Veterans Will Find Their Memory Honored On The Normandy Coast

Q. I didn’t get to France for the 50th anniversary of D-Day in June, 1994, although I watched the televised ceremonies. I am a World War II veteran, and getting more over the hill every year. I’m still on the go and like to travel, but who knows for how long.

Is it worth the trip to go to Normandy now with no anniversary to celebrate? I suppose 1999 will be special for the 55th anniversary, but I don’t know if I’ll be up to the trip by then.

A. I’d say you were better off watching the 1994 anniversary events on TV, because it was a mob scene, very congested. Visiting now is better.

I had toured the invasion coast of Normandy several times, but not since the big 50th anniversary celebration. So when I returned last year, the place had changed considerably, mostly for the better.

I did think that Omaha Beach, bloodiest of the landing beaches, had been over-improved to the point that even a veteran of the 5th Corps, First Army, would find it hard now to recognize the place where so many of his buddies died on June 6, 1944. But the nearby American Cemetery remains in wonderful condition, and the Caen War Memorial, also called the Museum of Peace, is stunning.

The American Military Cemetery at St.-Laurent attracts 400,000 visitors every year to see the rows of marble crosses and stars of David that mark the graves of 9,386 American men and women. The cemetery is located in Colleville sur Mer, along the English Channel overlooking Omaha Beach.

Central focus at the memorial is a semicircular colonnade with battle maps at each end and a large bronze sculpture in the center. There is also a small memorial chapel, and the Pointe du Hoc monument on the beachhead.

There are several museums, many monuments and memorials along and near the invasion coast. Most impressive of all the museums is the Caen War Memorial, also called the Museum of Peace, that’s built on top of an underground bunker that had been German headquarters. The memorial was the idea of a mayor of Caen, who was a boy at the time of the Allied invasion and remembers getting Hershey bars from GIs.

Inside, museum exhibits and films beginning with the end of World War I take visitors on an unusual journey along a spiral ramp into the collective memory of events from 1918 through World War II.

School groups at the museum carry workbooks as the kids prepare to answer questions about what they have seen, and most visitors conclude the visit with lunch at the museum restaurant and a stop at the gift shop.

Of course, a highlight of any trip to the Norman invasion coast has nothing to do with World War II. The Bayeux Tapestry, made in the years just after William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, is carefully preserved and displayed behind glass in a dimly lighted room in the city of Bayeux. As the story goes, this tapestry of Queen Matilda, wife of William, was contracted out to English nuns who were not the best of seamstresses. It’s regarded by some as a sort of comic strip, showing the entire story of the invasion, panel by panel.

It is displayed at the William the Conqueror Center in Bayeux, an 18th-century building that was once a seminary, where visitors can see a film and then rent a audio guide for narration of the story in any of several languages. The tapestry, of colored wool on linen, is 20 inches high and 230 feet long, and was probably commissioned by the bishop of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, to hang in his cathedral.

To reach the Invasion Coast, take a train from Gare St. Lazare in Paris to Bayeux, then rent a car or take a cab to the beaches. Rail Europe, Europe’s principal handler of train travel, has a pass that includes train riding and rental cars. For information, call Rail Europe at 800-4-EURAIL.