Just got back last week from Normandy in my Tiger kit car. Beautiful place. Very historic. As well as visiting the Normandy landing beaches we also visited the Bayeux tapestry. Some pics.....
Oh I am envious, I used to do that kind of thing in the S2000 but I never got as far as the continent, great pictures really nice. I really am envious, fantastic weather you had too.
Yeah it got a bit too bloomin hot at times. We all got a bit burnt. Going around the cemetery at Omaha brings it home I can tell you. 19 yr old from Wisonsin, 21 yr old from NY, 20 yr old from Wyoming and so on and so forth. Kids who probably had never ventured more than a couple of miles out of town, next the big adventure on a boat with their mates to England, camped somewhere down south for 12 months training, then dead on a beach in France. Heart breaking I kid you not.
Yeah I've never been to any of the memorials on the continent but I have been to the Pacific war memorial on Corregidor island which had a similar effect.
I have been to many it puts life into perspective when you read a headstone* a soldier known only to God *
Actually I just realised how wrong my statement above is because I've been to Auschwitz and that was very moving.
I drove to a trade show in Munich during the 1980s and on the way back, stopped at Dachau. It was the most haunting and upsetting couple of hours of my entire life.
Belsen: I have two family associations with that evil place. My mother and her family were Polish Resistance fighters in the mountains along the Czech border. They were all captured in 1943 and were sent to Belsen by mistake - the Germans who captured them assumed they were Jews. They were not, they were devout Catholics. My mother was "rescued" by a senior officer who managed to get her a "cushy billet" at an armaments factory on the Rhur whilst her father and two brothers disappeared believed murdered by the Nazis. Coincidentally my father, a Brigadier in the Royal Engineers, commanded a bridge-building unit who'd been attached to the 11th Armoured Division and was still with them when they liberated Belsen mid-April 1945.
They met in Germany in October 1945. My mother had been liberated by the Paras and because she wanted to find out what had happened to her father and brothers, she joined the Red Cross and worked as a Polish-German translator helping to get displaced Poles into places of safety; very few wanted to go back to Poland which was, of course, under Soviet rule. Since there were no more bridges to build, my father found himself attached to the newly-formed War Crimes Investigations Command - mainly English, French and Dutch civil police detectives working with MPs and under military command. He and my mother met at a wedding held in an army camp near my mother's base. My mother was matron of honour whilst my father was simply an invited guest. They were married in Germany the following year and my father returned to civilian life in 1949 - which they celebrated by making me!
Great story with a good outcome, but I'm not sure everybody on here would agree with the last part.......
Dont look for something that isn't there. Your story is one of love and history in the world as it was.
