D-Day in History and Memory by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Published: 2014-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

GRATITUDE, TRAUMA, AND REPRESSION: D-DAY IN FRENCH MEMORY

KATE C. LEMAY

Beginning on 6 June 1944, Norman French were put into the challenging role of welcoming the Allied military forces that had inadvertently killed thousands of Normans, those citizens unfortunate enough to live in Norman urban centers used as communication hubs by the German military. For those Normans living through the bombardments of Caen and Saint Lô, among other towns such as Mortain, Vire, Falaise, Caen, Lisieux, and Le Havre, 6 June was the traumatic renewal of Norman war experience. Other Norman cities like Bayeux, undamaged by the bombardment, had to accommodate thousands of neighbor refugees.1 In the end, no one in Lower Normandy was left unaffected: 13,000 lost their lives. After enduring the devastating bombardments, Normans warily waited for their liberation as the battle, which started on the beaches in the departments of Manche and Calvados, tore through the Cotentin Peninsula to capture the major port city of Cherbourg, then headed south, and with the brutal battle through Saint Lô, broke out into the department of Orne to finally force the German military back east. The bloody struggle had enormous cost to the Norman landscape and its civilians. Men, women, and children were eyewitnesses to a grisly combat that routed the German forces out of their cities, villages, and all expanses in between. The landscape of war duly became a battlefield of memory invested with conflicting histories of both gratitude and resentment. As a result, the memory of trauma in Normandy has continually surfaced in political, economic, and social arenas, first figuring prominently in local remembrance during the postwar period, but then evolving into repressed underground expression as French memory shifted as early as 1984.2

In French remembrance, D-Day represents two sides of French war experience whose gradual changes are addressed accordingly in a chronological format. One remembrance is to recall, publicly, the joyous release from the tyranny of the Nazi regime and to give thanks to the Liberators, a remembrance that is complicated by interior resentments toward the Allies.3 The French government, on a national level, promoted this approach especially through the Monuments Signaux, or Signal Monuments, a group of identical, large-scale works that were organized by the Comité du débarquement, or D-Day Commemoration Committee, whose aim was to mark major sites of battle and commemorate the Allied forces.

Another remembrance priority, but one that until the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day remained rarely visible in material culture and was often restrained in public remembrance, is a more region-specific, Norman-driven memory, a memory that simultaneously acknowledges and suppresses the devastation of cities and landscapes, of homelessness and refugees, and of horrific wounds and terrible death. Indeed, the tendency to mute the terror and tragedy is even reflected in the name soon adopted by the French to describe the D-Day operation: “the landings” (les débarquements). In using such soft terminology, Normans give a sweeping category to what was violent combat and destruction. In many respects, this term is more appropriate to French experiences beyond Normandy where the arrival of the allies was seen from afar.

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