In Flanders Field and World War II

*This is the fourth in a series of four or five essays I wrote while I was in graduate school. I was going through some of my old grad school documents and came across the personal essays I wrote during my Advanced News Practices class, which I took from David Waters, who now works at The Washington Post. I thought throwing them up on the blog would be a good forum for them. So enjoy.

In Flanders Field and World War II
This story is about my visit to Normandy in France, where I got to stand on the same sand my great uncle did when he rushed the beaches (and survived) during World War II.

The bus slowed to a halt in the empty, dew-soaked parking lot. I slipped off with the rest of my classmates. We gathered for a moment, stretching out our tired and cramped legs and rubbing our sleep-deprived eyes. It had been long trip already, but we still had more than a week left. Our professors walked off the bus into the early-morning sun and led us up a brief, sinewy, stone pathway housed under the soft shade of the surrounding trees that may have been elms. I tugged down on my knit cap with a lowercase “dc” emblazoned on the front that symbolized the Washington Wizards, and I zipped up my red winter jacket as far as it would go and hid my mouth and nose behind it. The 30 of us – all battling the frigid January winter weather – soon turned a corner and set our road-weary sights on one of the more impressive and daunting sights we had ever seen. It stopped me cold for a moment. My feet seemed to be glued to the ground as I stared at the rows and rows of white, nondescript crosses that lined an undulating bright green countryside. The graves extended to the infinite horizon. It was early morning, so the sun was not at is peak. Shadows covered a great many of the graves, but the ones to the East were showered in the soft dawn tones of orange and yellow. The class fanned out across the graveyard.

On this trip across Europe, we had seen cemeteries in England, and would see mass graves in St. Petersburg, Russia. Yet for some reason, this American graveyard at Colleville sur Mer, which rested above the once blood-soaked Omaha Beach and deadly cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, seemed more awe-inspiring than anything we had seem before it or surely anything we would see later. The serenity of the morning, the structure of the cemetery and the gentle crashing of the waves on the beach belied the horrendous events that had transpired here less than 60 years ago.

As I walked among the knee-high graves, I thought back to John McCrae and his poem In Flanders Field. It was a World War I poem, but it held significance on this day:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below

Hundreds of graves are anonymous, some have identification marks and others bear the Star of David at the top to signify the death of a Jewish soldier. In the past, being in a cemetery forced me to recognize the finiteness of life, but standing there at Colleville made me ponder the D-Day invasion of 1944 that provided a rebirth for Americans and the inhabitants of this region. Then, I thought about my great-uncle Patrick Edward Fitzpatrick, or Uncle Eddie to me.

He slipped onto a landing barge that overcast June 6 day in 1944 and took the short, but assuredly tense, ride across the English Channel poised to continue the assault on the German forces at Normandy. He was 30 years old at the time – a bit older than the average soldier. He had been drafted into the war, or to him, stolen away by the Army from his job at Pepco and his life in Maryland. He was a tall, strapping, strong Irishman who had played some minor league baseball. (He often tells the story of showering next to Walter Johnson after one mid-summer game.) His job in the armed forces was to repair communication lines, so he was not a foot soldier, per se. When the boats approached the coast, he jumped over the side of the boat, waded through the water and hid behind a Jeep until he hit land. Once he felt the sand under his feet, he jumped into the nearest hole he could find until he was clear to continue his advance up the beach. He recalls looking to his left and watching Allied forces – mostly Americans – attempt to scale the vast, ominous wall of Pointe du Hoc. They were picked off easier than most. He says entire barges dumped only the dead into the Channel. He has no idea how anyone survived the invasion. Today, at 93 years old, he considers himself one of the lucky ones. (Ed. Note: My great uncle was 93 at the time this was written. He died two years later in 2007.)

All his stories careen through my head as I turn my empty stare from grave to grave. I rejoin the rest of the group and we begin our descent from the cemetery to the beach. We walk down a short pier and our professor tells us to take off our shoes and socks. We oblige and walk barefoot across the sand and toward the water. The wind whips off the Channel’s waters. I pull snugly on my knit cap again, my feet freezing in the wet, hard sand. My professor produces 32 roses. He hands all of us one rose apiece and tells us to wade knee deep into the water. Despite our better judgment, we follow his instructions. The cold water stings my bare skin. We form a circle, read In Flanders Field at our professor’s behest, observe a moment of silence and toss our roses into the water. It may seem like one of those typical cornball, cheesy movie moments, but I truly appreciated the gesture. I was standing on the very same beach my great-uncle was thrust onto in 1944. I was looking up the beach at the remnants of the German-used batteries that killed thousands upon thousands of Allied troops. I was having war flashbacks, or at least sympathy flashbacks.

I turned back with the rest of the group, did my best to dry my feet and put my shoes and socks back on. I walked up the hill to Colleville and took one last look at the immense cemetery. I felt a major pang of emotion overtake me, and I realized then and there my great uncle’s heroic acts, along with the other men and women who served that day, will always be remembered. I thought to myself that winter day in France that nothing I ever see or do will compare to my moments in Normandy at Omaha Beach. I tugged on my coat and walked back to the bus. We had more than a week to go and several more countries to visit, but the denouement of my trip happened at Omaha. The rest would only be filler.