D-Day + Twelve

 It is now a frequent and regular occurrence  for groups of secondary students to make journeys to the major battlefields and cemeteries of Europe, as they learn and experience the landscapes and events of the European wars of the twentieth century. It marks a very different perspective on war and the wastage of human life.

In 1956 students from Beaumont Boys' School undertook a journey to France. Until the last minute there was some conjecture about whether the journey should proceed; there had been a number of student riots in Paris which had concerned our parents.

Boys from each year group participated. Among the staff were our French teachers, although the opportunities to advance our French conversation were very limited.  There was certainly a cultural and geographical element, with the first week spent in Paris, lodged in a residential school and visiting all the usual tourist locations.   We then removed to the coast, not far from the ferry port of La Havre, the small town of Fecamp; again staying for a few days at a rather smaller residential school within its stone boundary walls.

A calm and long-cleared coastal zone today.  Beyond the distant headland and the mouth of the 
Seine are the line of five beaches where D-Day played out in 1944.

Yes, there were visits to nearby locations, but also rather more "free time," and since it was a coastal location partly projecting into the Channel and with – almost – a view into the mouth of the river Seine, much time was spent on the beach, in the shallows, and exploring the cliff tops, former gun emplacements and pill boxes.  Just below the steeply descending cliffs was a little port; lots of little fishing boats.

I returned home with a number of strange visual recollections: sunken caissons swamped by the tides and lying at varied scattered angles; barricaded sections of beach with warning notices against entry – the typical explosion and skull & crossbones signs; concrete contraptions intended to prevent boats coming ashore.  What were all these strangers to seaside holiday locations?  Either I had not been paying attention, or surely, we were missing something.

"The War" had not been referred to at all during our stay; no opportunity to bring to our attention the events that had occured just over a decade earlier.  It was as if the events of D-Day had not taken place; as if we were not standing as close as was practicable to where the battle for the free world was being determined.  A coach, a map revealing the road down to the Seine Bridge would have brought us towards the coastal communities and their beaches which today we have come to know from many commemorative ceremonies as Sword, Juno, Gold – and in the further distance – Omaha and Utah.  We had come this far, and a day's coach journey and beach lesson from our teachers would have shown us so much.

Gold was the name given to the third of the landing ground beaches, eighty years later.

The reason for such an omission was probably entirely understandable at the time, twelve years on.  Perhaps it was too close for the families of our teachers; too close for the dissemination of the event's minutiae of details.  Perhaps the mammoth nature of D-Day, its secret planning, its background; and the resulting aftermath, was still being played out in the memories of far too many people.

We should also remember that it would still be a further six years before the world knew anything about The Landings through the three-hour mammoth movie The Longest Day.  So,  the D-Day landings played no part in our education while we sojourned on the Normandy coast. Forty teenagers of the Fifties who instead were being taught that  the world needed to forget the recent past.  To us The Longest Day was just another war movie, and our parents had to remind us that it really did happen and husbands and fathers did not always return.

The beaches as 6 June and its aftermath played out, as envisioned in the 1962 film The Longest Day.