Normandy and Musee d'Armee

Here are some pics of a recent trip to Normandy, including Pointe du Hoc, and the Museum of the Army with Napoleans tomb.

There is a ceremony that only family members can perform. Sand from Omaha Beach is impressed into the engraved name of theit soldier. This is from one of the panels with the names of the missing. Earl Parker was in the 116th Infantry.

 The American Battle Monuments Commission has taken over Pointe du Hoc. They have stabilized the erosion and built access to the observation bunker that the Ranger Monument stands on.

Ranger Monument

Musee d'Armee

Ma Deuce and grandson.

Napoleans Tomb

Veterans Day

If your veteran was at Omaha Beach, remember them by adding their photo to the web site of my friend, Laurent.

D Day and DD Tanks

It wasn’t until I was middle aged that I realized I had an uncle that was on Omaha Beach on D Day. I knew I had an uncle that had been killed in the war but nobody ever talked about him. The reasons might have been long lasting grief or that they just didn’t know any details of his service. I happened to be home for a visit and at the some time I was reading Stephen Ambrose’s book on D Day. Someone mentioned that Uncle Philip had been in the 743rd Tank Battalion. Stephen Ambrose’s book had a diagram that showed the landing order of the assault units. The 743rd Tank Battalion was the lead unit, 10 minutes ahead of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division, on the right hand side of Omaha Beach opposite Vierville sur Mer. The beach assigned to his company, Company B, was code named Dog Green.

As I started doing research, I was surprised to find that little was discussed in the popular literature about the 743rd Tank Battalion and their position in the assault on D Day. There was almost nothing about them in the exhibits in the World War II Museum in my own hometown of New Orleans. Yet they were a unique secret weapon that military planners relied upon very heavily for close infantry support. It seemed to me that more should be known about them.

The 743rd Tank Battalion was made up of modified Sherman tanks. The tanks were equipped with a double drive unit so that the engine could provide power to the tracks or to two propellers. The tank was also equipped with a canvass flotation shroud that was inflated using a small air compressor. Once erected, the canvass shroud would keep the tank afloat, barely. The idea was that the tanks would use their propellers to drive themselves on the beach. It was hoped that the tanks would look like innocuous rubber boats from the German perspective thereby giving them a big surprise when the tank was revealed. Their mission was to provide close in support to the infantry by engaging machine gun bunkers and other targets of opportunity.

There were two tank battalions on Omaha Beach that day: the 741st and the 743rd. Their orders were to launch from their LCT several miles out to sea and then proceed to the beach. The seas were still rough from the storm the day before. The 741st launched according to their orders and were quickly in a fight for survival against the sea. The tanks had about 1 foot of freeboard and the waves quickly overwhelmed the canvass shroud sending the 35 ton tanks to the bottom. This was observed by the LCT drivers carrying the 743rd. (How they learned of the situation of the 741st is not known. There may have been radio transmissions via tank radio alerting the 743rd to the problem.) The LCT driver made an on the spot decision to ignore orders and take the tanks all the way to the beach. His initiative may have saved many lives that day. (Recently declassified documents indicate that the decision to launch or not was up to the senior Army and Navy personnel on site)

My uncle survived D Day. Elements of his company went to Pont du Hoc to relieve the Rangers on June 9. I’m not sure, but I’d like to think he was part of that. Any letters he may have sent to the family regarding his experiences have been lost, if they ever existed. He was killed in Normandy on July 9 when his company was ambushed by tanks from the 2nd SS Panzer Division.

There is little documented about the independent tank battalions. There were approximately 37 of them in total including a couple of all black units. They were formed for the sole purpose of infantry support and were disbanded after the war. They were not stand alone units but were meant to be attached to infantry units as needed. Tank companies were split up and tanks were often out of contact with their company commander for weeks as they were shuttled between units. They could be fighting with different units on different days which gave them no time to develop coordination procedures with the unit they were fighting with. Ambrose discusses how unit cohesiveness was a key ingredient for building a soldier’s morale. Familiarity with the men you were fighting with gave the soldier a level of confidence as each man knew what the other would do. But Ambrose ignores how the combat vagabonds of the tank battalions coped with being separated from their command structure and shuttled between infantry units. They were dependent upon the kindness of the unit they were attached to for support. It must have been a lonely existence.

I have been to Normandy twice but could find no monument to either of the tank battalions that assaulted Omaha Beach that day, even though they were the first to land. There are almost no examples of DD tanks existing today even though it was considered to be an important secret weapon. (A couple of tanks from the 741st have been recovered and are on display at a museum in Port en Bessen, France. These still have the tubing for the inflation mechanism and pieces of the shroud on them.) And as I said earlier, the World War II Museum in New Orleans, our National WW II museum, has almost nothing about these unique units. Steel Victory: The Heroic Story of America's Independent Tank Battalions at War in Europe is a very good source of information regarding all the tank battalions. The View from the Turret: The 743rd Battalion During World War II is an excellent source for history about the 743rd. The 30th Division Association also has reprints of the unit history, Move Out, Verify.

The survivors of these units are passing from us quickly and a key piece of history will be lost with them. I hope this serves in some small way to keep their memory alive.

Mont St Michel, Dead Germans and Calvados

My wife woke up with the start of a bad cold. However, she was game to visit Mont St. Michel. I stopped on the way at a small town pharmacy and used my guidebook French to ask for cold medicine. The very helpful druggist asked several questions concerning Tana’s general health and then recommended a cough medicine/expectorant. Chalk up yet another positive encounter with the French.

