Normandy

And again, it's always, always hampered by the fact that they have 19th century communications, static telephone lines, runners, pigeons, all the other kind of methods we've often discussed in this podcast, but the lack of radio communications where they can transmit voice, which was not possible in the First World War.

eventually by 1918 they had smaller radio sets that could transmit morse that were up in balloons or aircraft that could be used on the ground but that was really only second best to the ability to broadcast voice which did not come until much later the kind of radio sets that british soldiers had in normandy could have changed the course of many battles in the first world war for example and you also mentioned march 1918 again with the build-up to that offensive in this case a german offensive the british were aware that something was coming but not entirely sure exactly where and there was a kind of inevitability about it so although some intelligence from trench raids had revealed that an attack was imminent there wasn't a lot that could be done really to stem it when it came.

And that sat side by side with all kinds of other complex issues like the reorganisation of the British Army, the change in defensive tactics with outpost lines and redoubts that the March battles proved to be not that effective.

So again, it was back to that argument between dugouts versus artillery.

Now, this is not a call for a doctor's appointment.

This is a conversation about Normandy.

or, you know, detailed about building cathedrals in the 13th century.

Right,

Now it was the height of summer in August of 1951.

Two English women, Dorothy Stein and Agnes Kerr, had crossed the channel for a quiet holiday in the little seaside village of Poix, perched just a mile or two northeast of Dempy on the Normandy coast.

They rented a room in a charming two-story house that sat right on the clifftop looking down over a narrow shingle beach where the waves washed gently against the seawall.

The war had been over for six years.

Then, they noted, 6.15 to 6.55 a.m., a gradual, heavy suppression of the attacking gunfire.

The sounds of battle receded into sporadic, isolated rifle shots, followed by the roar of naval rescue craft pulling away into the channel under heavy shore fire.

Then, by 6.55 a.m., as the warm summer sun rose high over the cliffs of Normandy and the seagulls began their morning calls, the last gunshots faded into nothingness.

The cottage was silent once more.

I think that's a Gambon Churchill film.

Is that the one where he doesn't want to evade Normandy and it's weird? Is that the one?

No, that one's got Brendan Gleeson.

That's a weird one.

yeah.

There's a few knocking around in

Normandy.

Not that many.

There was one more thing he needed to see before he could begin his real work, and he went looking for it.

In the last months of the war, he volunteered with an Irish Red Cross unit and went to Normandy, to a town called Saint-Lô, that the fighting had almost wiped from the earth.

It had been bombed nearly to powder, and he served there in a makeshift hospital as a storekeeper and interpreter, among the rubble of what had been a living town.

He watched people pick their way back into the ruins and begin somehow to live again, to set up house in the wreckage, to go on.

Really? yeah it was a legitimate hit like outside like Steven Spielberg making a World War 2 epic like people were down that

Normandy scene still it's like second hand trauma man

when I went to see it opening weekend and there were a bunch of greatest generation dudes in the audience and I like during at the end of the Normandy scene I like looked over and could see like several of them just like Shit, like like sweating and shaking.

That's one of those moments, I think, in my childhood, seeing a movie in the theaters that I was definitely too young to be seeing that in the movie theater.

You know, I was 12, 11, maybe watching the landing at Normandy as realistic as Steven Spielberg could possibly make it.

oh yeah like not that big of a deal but jesus there are probably millions of children who watch that shit in the movie theater oh yeah absolutely for the historical

value oh um above it also eight millimeter the nicholas cage snuff movie movie that movie's crazy yeah Oh, God.

I know, I remember well in June of 1944, when I was only four years old, In Northeastern Holland, in war and hunger and cold and devastation of war.

That day landed the Allied forces, the United States, Canada and the UK landed in Normandy and at great cost.

made their way out of Normandy, went east, south, and the Canadians went through France, Belgium, western part of Holland to where we lived and liberated us.

The other point that I was going to make, Holland and Western Europe then was devastated because of the dictator had of Hitler that virtually destroyed Western Europe.

physically, mentally, in war.

Why is that the case? Has he really produced the evidence for that? And that's the kind of reading that you should be doing with military history.

So right now, I'm going to be leading a staff ride to the Normandy beaches.

So I've been doing a lot of D-Day reading.

And when I read something like James Holland's very good narrative history of the D-Day campaign, I find myself asking lots of questions.