Not very much at all to report on the modelling and painting front over the last few weeks, I’m afraid! With the month that’s in it, however, I thought a quick – albeit slightly late – update with a D-Day theme might be in order.
Normandy has always held a very special place in my
affections; above all else because it was the scene for me of an extremely
formative introduction to military history. A rummage through the family
photograph drawer this week has bought back some cherished memories.
I’d just turned six in June 1994 when my parents, sister and
I decamped to France for a fortnight in a self-catering rental in the Norman countryside.
This was fairly typical for us at the time: Mum is a French teacher and for as
long as I can remember has had an affinity with the country that borders on
passion. Quite a few summers saw us cram the family Golf with enough picnic
supplies, stuffed toys and mutual patience to sustain us for a week or two of
puttering around Gallic back lanes and town squares.
This particular trip saw us settling into a stone clad
cottage just outside the village of Fierville Les Mines. In 2014, a little bit
of armchair browsing with Google Earth allows me to confirm that Fierville lies
inland from the western side of the Cotentin Peninsula. Potentially more
significantly, the village is within reasonable driving distance of the main US
sea and airborne landing zones of D-Day. And much more significantly again,
that June of course marked precisely the fiftieth anniversary of those
landings…
Now, this had been entirely coincidental as far as my
parents were concerned. Neither have any especially profound interest in
history; much less in the campaigns, cannon and colonels of military history.
Regardless, the past was very hard to get away from that summer in Normandy.
Every last village and hamlet we visited during those two
weeks seemed to be festooned in the bright blues, reds and whites of British,
Canadian, American and French flags. War memorials had been cleaned, burnished
and marked with wreathes.
We ended up visiting nearly every significant location of
the US invasion sector, from the windy dunes of Utah and Omaha beaches to the
central square of Sainte Mère
Eglise. None of us can seem to remember visiting the British and Canadian
sectors, further east – probably because they were too far away from our base.
If we did, no photographs have survived.
As a young boy,
this was heady stuff. The lifelike effigy of the 82nd Airborne’s Private John Steele hanging from the church steeple of Sainte Mère
Eglise was a source of particular wonderment to me, and I became enthralled by
the story of the paratrooper’s hapless ordeal during the early hours of D-Day. I
was able to clamber on plinth-mounted Sherman tanks and peer through the gun
slits of shattered concrete bunkers. Young though I was, it was impossible not
to begin to perceive that something quite extraordinary had clearly happened
here.
That trip to
Normandy was a game changer for me. Exactly twenty years on, I have an MA in
military history, an album of personal snapshots of battlefields from the Boyne
to Passchendaele, and an enduring fascination with the history of conflict.
That passion
might have developed anyway, but I’m able to tease my parents today that, but
for their choice of location in the holiday brochure that year, I might still
have grown up with slightly more conventional interests at heart. My television
highlights this month might have featured overpaid athletes booting balls
around Brazilian arenas, rather than pensioners in blazers and mounted medals
taking perhaps a final opportunity to retrace their footsteps as young men
seven decades ago.
I wouldn’t change
a thing.
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