Our German Enemies

As I drove the German autobahns with my 13-year-old son David beside me in the little rental car – the damned Opal wouldn’t go over 80 miles per hour, and the Mercedes passed going 135 – I was uneasy about the German people. I have vivid memories of World War II, when the Germans were our enemies.

I was just a kid in high school. All I knew was what I read in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and what I saw in newsreels at the Saturday matinee at the Tivoli Movie Theater. After the war I found out what really happened. At one time I had several books about the war, which I gave to my grandson when he heard about World War II in his high school history class.

My husband John, whom I didn’t meet until 40 years after the war, in 1944 was a young Army supply officer in the Normandy invasion and followed the troops across Europe to meet the Russians at the Elbe. He told me his personal experiences in the war.

This week I gave a program on June, 1944, Normandy invasion, the greatest amphibious operation in history. The object was to kill Germans and drive them out of France. The worst fighting was on Omaha Beach were German machine gunners on the bluff killed thousands of American boys before many of them could wade out of the water onto the sandy beach.

Today the cemetery on the bluff above Omaha Beach is serene with row after row of white marble crosses. Over 9,000 young Americans are buried there. A few miles further down the coast is the German cemetery with 21,160 graves.

I’ve been to Normandy three times. My first visit was with John, who had landed on Omaha Beach on “D-Day plus 4". That was June 10, 1944, after the Germans had been driven back. We had a friend in Albuquerque who landed the first day as an Army sergeant. By the time he was wounded at St. Lo, he was a captain. Forty years later John walked along the water’s edge and said, “It has not changed a bit since I was here in ‘44.”

But of course it has changed. The whole world has changed. Roofs have been repaired, glass restored in windows in all the village houses. Church steeples again point to Heaven. Normandy looks as if there never was a war.

When David and I drove around Germany, one of the first thing I noticed was that we were never out of sight of a castle. In the valleys every little village backed up to a mountain topped by a castle. All very picturesque, but it made me realize how unsafe life was a thousand years ago. No one knew when the lord of the next village would attack. No one trusted their neighbor. Today all the castles are in ruins.

England and France were enemies for centuries. One conflict is called “The Hundred Years War”. The English defeated the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Then the English and French joined (with our help) to fight the Germans in World War I and World War II.

Today Germany and France are partners in the European Union, sharing the common currency, the Euro, and working together to shore up Greece and Italy. Every time I went in Europe, I saw German tourists and said to myself, “They didn’t need to invade other countries with their army. The Germans bring Euros, and everyone welcomes them.”

Recently I talked to a guard at the Dallas Museum of Art who was stationed in Germany a few years ago with the U.S. Army. He kept repeating, “Germany is so beautiful. I love Germany.”