June 6

June 6

I am especially missing my late father -in-law General William Levine of Highland Park this bright sunny June day.  On many anniversaries of the D-Day invasion of France I would take William out to lunch, buy a bottle of wine (or two) and over the course of the next few hours ask questions about that day and the ensuing months that followed Williams activities across Europe and into Germany.

Like many veterans William was not naturally predisposed to speaking about his personal experiences.  The full weight of what he saw and what he experienced was perhaps to heavy to bind to simple words. Yet as the wine took hold William often opened up and expressed himself beautifully…the sharp memories of a young man heading into the unknown would emerge intact and as powerful as the day they were experienced in Europe that fateful day in early June 1944. 

One particular story struck me as emblematic of the human side of war if that isn’t a contradiction in terms.  I once asked William what was the initial thought that went through his head the moment he woke up that first morning in France after the invasion. William thought for a moment and without hesitation looked at me and said “I remember it like it was yesterday” I assumed his reflections had to be monumental in scope, the horrors of war, of great armies attempting (and often succeeding) in annihilating each other across battle zones heaped with the dead and dying. Instead William turned to me and said, “I had to pee like a race horse!” He went on to say, “you see we were so busy that day that I didn’t have a moment to answer Mother Nature’s call!” At that moment I realized that the invasion like the rest of the war that preceded it and that which came after were driven by the hopes, dreams and biological needs of regular folks, the bus drivers, the lawyers and teachers the students, doctors, farmers and machinists…all thrown into a great drama that in the end resulted in nothing more or less then preserving our most basic right…to live as free people.

In the fall of 1973 less then 30 years after D-Day and the resulting liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny I left the United States for a semester at the University of Caen in Caen France. Forget for a moment that for months prior to my departure I actually thought I was headed to Cannes on the Riviera…where I ultimately landed was in a City that was destroyed by American and British bombers in the days leading up to D-Day.

Upon arrival in France that first night in Caen I was thrown out of the house that I was scheduled to live in due to the fact that the French host family realized (as I stood at their front door in the rain) that I was indeed a rather unkempt long haired American hippy with torn jeans that didn’t speak a word of French. Before I could say “au revoir!” I was trucked back into the only part of Caen left standing after the war and deposited into the attic room of the crumbling 12 room Hotel Demolomb long since demolished. The room turned out to be fantastic, as did the resulting freedom to do as I pleased without a host family dragging me around however that first evening in Caen, as the rain outside subsided, was for me both magical and horrifying.

My first encounter with the French after being booted by the family that evening was an elderly woman dressed in black from head to toe standing on a street corner waiting with me to cross. I had decided to take a walk to clear my head. As we stood on the corner her eyes swiveled up and down taking all of me in and everything I must have represented to her and more. Without warning she began to strike me with her folded umbrella across my legs and back all the while screaming at me in (of course) French.  At the time I didn’t know what she was saying however I knew she was passionate about her thoughts as she put all of her 4 foot 11 inch body into the baseball swing blows of the umbrella.  It was only later I learned that many of the older residents of Caen never forgot the evening of bombardment occasioned on them by the American bombers that preceded the liberation of Caen.  While the German’s occupied the City they allowed the French to go on about their daily lives over the course of the 4 years of occupation. The bombing on June 5 was necessary to dislodge the Germans prior to D-day and resulted in many civilian casualties. I never saw that lady again however to this day I wish I had had a chance to tell her how proud I was to be an American…certainly not for the destruction but for the lives saved and peace restored across Europe due to our actions.