World War I veteran, who "always said that it took a man's weight in bullets to kill him." Evacuated to England for treatment of his wounds, De la Vallevielle returned home to become an honorary member of the U.S. 90th Infantry Division for the help he gave to visiting veterans and his work in improving the Utah Beach Landing Museum. Though he honors the reasons why the Allies came and fought, De la Vallevielle says, "For me who had two brothers killed and has six children, I don't want any more killing. Hardly anything remains of that tragedy, but there should be a reminder for everyone."

Another guardian of remembrance is Henri Levaufre, who was 13 years old when the invasion began. After the war, as an engineer for the government power company, Levaufre kept coming across foxholes and trenches and began noting their locations on survey maps. Soon he became the unofficial expert for G.I.s who wanted to seek out the places they had been during the fighting. He arranged for the veterans to stay with French families. Levaufre too was made an honorary member of the 90th Division. Five years ago, he set up an extraordinary reunion between members of the 90th and the men they fought in the German 6th Parachute Regiment. No military music or medals were allowed. As the hesitant German soldiers lined up on one side of the banquet hall, the American G.I.s walked across to greet them. Each German presented an American with a rose. "One of the Americans was blind," recalls Levaufre. "As he walked by, the Germans began to cry."

For the past 37 years, a committee for the landings, made up for the most part of local Norman mayors, has organized D-day anniversaries, cared for and improved two local war museums at Utah Beach and Arromanches, and generally, but not invariably, preserved decorum at the landing sites. At Chez Mimile, a cafe in St.-Laurent-sur-Mer, for example, a visitor can buy small white cloth bags labeled in both French and English, EASY GIFT TO TAKE HOME--SAND FROM THE LANDING BEACHES--25 FRANCS.

Though arrangements for the 40th anniversary have largely been taken over by the French government, the local committee will be back in charge next year, working to create what it hopes will become a living museum stretching 60 miles along the length of the invasion beaches. Last year about 1.5 million visitors, almost half of them Americans, stopped to gaze at the 172-acre U.S. cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, where 9,386 soldiers are buried beneath an immaculate lawn. The sheer multitude of white crosses and Stars of David, arranged in neat rows that undulate over the green expanse, forces a hushed reverence, even on buses filled with students born long after the event. Caen Mayor Jean-Marie Girault points out that a high proportion of the people who come to the D-day beaches are young. "It was a struggle against totalitarianism," he says. "And it's still going on. They ask questions about it. They want to know what happened."

The British cemeteries seem cozier, with rows of flowers and bushes along the lines of gravestones. Farther inland at Orglandes, the German cemetery is resolutely austere; its 10,152 graves are marked with blunt crosses of lavender-flecked gray granite. Few tourists come to the German cemetery, but those who do often feel compelled to write a comment in the visitors' book at the entrance. A German wrote, "Nie wieder" (never again), and the same message is repeated, page after page, in French and English.

--By Frederick Painton/Normandy