Normandy: Making History Come Alive for the Kids

We took our youngest children to Normandy to tour the beaches and pause in thanks at the American Cemetery.

It was important, and they came back with a new appreciation for service.

All those crosses will do that.

I’d been there as a child myself.

A movie to tell the story

My father, a history-lover, felt his children should learn what happened in Europe during World War II.

Fourteen years after the end of the war, in 1970, we visited the actual sites. He wanted us to imagine what it was there. We needed to see with our eyes so that we could reverence with our hearts.

We prepared our children the same way my father did: by watching the movie The Longest Day.

A lengthy film featuring American movie stars in cameo roles, The Longest Day told the story of Normandy in an engaging black and white.

Because the pictures we’ve seen from D-Day were all black and white, this seemed completely natural. The Germans spoke in German and the French spoke French. It was the first movie I  saw with subtitles.

In 2009, our children, then 16 and 22, knew the story well by the time we arrived.

From Paris to the battlefield in 2009

We exited the train in Caretan and were met by a battlefield tour guide who looked a lot like Field Marshall Montgomery: mustache, clipped accent and English officer cap. We liked him and he was extremely knowledgeable.

He took us to his home first, across the street from the infamous church at Sainte-Mère-Église, where John Steele of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (the Red Buttons character in The Longest Day) hung from a parachute for several hours during the invasion.

Steele played dead while a fire fight went on in the courtyard, and survived. The church never forgot him, and a dummy parachutist resides on the steeple to this day.

It was just pretty countryside to us, green and fertile, until we arrived at that church. The movie, the sounds, the horror flooded back in that courtyard and tears–the first of many that day–began.

We reviewed the invasion, toured the church–where a beautiful stained glass window commemorates the American paratroopers who crossed the channel on June 6, 1944–and spent time at a local museum devoted to the war.

Silence reigned between us;  we had to take it in by ourselves individually and with awe.

Visiting the beach at Normandy

A thin breeze blew that March day, but the sky stretched clear and blue. A visit to Omaha Beach filled us with amazement as we examined the the cliffs men had to climb under fire at Pointe du Hoc.

The beach also startled: the sand had a red hue.

We puzzled over the reddish color until my son suggested perhaps it was the result of rust from the ships and equipment still under the water? Eerie.

Our final stop was the American Cemetery which our guide told us actually has been given to the United States by France–so our soldiers could be buried on American soil.

Our hush fell into silence there. For an hour we wandered the green grass, read the names on the white stone crosses, stood with tears in the chapel and wondered, yet again, how these men found the courage to come ashore that grim rainy June day.

My memories from 1970 were of the rows of crosses stretching to the water. I’ve never forgotten the solemnity of that moment. My daughter could scarcely speak.

“This is how we should be taught history,” she said. “By visiting the places where it took place.” She’ll never think of World War II the same.

Just like me.

Go

Since our trip, most of our siblings and their families have visited Normandy.

“The American Cemetery was the most memorable place I saw in Europe that summer,” my sister-in-law said.

My twenty-year-old niece: “I was never so proud of being an American as when I stood in that cemetery.”

A piece of America, in Europe, made us all think about history from a new point of view.

Visiting such a place will do that to you.

Tweetables

A tour of D-Day’s Normandy sites with kids. Click to Tweet

Why were Normandy’s D-Day beaches still red? Click to Tweet

Why taking the kids to tour D-Day sites is important. Click to Tweet