The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (10 page)

In October, General de Gaulle made his first visit to Caen, and promised immediate aid to “Caen mutilé.” “Caen, mutilated in the service of the nation,” he said, “Caen, more proud and resolute than ever, I give you

my word, you will have the support of the public au- thorities.” Yet in December, Raoul Dautry, the minis- ter of reconstruction, visited the region to inform lo- cal leaders that due to shortages across the country, it would be “many years” before Calvados would be re- built. Indeed, in January 1945, six months after D-Day, the local director of the office for refugees and war vic- tims described the desperate plight of the homeless in the department, and begged for an immediate delivery to the region of 50,000 blankets, 20,000 cots and mat- tresses, 40,000 suits of clothing, and an equal number of shoes.
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The face of liberation in Normandy, then, was ugly and bruised. Local authorities and their Allied patrons worked diligently to impose their ideas of order on this liberated space, but they operated in an environment they themselves had violently uprooted. Not only had liberation shattered the long-settled Norman coun- tryside, demolished hallowed churchyards, and razed towns, but the presence of millions of armed soldiers, with enormous power and few constraints, unsettled the local inhabitants and invited criminal misbehavior of all kinds. In the wake of liberation, Normandy re- mained disoriented, disfigured, and disordered.

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IX DECADES AFTER the liberation of Normandy, few visible traces of the trauma of war remain; the green fields and small towns have long been

put to rights. The natural beauty of the land is evident at every turn, and Ernie Pyle’s description of Normandy as “too wonderfully beautiful to be the scene of a war” seems more apt than ever. Caen, so badly mauled in June and July 1944, is today a quiet, tidy city of 117,000 people. Its inhabitants make their living in a variety of industries, including auto manufacturing, electrical engineering, and, of course, agriculture. The steeples of three handsome churches rise up above a modern cityscape of straight boulevards and pedestrian walk- ways, and the thick walls of William the Conqueror’s castle—which withstood the bombing of 1944—domi- nate the town center. The river Orne still bisects the town, running slowly northeast on its path toward Ouistreham and the sea. A series of low, stout bridges cross the river, and restaurants and cafés crowd along the riverfront boulevards. Everything seems perfectly normal, and it is, even though the Caen of today is en- tirely a modern fabrication. The historic town of small, wooden Norman homes and ancient churches died in June 1944. Caen today is a city of absences.

The city’s haunting character is emphasized each June, as hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists, many of them veterans or the families of men who fought in Normandy in the summer of 1944, come to the city, fill up the hotels, and make their pilgrim- ages to the D-Day beaches and the cemeteries that dot the countryside. The American cemetery at Colleville-

sur-Mer is a popular destination. In 2005, 1.4 million people, half a million of them Americans, visited this immaculate ground, which overlooks Omaha beach. Here, amid tall, gracefully arched pines and the sound of the rolling surf below, 9,387 Americans lie buried. An additional 1,557 names have been engraved on a semicircular wall in the Garden of the Missing. Yet all is not quiet. Every hour, a loudspeaker plays an eerie, warbling recording of “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “God Bless America.” Even in death, the Americans are cheered along to the strains of patriotic songs.

In Caen itself, many small plaques affixed to city walls honor French men and women who assisted the wounded, or who died fighting the German occupiers. The principal site of memory, however, is called “Le Mémorial de Caen.” It was erected in 1988 and opened by President François Mitterrand, himself a former member of the French Resistance. Though its origi- nal purpose was, like the Colleville cemetery, to honor the sacrifices made during the liberation of 1944, the Caen memorial has emerged as something altogether different: “un musée pour la paix”—a peace museum. The museum is surrounded by the flags of all the na- tions who fought in the battle, including the German flag; indoors, the central galleries are dedicated to images and ideas of world peace. A Hall of Peace asks

visitors to contemplate how world civilizations across time have thought about peace and tolerance; to exam- ine “fractures” to that peace brought about by nations and hate groups; and one corridor offers tribute to all the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. Rotating exhibits feature, for example, discussions of the geopolitics of oil, and the violent practice of civilian hostage taking in various global conflicts. Monthly seminars are held on moral philosophy, and adult education courses ex- amine human rights law. One might, of course, see the construction of this sophisticated peace museum as a sign that the people of Caen do not wish to dwell too much on their past, or do not wish to be associated only with the tragedies of D-Day. Yet the epigrammatic words engraved in stone on the outside of the build- ing suggest not so much a turning away from the past as a particular stance toward it: “La douleur m’a bri- sée, La fraternité m’a relevée; De ma blessure a jailli un fleuve de liberté.” Sorrow broke me, Brotherhood has raised me up again; From my wound has sprung a river of freedom.

The Caen memorial has come under fire in recent years from Anglo-American veterans groups for its peacenik pretensions and its apparent abandonment of its role as a memorial to the battle of Normandy.
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But muse- ums and memorials tell us more about how and what

we choose to remember than about historical events themselves. On these now-placid, verdant Norman fields, Americans come to pay homage to their soldiers amidst the somber grandeur of a military cemetery; the people of Caen prefer to gather in a museum of glass and steel and consider the human cost not just of their liberation but of all wars. Both sites are fitting tributes to the varieties of liberation, and the univer- sality of mourning.

