6/23/09

Reflections on Omaha…a pilgrimage

Date of trip to Omaha Beach 6/15/09…65 years and nine days after the Allied forces landed there, 6/6/44

When I was a kid, Mom and Dad used to talk about my twin uncles Cloyd and Lloyd Emswiler. They admired them and said they’d been in WWII. They’d landed at Omaha Beach. As a kid, all that meant very little to me except for the fact that they had been REAL soldiers. Kids, boy kids anyway, like to play war, at least they did when I was a kid. I was inquisitive about what it was like to really be a soldier, and who better to ask what it was like than my uncles. So I would ask them about it from time to time, but as I recall it, they said little if anything about it. They would change the subject or give a short answer like… “It was a bad time” or “It was rough…” or something like that.

I remember coming back from a fishing trip with Uncle Cloyd, Cloyd Jr. and Dad, all of us packed in the front of one of the old aqua-colored Harrisonburg Refrigeration Service trucks. I guess I must have been 8 or 9. Dad was driving, I sat next to him, then Cloyd Jr. and Uncle Cloyd at the other window. I said, “Uncle Cloyd, how many Germans did you kill in the war?” My dad put an elbow right through my rib cage!!! I thought I’d never get my breath back. You see, killing and dying in a war for me was sneaking around in my front yard, pretending to see an enemy, shouting “Pow, Pow, kapow, kapow!!!” then jumping up, pretending to get hit, rolling dramatically down the big hill our house sat on and holding my breath, pretending to be dead. I had no idea then…and I still don’t, of the horror, the awful reality of war. Uncle Cloyd didn’t respond to my question. He just looked out of the window and pretended that he didn’t hear me. I never asked him or Uncle Lloyd any thing about the war again…and I think that something of the horror of war was passed along to me that day. I understood that the war experiences of my uncles was a heavy burden…a burden they carried inside…not something to be shared lightly or irreverently. It was not for all to hear. It was theirs to know and to carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Since my childhood, I have only gained more respect for my uncles and the entire generation they represent. There was a moral fiber and grit in them that makes one want to put them under a microscope and analyze how they came about, and how they functioned so bravely through a debilitating economic depression and a mechanized war of fearful proportions.

I selfishly regret that at no time in our lives did my uncles share their experiences with me. I am left with bits and pieces from newspaper articles, historical accounts, conversations with my youngest surviving uncle, Butch, and pictures of the places where they looked death in the face…but not their personal, in-depth accounts and remembrances from their own mouths. That being said, I am so indebted to Uncle Butch and Aunt Lois for being savvy enough and caring enough to gather the pieces of truth and memories we DO have of Uncle Cloyd and Lloyd. Without them, much of what I know now, I would have never known.

My wife Deborah and I have been to France before. France is a great country…it has some of the most beautiful, fertile and unspoiled farmland I have ever seen. A 300 acre field of wheat on that rolling countryside is a sight to behold. Many folks think the French people are unfriendly toward Americans: Deborah and I have found that to be untrue….at least outside of Paris. The French are approachable and friendly. They are still grateful to America for the sacrifices our country made for them 65 years ago. They haven’t forgotten.

When I found out a few months ago that my wife Deborah and I would be traveling to France again, I knew where I had to go…Omaha Beach. This would be a pilgrimage for me. I prepared for it: I read, I researched, and I bought a new camera. The purpose of a pilgrimage is to pay reverent respect, and that is what I tried to do.

We started our tour of Omaha Beach at the American cemetery at Colleville.

The visitors’ center there does a really wonderful job of presenting the background of the D-Day invasion. There is a 16 minute film which focuses on several different men who lie in the cemetery, average, normal, guys who didn’t have to be there, but felt they needed to be there in the invasion force. It is a moving film that lets the viewer ponder the sacrifice and patriotism of both those killed in the war, like the men featured in this film, and those who survived, who managed to come here and somehow to make it back home to their loved ones in spite of the long odds they faced.