We had been warned that traffic would be heavy and it was. After creeping along for about an hour we finally got to the end of the causeway to Mont St. Michel. It looked like we would be treated to about another hour in traffic followed by a search for a parking space. As it was lunch time, we decided to stop for lunch at a restaurant with a view of the monastery and call it a day.

Upon leaving, we saw signs to the German Cemetery. My wife decided she wanted to see what a German cemetery in France looked like. We had seen the British and American, so it was time to see the German. It turned out it was a large circular mausoleum made of dark stone holding 12,000 Germans. It was dark, ominous and depressing. The soldiers are buried above ground (My wife claims it was done like that so no German would rest in French soil), eight to a crypt. There were only a few visitors to this cemetery.

We also saw a sign pointing to another American Cemetery, so we followed it to the lesser known cemetery in Brittany. This is a smaller cemetery with about 4,400 graves.

With my wife feeling under the weather, we headed back early but first I had to stop at a roadside stand and buy some cider. Cider in France is fermented. It is NOT the bottled apple juice Americans are used to. They then take the fermented cider and distill it to make Calvados. (As a child, we used to leave cider that had "gone off" outside in the cold. The liquid that didn't freeze was called "Apple Jack" and was mostly alcohol) It so happened that the proprietor had a still and was giving away free samples of Calvados fresh from the condenser. Almost anyone in France is allowed to distill for personal use. Sometimes the French have some damn good ideas.

Researching Family History

We leave Giverny and head for Lower Normandy. I got lost several times with the ring road around Caen being the biggest problem. (The Michelin directions were not clear on which exit to take.) We stopped for lunch in Bayeux. Leaving there, we passed the British Cemetery. A unique feature of the British Cemetery is that each headstone contains a personal statement or quote about the soldier buried there, making it a very personal and moving experience. Across the street from the cemetery is the Musee Memorial de la Bataille de Normandie. The Sherman tank parked out front is reportedly Patton’s personal tank. We arrived at La Ducrie, our 500 year old castle B&B destination in the little town of l’Hommet d’Arthenay in the early afternoon.

While my wife took a nap, I drove the local roads around nearby Le Dezert with maps and aerial photographs in hand to locate the site where my uncle Philip was killed in WW II. He landed on the beach as part of the 743rd Tank Battalion. They were a secret weapon called the "double drive tank". It could float and propel itself to shore. A canvas “hull” was inflated with an air compressor to support 80 tons of tank. They landed 10 minutes ahead of the main landing and probably would have sunk in the heavy seas if not for the personal initiative of their LST driver. He realized that the seas were too big for the flimsy canvas “hulls” and, contrary to his orders, took his vessel all the way in and landed the tanks directly on the beach. You can see an example of these tanks near Bayeux. They are from the ill fated 741st Tank Battalion. These tanks launched while in the open sea and foundered in the heavy seas.

Uncle Philip survived D Day and fought in Normandy until July 9, 1944 when most of his company was wiped out in a German ambush.

This area of Normandy has not changed very much in the last 60 years. The local roads in 1944 were still the same in 2004. The hedgerows, or bocage, is still very thick with the only concession to present day being that they now use mechanical trimmers to keep it from growing out over the roadway. (Its essentially a bush hog used in the vertical) I had aerial photographs from 1944 and 1996 and I could match the shapes of fields between the two photographs. At times it is like driving through a tunnel and you can understand why this feature was such a problem to the soldiers. The road is lower than the field and the hedgerow extends more than 20 feet high. It is impossible to see through the thick undergrowth. As best as I can tell, I get within one field of the spot where his tank was hit. (As it was raining and I didn’t know the owners, I didn’t want to go wandering across a cow pasture). His company lost 60% of their tanks that day when they were ambushed by an SS Panzer unit.

Normandy is full of stories. Our host at the B&B related the story a 93 year old local woman told at ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary. The castle, La Ducrie, was used by the local tax collector in the 1600s and a secret chamber had been carved into the floor in what is now the La Salle de Monnaie to hold the taxes. The Germans had raped and killed her two sisters-in-law and she had crawled into the secret compartment to hide. She remained there for three days until she heard American voices.

Dinner that evening was in a nearby town of St. Fromond. Of course no one spoke English but we were able to muddle through OK. The one surprise was an appetizer that had andouille sausage in it. We found out later that, unlike Louisiana andouille, the French version is made from intestines and stomachs. It was scratched of our menu list from then on.

Sauf Lundi

It's Monday and we are looking for other sightseeing opportunities. We learned very quickly, however, what “sauf Lundi” means. After deciding that nothing nearby was open, my wife got the idea to go to Paris. I balked and told her no way was I driving into Paris! I would however check the train schedule and we could take the train. So, less than an hour later we were in Gare St. Lazare getting a taxi for the Musee d’Orsay to continue the Monet venue. With our taxi barely avoiding an accident as he made a left turn across two lanes of traffic near the Place de la Concorde, we arrived at the Musee d’Orsay to find, alas, that the Musee d’Orsay is open every day “sauf Lundi”. However, since the Louvre is just on the other side of the Seine, we decide to do the Louvre.

The Louvre is the best $10 deal in France. It is also a huge building. The trick is to pick the type of art you want to see and then concentrate on those wings. And , of course, there’s the Mona Lisa. Like all dutiful first timers, we planned to see her. We followed the direction and got into the queue. Rope barricades and bullet proof glass protected us from getting too close, and a large man with an unpleasant disposition chided the line to keep moving. The Mona Lisa is smaller in person than you would expect. And having to view her at while shuffling along in a queue did not add to the ambiance of the moment.