D-Day countdown—only weeks to go

If you have the slightest bit of nostalgia or interest in history and
you’re going to be in France in early June, you should be thinking
about attending the 60th anniversary celebrations of the 1944 Allied
D-Day landings in Normandy that led to France’s liberation from Nazi
occupation.

If you have the
slightest bit of good sense, you will stay away from the landing sites
and plant yourself in a nice hotel somewhere to watch the festivities
on television.

The 60th
anniversary activities are going to be mammoth by any standards.
Security and traffic restrictions are going to be so tight up and down
the Normandy coast that without special passes and in many cases police
escorts, it is going to be next to impossible for non-official visitors
to move on the highways or get around in any fashion on June 5th and
6th, the D-Day weekend.

More than
15,000 visitors are expected for the commemorations on June 6th at the
American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, overlooking Omaha Beach, the
main American landing site. Tens of thousands more will be along the
coast at other locations where American, British, Canadian, Belgian,
Polish and Free French forces, among others, fought their way ashore in
the face of stiff German army resistance.

All
in all there are more than 1,000 commemorative events on the Normandy
calendar for the month of June, with virtually every battle site,
military cemetery, local museum, veterans’ organization or municipal
authority from large cities to the smallest of villages planning some
gesture of remembrance. All this in addition to the 18 official
ceremonies scheduled for the D-Day weekend itself at the various
landing sites.

Already,
bookstores throughout France are offering a flood of D-Day related
books videos and special brochures that have sprouted like spring
flowers as the celebrations approach. Seminars and conferences
reviewing the significance of the landings or analyzing the current
state of trans-Atlantic relations abound.  Duke Ellington and
Tommy Dorsey World War II songs are back in style on French radio
stations. There’s even a special five-cars-long “Free France Train”
touring some 16 cities throughout the country putting on special
exhibitions about France’s resistance efforts during the Nazi
occupation and the war and organizing, at each stop, meetings where
those who took part in the resistance can recount their experiences.

The
list of activities is so long that both local and national newspapers
have been advising their readers and tourists to plan their Normandy
visits either before the D-Day dates or after June 8 if they want to
have any chance of access to the historical sites or of finding hotel
accommodations in the area. Available rooms within 50 miles of the
landing areas generally have been  booked up for months and in
some cases for years.

Even the
huge French and international press corps already descending on
Normandy to cover the anniversary is going to be restricted to one
mammoth press center in Caen, capital of lower Normandy. From there
they will be bussed to and from the official commemorations but only to
one each day. They will have to choose. They can’t just roam around.

Although
there is no perfect standard of measurement, to those who have
experienced the celebrations marking other decade-marking anniversaries
of the landings–and this reporter is one– the schedule and the
publicity surrounding the commemorations this year seem easily to be
far bigger and more extensive than ever before.

In
part, it seems evident that both the French government and, in
particular, the people of Normandy want to make it clear that current
Franco-American disagreements about Iraq have not erased a sense of
debt to the Americans who fought and died for France in Normandy

Another
underlying rationale, often mentioned, is the fact that the number of
still-living veterans of the landings is diminishing rapidly. By the
time the 70th anniversary rolls around, there won’t be many left to
honor. Those who hit the beaches as teenagers on June 6, 1944, will be
in their late 80s or 90s by then.

That’s
a main reason, according to Fred Rhodes, Assistant Superintendent of
the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, that everything possible
is being done to honor and assist veterans of the 1944 landings and
members of their families who will be attending the 60th anniversary
celebrations. “They are going to have absolute priority,” he told
BonjourParis recently at Colleville, which already is receiving record
numbers of visitors to the Omaha Beach cemetery in the run up to the
anniversary.

Although time
now is short he reminded that veterans who want to attend the
ceremonies have the possibility of applying for passes by contacting
the Department of Defense’s 60th Anniversary Committee by email at [email protected]  by phone at 703 696 0120 or by fax at 703 696 0122.

Current
Franco-American political differences notwithstanding, both U.S.
President George W. Bush and French President Jacques Chirac are
scheduled to attend the commemorations at Colleville on June 6th. 
Also, for the first time, some 3,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in Germany
are being brought to the Omaha Beach site for the day. Half of them
will beef up what are expected to be extreme security precautions at
all the events involving President Bush and half will be honored guests
at the ceremonies.

Don’t get the
idea, however, that President Bush will have the limelight to himself
for the D-Day commemorations. Jacques Chirac is going to share them
with German Chancellor Helmut Schröder at a special Franco-German
ceremony at the Memorial peace museum in Caen on D-Day evening.

Topping
that, and stealing a march on all of them, will be New York Senator and
former First Lady Hillary Clinton on June 2. That evening she will be
opening a special June 2-6 “Freedom Week” series of events in Paris
beginning with a French National Assembly dinner in her honor and the
kickoff illumination of the National Assembly façade, with lighting
depictions of Allied wartime leaders Free French General Charles de
Gaulle, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill.

And if you
think that all this will abate once June 6th is behind us, think again.
They may not be quite as extensive, but French authorities already are
gearing up for a series of similar commemorative events to mark the
60th anniversaries of the Allied landings on the south coast of France
and the liberation of Paris, both in August of 1944.

An
accredited member of the foreign press corps, Minnesota native Robert
(Bud) Korengold first came to Europe in 1955 after serving in the
Korean war. A Chevalier in the order of Tastevin in Burgundy, the
recipient of a Presidential Award for Sustained Superior Accomplishment
in the conduct of foreign policy, and a member of the order of Palmes
Academiques and the order of Arts et Lettres, he lives in Normandy
doing a bit of gardening and a bit of writing and a lot of amused
reflection about life in France and with the French.