Pointe du Hoc was the German gun site between Utah and Omaha Beach that was believed to be heavily fortified and essential to Operation Overlord. The 2nd Ranger Battalion assaulted the location scaling the cliffs with ropes. They found that most of the heaviest guns had been moved, but they held the point for two days without reinforcements against several counterattacks.
This was the site of Ronald Reagan's speech commemorating the 40th anniversary of D-Day. (Click the link to watch the video of the speech.)
The pillboxes and gun installments remain, as well as the deep pits from Allied bombing ahead of the invasion.
One is pretty much free to roam over the point. Kids play hide and seek and look for snails. Middle aged adults wander and consult their guidebooks. Old men stand pensively looking out across the channel.
Looking down the cliffs and imagining scaling them under fire was pretty amazing, even if the resistance was not quite what they had expected. It took great courage, especially with the element of surprise having been largely taken away by a navigation error and unexpected weather.
We stayed for quite a while. One interesting side bonus was the discovery of a "camera obscura" effect down in the underground tunnels. I was taking pictures down below and noticed that on one wall opposite a small opening, there was a ghostly image of an upside down human form wearing pink. I turns out it was Nora, who was standing just outside the opening!
After leaving we spent some time on Utah Beach. The girls made a seaweed fortress while Dietrich and I walked up the beach and the rest of the adults looked on. Found some interesting shells I had never seen on the Pacific coast.
Ice cream treats afterwards. Thanks, Gramps!
Day 19 Reflection One
Watching Reagan's speech (written by Peggy Noonan, by the way), I was struck by how relevant his remarks are to our current world situation.
We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.
Agree or disagree, we are still having the same conversation about American isolationism that we have been having since gaining essential independence from the entire Eurasian situation. We are the only major world power occupying land that is at a geographical remove from all of Western History. This definitely offers an opportunity for isolation that other countries do not have in their relations with each other. But how should we understand ourselves in relation to them? Not an easy question and one that so-called liberals and conservatives disagree upon among themselves.
Day 19 Reflection Two
There was a well dread older man at the Pointe speaking German with a younger man who was with him. I wondered at how different it must be to tour a great historical site as a place of defeat rather than victory, and ignominious defeat at that.
Were there heroes on the German side? Undoubtedly. Do most Germans now thoroughly renounce the Nazi ambitions and radical German nationalism? Absolutely. But there are still grandfathers who fought in those engagements and probably believed to some extent that what they were doing at least approximated the 'right thing' -- even if that was the simple duty of fighting for one's country.
Modern Germany, as a prosperous, peaceful leader in Europe is something of a political and sociological miracle.It is astonishing that so many men could adopt and pass on to their children an entirely different narrative and world view.
Day 19 Reflection Three
The incongruity of my children (and the rest of the world's children for that matter) playing games on the wreckage of World War II France struck me as significant.
Poetically the scene was full of potential. Maybe someday.
Sociologically, it underscored for me the reality of something G.F.W. Hegel says in his lectures On Reason in History:
When we contemplate this display of passions and the consequences of their violence, the unreason which is associated not only with them, but even – rather we might say especially – with good designs and righteous aims; when we see arising therefrom the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can hardly avoid being filled with sorrow this universal taint of corruption. And since this decay is not the work of mere nature, but of human will, our reflections may well lead us to a moral sadness, a revolt of the good will (spirit) – if indeed it has a place within us. Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple, truthful account of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities and the finest exemplars of private virtue forms a most fearful picture and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counter-balanced by no consoling result. We can endure it and strengthen ourselves against it only by thinking that this is the way it had to be – it is fate; nothing can be done. And at last, out of the boredom with which this sorrowful reflection threatens us, we draw back into the vitality of the present, into our aims and interests of the moment; we retreat, in short, into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of wreckage and confusion.
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