2: Blood on the Snow: The Elusive Liberation of Belgium

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UR JOURNEY INTO Belgium,” wrote Sgt. Rich- ard Greenwood of the 9th Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment, “was an interesting experience. I felt

that here, we were really welcome. But at Brussels! It is difficult to describe the scene. It may have been a royal procession, so great was the acclamation. We passed through the principal streets of the city at a time when there were many business people about, 6:00 P.M., and what a contrast with France! Here there were well dressed civilians, fine shops, cleanliness, order, and intelligent looking people. And girls! There were so many, so clean, healthy, fine looking. What a sight for our lads. The city was a blaze of color: every shop, every house, every window carried a flag…. We were bom- barded with fruits and flowers, on a greater scale than ever.” Major Edward Elliot of the Glasgow Highland- ers concurred: “ The contrast between Belgium and France struck me at once. The people dressed better, clothes seemed more plentiful, everyone looked clean and healthy, whereas France gave one the impression that everyone was shoddy and tired. The enthusiasm for our cause seemed more genuine and spontaneous in Belgium than anywhere else we had been.” A raptur- ous welcome, yes: yet the reality of the war hung over

the proceedings like a shroud. Major Maurice Cooke of the Royal Scots recalled that he and his second in com- mand were billeted with a Belgian family in Courtrai (Kortrijk), just a dozen miles from the French border.

Troughton and I were invited into a big house, beauti- fully furnished, whose owner speaking English fluently invited us into his drawing room and opened a bottle of red wine. We noticed a couple dressed heavily in black, and our host explained that his brother and sister in law had lost their three young sons when the RAF had destroyed the station area earlier in the year. It was a most embarrassing situation—our host was most kind, but the atmosphere was strained. We departed to bed early to find pictures of the three little boys, aged 7, 9, and 11, and a family biography of them on mourning cards on the mantel-piece.

An apt summary of the experience of liberation: a warm welcome mixed with the bitter taste of loss.
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After the trauma of Normandy, Allied soldiers basked in the glories of Belgium’s apparent peace and prosper- ity. The British and American forces that dashed across France from the Seine river to the Belgian border en- tered Brussels, Antwerp, and Liège on September 3, 4, and 7 respectively. They frequently spoke not only of

the joy of the liberated Belgians and of the welcome they received, but of the abundance they found in the country. “One got the impression,” wrote one British captain, all too aware of the severe shortages Britain had suffered through, “that the Belgians felt they had done their bit by eating their way through the war.” A bemused GI, after seeing the flags along the main bou- levards, the handsome shop-fronts and well-dressed citizens in Brussels, remarked “one would hardly think they were having a war.”
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We cannot rely, how- ever, upon these soldiers’ first impressions. To be sure, Belgians had not experienced the kind of punishing, murderous occupation policies that the Germans had imposed in Eastern Europe, and they had fared better than the French, on balance, but the country had hardly escaped unscathed. Defeated in May 1940 after a battle against the Germans that lasted only eighteen days, Belgium suffered from the systematic German eco- nomic exploitation that drained the country’s financ- es, requisitioned food, coal, and textiles, and siphoned off a most valuable commodity: human labor. By 1943, 542,000 Belgians were working in Germany and France for the German war effort. Starting in mid-1943, the in- satiable Germans intensified their demands for labor, and hunted men down in the streets, the movie houses, the parks, churches, and in their homes. Thousands of so-called réfractaires (defaulters) went into hiding.

Wartime reports concluded that “the population is suf- fering intensely from what it considers a reduction to slavery.” And for one group of people in Belgium, their fate was even worse than that: 26,000 Jews, or 45 per- cent of the Jews in Belgium at the start of the war, were deported to German extermination camps; a mere 1,200 survived.
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The liberation too—despite its first flush of glory—was stained with blood. Even as the residents of Brussels were throwing flowers and fruits into the jeeps and trucks of the British troops during the glorious early days of September, a number of ghastly events were unfolding in the eastern part of the country that made plain how much brutality the retreating Germans still had in them, and augured ill for the final stages of the war. On September 2–3, along the road that runs from the French town of Valenciennes to the Belgian city of Mons, thousands of Germans in full retreat encoun- tered harassing fire from small bands of ill-equipped and no doubt overconfident Belgian partisans. The Ger- mans responded with typical ferocity: around the vil- lages of Ghlin, along the Mons Canal, and in the towns of Jemappes and Quaregnon, through which their main axis of retreat ran, Wehrmacht and SS soldiers set fire to civilian homes along the route, and killed some sixty civilians. On the same day, just a few miles to the north,

in the village of Quevaucamps, Belgian partisans fired upon a column of retreating Germans, killing one sol- dier; the Germans determined to exact reprisals. They killed two resistance fighters whom they caught, then rounded up seventeen civilians in the town and shot them. By the 4th of September, the Germans were tumbling headlong eastward, across the Meuse river, through the Ardennes, toward Aachen, and toward the shelter of the West Wall—what the Americans called the Siegfried Line—the vast row of concrete fortifications and gun emplacements designed to keep the Allies out of Germany. But as they went, they spread death and destruction along the way, and many Belgians found September 4 to be a day marked by atrocity rather than liberation. In the small hamlet of Sovet, some six miles east of Dinant and the Meuse, a few Belgian partisans unwisely sprayed retreating SS soldiers of the Hitlerju- gend and Prinz Eugen divisions with gunfire, wound- ing two of them; immediately, the Germans organized a manhunt in the town for partisans. In Sovet, they went from house to house, gathering groups of villagers, kill- ing them, and setting their homes ablaze. The home of the village priest, Vicar Beusart, was set alight, and as he was running to rescue his possessions, he was shot dead, his body left to be engulfed by the flames. By the end of the rampage, eighteen people, including three women, were dead.