When you first see the cemetery, it is a moving sight. So many young men, so much violence, so much pain, so much tragedy… so quiet. 10,000 men and women are buried here. The cemetery is immaculate, each white stone cross or star of David perfectly positioned. We had no trouble locating the graves of the four men we were searching for: Jacob Rhodes, a friend of Uncle Lloyd and Cloyd; the side-by-side graves of cousins Lionel and Albert Emswiler, one of 41 sets of brothers in the cemetery; and Ted Moubray, platoon leader in Company C…killed on D-Day, Uncle Lloyd’s friend…Lloyd took over the platoon when Ted was killed.

I walked up to the graves. I looked down and said, “Thank you,” inside my head and asked the Lord’s blessing upon each….I didn’t know what else to say…they gave all.

We descended to Omaha Beach via the “Avenue de Bedford, Virginie, USA,” the road from Vierville to the beach named in tribute to the unit from Bedford County that suffered such tremendous losses there on D-Day. Looking inland from the water’s edge, I could see that Omaha Beach is not the same as it was pictured and described at the time of the invasion. The steep cliffs still loom forbiddingly above the beach…of all the features of Omaha Beach, the cliffs are probably the most unchanged. German gun positions, sans guns, are still intact. Several burros forage on the steep, once-mined slopes where the Germans zeroed in on the advancing Americans . At the bottom of these cliffs, a general by the name of Cota galvanized the men of the 29th into action and led them up the slopes and on to capture the town of Vierville…the first town liberated in France. The 4 foot wall separating the beach from the shore is gone. This was the wall that C Company of the 116th Brigade, 1st Battalion, 29th Division, a National Guard unit from the Harrisonburg area, huddled behind for protection from withering German fire. My uncles were in this unit. Instead, a concrete seawall slopes to the sea interrupted periodically by steps down to the beach. The inland beach area that, in 1944, was a no man’s land…consisting of a crude road, scrub brush, mines and barbed wire, is now lined with beach homes. The “shingle” where men found very limited shelter from the killing fire they were exposed to, is now covered in concrete and large black rocks, instead of the small black pebbles which then littered the beach. A paved road and a sidewalk along the top of the seawall complete the modernization of Omaha Beach. The beach itself is relatively unchanged except for the removal of all of the obstacles that littered the landing sites. I took a picture that shows a guy sunbathing on the beach… I felt odd about this. I wanted to tell him to move to another beach …this is hallowed ground…but I didn’t because upon reflection, this is how the beach should be used…. this was the right use of the beach….not as an amphitheater of death, as it had been 65 years ago.

Because of my desire to know more about my uncles’ war, I have done research which has brought me great insight into what they endured…but as much as I have learned, I am left wondering what it must have been like for them. Seasick, exhausted, frightened, in shock on that beach. I am awed that they could get up from that four foot wall they crouched behind, having seen what they had seen and having escaped death so narrowly, and go forward into more of the same - up and over the cliffs of Omaha.

What did it do to them? Could they watch a war movie? Could they go to the beach? Did they have recurring dreams? When they came back from the war, my father trained them both to be refrigeration technicians. Pumping a vacuum on a refrigeration system…sitting there waiting for the gauge to show them what they needed to know, did their minds drift back to Omaha, a foxhole, a scene so gruesome that they had to go outside just to break the train of thought? Neither of them were outwardly religious men. Did Omaha end any thought they may have had that there is a God? Whatever it did to them, they kept it inside…they just lived with it. It was their own personal hell, their own personal secret, perhaps too horrible to share.

It has been a wonderful pilgrimage for me. It has stretched me in ways I don’t usually stretch. But as much as I know now, I feel I really know very little about what it was like to land at Omaha and fight from hedgerow to hedgerow from my uncles’ perspectives. In spite of this, it was important for me…enough for me, to go to Omaha; to touch the sand where they came ashore; to visit a hedgerow near St. Andre de l’Epine, the area where both of my uncles shed their blood; to see the places where America sacrificed so much in the name of freedom; to see exactly where my uncles were immortalized in my eyes; and to understand, finally, why Dad put an elbow through my ribcage some fifty years ago.

Sam Heatwole

Newport News, VA

Lloyd Emswiler (1922)