Yesterday, I watched the observances at the American Cemetery in Normandy. It stirred memories.

An eleven-year-old Michel was in Amiens, Occupied France.  Or was he? How did he survive in the bombardment that lowered so much of that city? Was he holding out with his grandparents in the country? Was he scared or hopeful to see Allied troops inching inland, slowly but finally liberating this land where 9000-plus young men of many ethnic backgrounds, races, native born and immigrants, but, as President Biden noted, “all Americans”, died and now rest in this Normandy cemetery?

Michel would survive to become a school inspector, a father and grandfather of a beautiful, loving, large family. A blogger many of us enjoyed reading and having personal contact with, Michel died in recent times. He loved gardening and he and his lovely wife Jeanine would be enjoying the early fruits of their effort now. He appreciated what those young men did, most of them barely older that he was when they stormed those beaches in Normandy. I regret that I missed the opportunity to learn more about how he and hus family survived terrible times.

I recalled how I arrived in West Germany shortly after the 25th anniversary of the end of that brutal war.

A newly minted US Army motion picture photographer, I had jobs in Greece, Italy,  and many parts of Germany. Several were to the then-partitioned Berlin. D Day happened only a generation before, a short 26 years.

I remembered how Kaiserslautern and so many places I went to still showed evidence of brutal fighting, though Western Europe was vibrant, largely rebuilt by then.  Yet, Germans of at least 35-years-old surely had memories of that landing and the subsequent war raging in their backyards that were, finally, ended for that young Michel in Amiens. They brought hell on earth with their blind obedience to that goofy fellow from Austria, that monster who rebuilt Germany only to bring it down in the worst war of all times.

I recalled how when Tim, Deborah, Ralph, and I climbed the hill to the Schloss Heidelberg,  we stopped to look in the window of an antiques shop. A smiling shop keeper spotted us, recognized we weren’t Germans. He placed a book on Hitler in the window, an item I thought was illegal then. It was offensive to us, so we continued our climb. I remember his smile at thinking he’d scored a sale with these foreign tourists. He removed the book from the window when he saw we were leaving.

I saw a postcard of Adolph-Hitler-Strasse in the 1940s in Kaiserslautern. When I arrived there 25 years after the end of the war, that street name was gone, of course.  I couldn’t identify the street from buildings shown on the postcard. It must have been a major road, perhaps the one named after Richard Wagner that leads down to the Hauptbanhof? It isn’t a question one would ask back in 1970 or so.

The Volkspark in Kaiserslautern is beautiful, with lots of grassy places and a duck pond. When I told my landlady on Beethoven-strasse that I really thought it was a great park, she got nostalgic, noting it was much nicer before the Americans came through…and razed 60% of the city! It was an awkward movement. Do you suppose they had a reason? I tried to keep from being rude. Frau Hauser was a nice lady.

I recalled how my Dutch friend, Elbert, born just after WWII in December 1945, wrote how his history teacher father told him how every generation had its war. It was inevitable, his father told him. Yet Elbert, who died in 2016, lived in that remarkable time when his generation would live in a peace bought with the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men of many nations.

I remembered how, when in Munich for a second visit to the Arriflex factory where our motion picture cameras were made, how we decided to visit the nearby Dachau. It was a day with a light rain, grey skies. We arrived as history tourists.  It wasn’t long there before the ghosts of all who died horrific suffering and death could be felt. I swear I could smell death. I still feel stunned by how it felt in that place. Was it because I watched motion pictures taken by my WWII predecessors of the liberation of this awful place that I felt the weight of its history? Or how many lives we lost to save the poor souls trapped there? You saw some of those films in documentaries.  The raw film I viewed in the 69th Signal Company (Photo) film library wasn’t edited. I feel like vomiting even as I write about these films! Had I been born one generation earlier, it would have been my job as an army mopic guy to make those films.

My father wanted to join the US Navy during WWII, so went to the induction center in Denver, Colorado to complete the job. While there, the city manager, Roberts Laing, called and told them Dad couldn’t enlist because he was married with children AND he was chief of police, a critical job in those times. He regretted missing his chance to fight for his country all his life. He was very proud that my brother and I both served our country. (I tried to convince him his service to country was different, but just as important in a town where an airbase more than doubled the population.)

Once, my Mom and I watched that Italian film, “Life is Beautiful” together. I’d seen it before, thought it was especially well done. After it was done, both of us in tears when the little boy saw the US Army tank liberate the concentration camp and claimed it as his prize – Google the film if you haven’t seen it- I mentioned I had another film about that time. Mom said she didn’t want to see it.”I lived through those times, and I don’t want to relive them.”

I remember a US president at the 75th Anniversary observance for that Normandy cemetery not going to the cemetery because it was raining, and he didn’t want his hair to get wet! Never mind the 9000+ dead there died, making it possible for his life to include huge wealth and elevation to the most powerful job on earth!

My brother, Dick, a former US Navy Seabee who’d helped build an airstrip in Thailand during the early 1960s, an airstrip used by Air America in support of Hmong, and I sat in front of the computer US. I’d told him about Google Earth and how you could view actual places at ground level. Did he want to see the US cemetery in Normandy, I asked. Yes! So we stopped by the beach, followed traffic to the cemetery behind a French farmer on a tractor.

We reached the cemetery. I started to cry. I said I couldn’t believe how emotional I would be just seeing the Google image of the cemetery through the outside looking in! Dick softly spoke. “I’m crying, too.” We were brothers in more ways than one.

When I visited my friends Deborah and Ralph in Paris, we went to a Greek shop where the shopkeeper and I conversed in German since it was the one language we both had in common. When I visited again several months later, the Greek fellow identified me as my friends’ German friend. I felt weird. “No, no!” I protested, “I am an American!” And damn proud in that moment to be able to say that!

One of my barracks mates had a Dutch girlfriend.  He went to church with her when visiting her in Amsterdam. When the plate was passed, he put some coins in it. The deacon scowled and said, “We don’t want those!” The Netherlands wasn’t liberated until the very last day of the war. The winter of 1944-1945 was one of starvation and famine in that country. They’d expected early liberation in hearing of the D Day invasion, but it wasn’t the first priority of the liberating forces commanders. My barracks mate had committed the faux pas of  mistakingly placing German Deutsche marks in the collection plate! It is a fact that Europeans use more coins than Americans. I remember having to have one pocket for German coins, another for American. I guess my barracks mate hadn’t cleared all of his Germain coins out of his pocket before visiting his girlfriend.

My Dutch friend Elbert once wrote how he passed this war-destroyed house on his way to school as a child. The bathtub was held up in the air by the plumbing. It was just one evidence he passed on the way to school of that terrible time.

So many memories! I watched as another American President spoke at the cemetery on the 80th year after D Day. Elbert would have been the same age had he lived. An old man, the US President spoke of the heroism of even older men behind him, the last survivors of that hellish day in 1940. Tears again. Of pride in those men, of sorrow that so many died, of relief thst this US President got it: the men buried in neat rows under Christian crosses and Stars of David were NOT losers and suckers. Honor their memory.