My Normandy Summer: A WWII Diary, 80 Years Later

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAMI RICE

It had rained all morning. Poured. Despite this, I arrived to a large crowd at the Mémorial de Montormel just as the first plane, trailing black smoke, puttered dramatically overhead. The clouds were low, but the airshow went on. Five post-war planes took turns swooping and banking in the open air, sometimes in formation, sometimes alone, sometimes teasing us into thinking the show was over before reappearing to make another pass in front of hundreds of upturned faces.

As the airshow in Mont-Ormel wrapped up, blue skies arrived, but the commemoration site remained slick from mud after a day of rain, giving a taste of the muddy conditions WWII soldiers would have sometimes experienced in battle.

I’ve spent the summer traipsing around Normandy, where I live, paying extra attention to memorials and placards in honor of this big anniversary year. I’ve attended special events, visited museums, and participated in local WWII-focused activities like a bike ride through the Orne River estuary and a walking tour of the town of Falaise. In the lead-up to June’s events, I helped organize a Normandy media junket for the Paris-based Anglo-American Press Association. During the week of D-Day commemorations, I worked as a fixer for a U.S. broadcast media team while they interviewed U.S. veterans and covered the June 6 ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery.

Through it all, a kaleidoscope-style image of disparate angles and points of view took shape. With each new twist of the kaleidoscope—a conversation here, a bunker visit there—the image changed again, an image more alive and 3D than history tomes could ever supply.

This shifting image has splayed out on a fairly blank canvas. I moved to southern France 12 years ago, and from the moment of my arrival, I encountered a relationship with war history that never existed for me in America. France takes commemoration and history seriously. As it should. These WWII events happened here, while America “just” sent men and weapons. In America, if you don’t come from a military family, war can be largely ignored. Here in France, it can’t. 

But this fact is even more viscerally true in northern France’s Normandy—where the physical scars of war are still present 80 years later. Three years ago I moved my belongings north to a city with less old-world charm than the ones I had lived in near the Mediterranean Sea and the Pyrenees Mountains. Much of thousand-year-old Caen was reduced to rubble by the Allies’ bombs. War history here is hyperlocal in a way it isn’t even in southern France, where I once became the voice for the recorded English audio tour of Camp des Milles, an internment camp in Aix-en-Provence from which Jews were deported to other camps before eventually arriving at Auschwitz.

This summer I learned to ask people in Normandy their family stories. Further evidence of the hyperlocal presence of war here is the fact that every family that has lived in this region for more than a couple generations has accounts of how their family experienced WWII.

Monique, a woman in her 60s watching that late-August airshow with me in Mont-Ormel, told me her father had been a member of the French Resistance, the underground groups whose efforts against the occupying Nazis included sabotage, collecting intelligence, and helping Jews and downed Allied soldiers escape France. Since his parents were dead and he wasn’t married, he had nothing to lose in joining his uncle in dangerous resistance activities. Monique said that after the war was over, people like her dad who claimed to have been part of the resistance had to join the new French military in order to prove the veracity of their claim that they had been helping the Allies before the war had a winner. Monique’s father was a mason, and his work in reconstructing France eventually brought him to Normandy where he met her mother.

The parents of Monique’s husband, François, are in their 90s and still living. His father grew up on a farm, and overall, wartime was not as bad for his family as it was for those living in France’s Nazi-occupied cities enduring food rations. François said those living on farms at least weren’t starving during the war. Some farms, like his dad’s, welcomed refugees who had to flee towns targeted for bombardment.

A couple days after Mont-Ormel’s commemoration event, I again drove south of Caen back into this pocket that was the Nazi’s last stand in Normandy. To finish bookending the early-summer D-Day events with the Battle of Normandy’s late-summer tributes, I went to the town of Falaise, which was best known before WWII as the birthplace of William the Conqueror.

Now the town features a museum chronicling the civilian war experience. WWII is the first conflict in modern warfare with the gruesome statistic of more civilian than combatant deaths: 35 million civilians—an estimated 20,000 of those in Normandy alone—compared to 30 million combatants.

The tour guide explained that while the Allies dropped leaflets warning the people of Falaise to flee ahead of the coming bombardment, Falaise’s residents didn’t think the wind-blown leaflets were intended for them. Their town had no major industry and only a relatively small contingent of occupying German forces. Residents didn’t know that the Allies’ strategy for cutting off German escape routes included blocking roads running through Falaise. In the end, too few of Falaise’s residents departed for the countryside, resulting in a heavy death toll alongside the destruction of 80 percent of the town’s structures.

