Life as it Really is: OMAHA BEACH – paying my heartfelt respect

Standing in the middle of over 9,000 white marble markers, placed above the D-Day landing site known as Omaha Beach, I could finally pay my heartfelt respect, my appreciation and utter awe along with my deepest admiration for the sacrifices made by so many, not only on D-Day June 6, 1944, but across the borders of war. I do not fight my thoughts and emotions anymore, but the tears now streaming down my face cannot even mildly explain the sincere sadness that is breaking me up. I had to come to Normandy to pay my most heartfelt respect– and I finally did, a life-long ‘must do’ came true.

Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial

Some time back my wife asked me why this immense interest in World War 2. I seriously have never asked myself that question, so it surely made me think. I knew I would find an answer and to some extent the answer I found surprised me.

My interest started early on, no doubt from growing up in Denmark, which was occupied by the Germans April 9, 1940 through May 5, 1945; I was born in June 1946. My father was involved in the resistance movement and my mother told stories about life in Denmark during the war. We also had some really big books about the war in Europe with lots of photos which I read from page to page so many times. It was soon after that my interest included the war in the Pacific, as those two fronts correlated on so many levels.

I started reading anything and everything about World War 2; I watched any movie, fiction, non-fiction and documentaries. I read more books and several of the better books, I have read many times. Stephen Ambrose: Band of Brothers and D-Day. Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy. A 650 page book I have so far read 4 times is Guadalcanal by Richard B. Frank. These are but three superb authors capturing me from the first sentence till the last; but still, why such interest in WW2?

No matter how much I begged my father through his life to tell me about those years, what he did, had done, his thoughts, his fears and his anxieties of being involved – or was he? I started to doubt it, as he refused to talk about that time.

What I did find out early on from my mother and from neighbors was that he was in the Danish police force by the time the Germans finally decided to round them up and put them in concentration camps in Denmark and Germany. But he had been able to negate being captured, and due to this, he had to go underground – which I know he did, as my mother told me so. She rarely saw him through the rest of the war.

But he never wanted to talk about it, until the second to last time I saw him before his death. We were visiting when he suddenly pulled me aside. “You have persistently asked me…” so with two glasses and a bottle of wine we found a quiet corner in the garden and then he started to explain, more so than telling me about some of the experiences he had endured during those years of fighting the Germans in Denmark.

But it didn’t last the whole bottle of wine, as he could not continue after trying to explain how it had felt losing friends and comrades during firefight confrontations with the Germans and about friends and comrades being executed by the Gestapo after they got arrested; that was all he could manage – and I did not push for more; how could I?

Place of executions - Mindelunden near Copenhagen

I remember his last words about that time. In my feeble effort of comforting him, I said: “I think I understand what you went through”. He gently touched my hand and said: “You will never know what we went through and I wish and hope that you will never have to find out…” He took the rest of the story with him in death a year later.

In my effort to understand what it is that has pulled me into this extreme interest about such a horrific subject matter as WW2, being of historical interest or not, no matter how relevant it must still be and should be, I did, somewhat figure it out – thanks to my wife’s question, as I obviously had never asked myself ‘why’…

The concept, reality and actuality of war are just a few markers underlining how horrific, beyond anything else we can fathom, war is. War is ignorant and in most instances fought for reasons that never should have been solved by such violence. The question is: have we not learned anything over the last thousands of years? And why is it that so many wars have been fought and are still being fought for religious reasons? Is your god better than mine? Why has the commandment: “You shall not murder” (in whatever variation) been so consistently violated and abused? What’s wrong with us; why have we always been so utterly barbaric and ignorant – can’t we talk, negotiate and figure things out in non-violent manners, including a lot of give-and-take and respect for diversities? Seriously, what is so bloody wrong with us?

We even have the audacity of talking about “just wars’. What I’m concerned there is no such thing. I cannot accept that we try to find solutions by killing each other. Those solutions have never and will never have winners and losers, as killing, murdering, death and violence is involved. Maybe you can see winners and losers, but through the smoke, blood and devastation I have a really hard time accepting any such ‘results’ – because as the human race, we all lose, again and again.

The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves

And in spite of all that, I have found that WW2 was perhaps ‘just’ in its own way. When you look at the built-up to the break-out of that war, in Asia as well as in Europe (very similar scenarios), it was the prewar politics and political “solutions” mixed with a lot of “ignorance” (in retrospect: really bad jokes) and politicians fumbling around like total idiots (sounds familiar?) that instigated and allowed the bad guys to do what they wanted. That is profoundly a horrific reality and not one that we (intelligently?) apply as an after-thought, but one that was so horribly clear at the time. But ignorance survived and over 60 million members of the human race payed the ultimate price; so how ‘just’ was it really?

Okay, so if we kick all the political ignorance out the proverbial window, and ‘accept’ that war was not going to reach peace anytime fast, World War 2 was close to a ‘just’ war, seemingly needed to be slugged out to prove the point of democracy – and that was what happened. It was the good guys against the bad guys, and in the end the good guys did win, no matter how hard I have admitting that – but the good guys did eliminate the bad guys and the world has been and still is better for it. It was a terrible loss of human life, devastatingly ruinous and at such a huge cost.

I found that my interest is based on my innate curiosity as to how we as a human race can be pulled into non-human situations, doing things and thinking thoughts that are so foreign to who we essentially are. My, perhaps naïve, but well-meaning trust in the human race is pictured with kindness, respect and consideration, as I have no doubt that we ALL want to live good and happy balanced lives between the time we are born till death do us part; to me, life is actually that simple – if you don’t make it that way, you really should give it a try, please.

One of over 9,600

Standing among the white marble on the deep green manicured lawns, blue sky above, the lanes of sand and a teal ocean stretching out in the horizon down below, now known as Omaha Beach, I do tear up as I desperately try to connect with those young innocent souls, with their utmost fears, frightened beyond reality, but still with a courage we will never understand, landing June 6, 1944 early in the morning, clawing on to a bit of sand, while being bombarded and shot at mercilessly. Their comrades and pals being blown up around them, cut in half, killed and wounded – a carnage nobody could have expected and nobody will ever be able to explain, even the soldiers who survived; they never wanted to talk about it – that was how horrific that morning was. So we will never know, as we were not there – but we must always work for it to never happen again; we owe those thousands of dead young soldiers on all sides at least that much.

Omaha Beach, May 13 - 2015

I weep for those soldiers who gave their all in any war, for what they never realized they missed: their own full lives; falling in love, growing up, wife and kids and family – growing old. Most of them had barely started to shave – if even that.

Do I feel they died for me? I honestly do, no matter the 71 years since that horrific morning and beyond. I do thank them through my tears, because in a big way they made my life what it has been and what it is; they made it possible. I cannot neglect the reality of that, and I have no reason to do so. All I must do is thank them and tell them again and again that it was not for nothing they died – it has reached so beyond in importance of what you could have ever tried to explain to them before they were sent into battle; being a ‘just’ war – if there ever was one.

Let’s never forget their sacrifice

let’s remember and be forever thankful.