Evendays

Daughter and Son 2 caught up with us after lunch at the Peace Museum. They’d just been to the temporary exhibit about the Hitler Youth. Son 2 told us how teenagers had massacred inhabitants of a Normandy village after the resistance had derailed a train those same youth were on. It took the German Army Police’s intervention to keep the whole village from being exterminated.

Pegasus bridge is now the name of the Caen Canal crossing where Major John Howard and his men landed their gliders just after midnight on June 6. (Stephan Ambrose wrote an entire book on this one operation.) The British successfully took the bridge and held “on till relieved”. (For those of you who’ve watched The Longest Day, that command is repeated in a haunting voice 4 times during the film… It becomes unintentionally comic!)

Sword beach is just a short drive away (as is Ouistrehem, where the French led a bloody attack on the German’s communication center). Dad carefully collected sand from that beach (as he did from all the beaches). Then we headed down to Juno and Gold, where the children flew a kite in gale force winds while us older folks sipped coffee in a nearby hotel lobby.