Marine-Noelle, whose family has resided in Falaise for generations, had joined in on the tour. She said her father, who passed away in June, recounted the horrors he saw when his dad took his 17-year-old self into that Corridor of Death to look for horses that might have survived the carnage. It was harvest season, and they needed a horse. Her dad described how everything was black, all the dead bodies covered with flies. When I slightly jokingly asked if they managed to find a horse, Marine-Noelle smiled with me over the dark humor of the question. Alas, this detail escaped the family record, so she doesn’t know.

But Marine-Noelle does know about the electrician’s exclamations when her parents had electrical work done in their attic in more recent times. The man was surprised to find extra wires and cables snaking through this space under the roof. They were souvenirs from the Canadian troops who used the home as a headquarters, necessitating running excessive communication lines to it.

As our small group followed the tour guide around Falaise under a cheerfully sunny sky, Claire, who now lives in Caen, said her father is 92 and doesn’t talk about his war experiences much, so she does not have so many stories to share. She and Marine-Noelle noted that their parents’ generation—teenagers during the war—tend to fall into two extremes: those who speak very openly about what they witnessed and those who say nothing.

By the time I was in Falaise listening to these anecdotes, a question had formed itself among the shapes inside my WWII kaleidoscope: To whom does this story of Normandy’s liberation belong?

In June I had stood on the edge of Omaha Beach while our TV crew’s anchorman interviewed a U.S. veteran in the early morning light. Cameramen and sound and lighting crewmembers encircled them on the sand. An older French woman accompanied by a young boy paused to observe from the road above, the grandstands for the next day’s international ceremony rising behind her.

She told me she lives in a nearby home that has been in her family for generations. Her parents, like her friends’ parents, didn’t speak about the war until the last 10-12 years of their lives. Her family story includes a grandpa in another Norman town who housed war refugees in the stables of his bakery.

By then I knew the U.S. news producers wouldn’t be interested in her story, though my blank canvas quickly found space for it. Heading into 2024, I had anticipated easily finding publications eager for freelance reporting that would provide humanizing local contextual layers to round out their upcoming coverage of June’s grand international events.

But I was wrong. Media outlets weren’t so interested in contributions from a Normandy-based, English- and French-speaking reporter. Most depended instead on Paris- or Brussels-based correspondents, and U.S. media primarily wanted stories with American protagonists.

Later, as the TV interview wrapped up, a quartet of Norwegian men in their thirties passed by. They too had family war stories to tell. One of their grandpas had been part of the Norwegian resistance that transported people and weapons in small fishing boats between occupied Norway and Scotland’s Shetland Islands.

Both the Norwegians and the woman with her grandson asked me for details about the rules for security the next day, given all the visiting dignitaries. Up to that point, I was only aware of the vehicle passes required in order to drive on certain restricted roads between Caen and the beaches and military cemeteries. Beyond that, I was of no help to them.

Later, though, I gained information that gave sense to their questions: For security reasons, residents of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer were confined to their homes while the internationally-televised tribute took place in those grandstands in their town. The Norwegians needed to leave their campground before they were locked in—they had a wedding to get back for. The French grandma was wondering whether her grandkids were allowed to play outside in her yard or if they had to remain indoors.

One of the drivers who transported our TV crew works as a guide for WWII sites. She loves the history of our region, and it supplies her livelihood. So she found it frustrating that people like her who live and breathe these stories, and like the locals living down the street, weren’t allowed into the commemorative ceremonies, while all these outsiders, important though they may be, were.

Her perspective contributed to the questions the rest of my summer explorations fleshed out: Again, to whom does this expansive story belong? To the civilians who lived it and in whose families the history lives on? To the veterans returning to the spot where comrades fell? To local dignitaries and volunteers tasked with keeping memories alive in their communities? To today’s international leaders who mark the occasions with solemn, inspiring words? To an American transplant to France who moved to Normandy three short years ago yet feels like she now has a stake in this story too?

Towns around Normandy don’t forget their liberators. Even if you don’t stop to read any memorial markers, you can learn which forces liberated which sectors simply by noting the flags mounted along the thoroughfares. In Mont-Ormel, a less well-known flag whipped in the breezes that welcomed me to that late-August tribute. Its design is simple: the top half is white; the bottom half is red—the colors of Poland.

Polish forces were critical to defeating the Nazis from this hilltop as the Germans fought to retreat with their horses and tanks. The base of a statue honoring the formidable Gen. Stanisław Maczek was covered in the traditional French floral wreaths laid during memorial services for the fallen. Among them, the gold print on one of the ribbons caught my eye; this bouquet of red and white roses was from Gen. Maczek’s granddaughter. A bus in the parking lot waited to be refilled with Polish girl scouts and boy scouts who made the trek to Normandy for these commemorations.