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What My Grandpa Lived Through

By Kaitlyn Davis

My Grandpa was never cold. He never complained when it was snowing and he lacked a sweatshirt, or if the heat wasn't working. We always asked him why...why, why, why was he never cold. He always gave us the same reply..."I fought in the Buldge, I slept in the snow." When I was little, I never understood. Sure, in history class we read about World War Two, and what all the boys had to endure, but I never really understood.

A few years ago, my family went to France for vacation and we decided to visit Normandy in honor of my Grandpa who had died the year before. He participated in the Normandy Invasions, but I never truly understood what that meant.

At 18, I worried about finishing my homework, what college I would go to, who I would date, what clothes I should wear and what I would be doing on a friday night. My grandpa? Well, at 18, he was shooting guns, evading bullets, driving tanks, sleeping in the snow and watching his friends get blown up. It was a completely different world, and I knew that before I went to Normandy, but seeing the damage left sixty years after the war made me understand how truly different his life was.

Our driver brought us to the top of a cliff, and the first thing I saw were huge craters that spotted the top of the cliff and all of the surrounding area.

"What's up with this Dad?" I asked, while I watched little kids running up and down, rolling around in the grassy holes.

"That's where the american fire hit," he told me. I was shocked at first. All of these craters were from bombs? How was that possible, every inch of the ground had some type of depression in it for as far as I could see. How could the holes have remained for so long? I couldn't imagine what the scene must have been on the day of the invasion. Bombs must have been raining from the sky, the world would have been exploding with dirt and stone and blood flying every where.

I blinked, turning out of my imagination and saw a huge stone...thing. Inside was a gigantic gun, and as I looked around, I noticed more of the structures.

"What are those?" I questioned my father, he seemed to know everything about history.

"Those are the German bunkers. That big gun is what the Germans fired at American tanks and ships. In there," my Dad pointed to a bunker close to the cliff, "is where the Germans hid with guns to shoot at the soldiers running up the beaches and climbing the cliffs."

I walked into one of the bunkers, through a tiny stone hallway, and looked into the sleeping and artillery rooms as I passed. I stopped in the lookout area. Two huge stone slabs were only a few inches apart, just large enough for a gun. Through the horizontal stripe I had a clear view of the beaches below and the ocean before me. I imagined the German soldiers, looking out on to the horizon and seeing only ships; hundreds upon hundreds of ships packed full of enemies waiting to kill them. I could sympathize with both sides, because I doubted that most Germans knew exactly what they were fighting for. All the soldiers were teenagers, and no one my age should have to go through something like war.

I thought of the Americans next, standing on their ships or in tanks waiting to be dumped on the beaches. Looking up into the enemy fire raining down on them, trying to shoot someone in a stone hovel and watching friends fall all around you. It must have seemed impossible, like there was no chance of survival. Especially for the soldiers climbing the cliffs, since German could have shot them and they would have had no way to even reach for a gun to fight back.

I looked down at the beach one more time before we left, and tried to picture the scene after the D-Day invasion. Blood and bodies must have been strewn everywhere. Friends and family members lost and unrecognizable. I wonder what the survivors must have thought, would they have been sad for the dead, happy for the living, feeling the pointlessness of battle, feeling the glory of victory? How must my grandpa have felt, stepping onto the beach only six days after D-Day, what would he have seen? Anyone he knew lying dead on the ground, to scared to look and find out? Excited to finally be fighting or wishing he was still back in training? My Grandpa never talked about the war, not even when I interviewed him to write a paper on his experiences. I was starting to understand why, it must have seemed like a different life, one too painful to remember.

We left the beaches, but still had one more stop to make before we left Normandy all together: the American Cemetery.

It's hard to describe the experience, of seeing rows and rows of white crosses shining against the brilliant green grass. I'd never seen so many graves in one place, there seemed to be an endless number. Everywhere I turned, another strip of white would appear. The sight took my breath away.

The thing I most remember, aside from the image itself, was learning that everything in the American Cemetery was imported from the USA: the dirt, the trees, everything. I loved that the American soldiers were in some way brought back home, honored in death for their amazing sacrifice.

When we left Normandy, I was lost in thought. I would never again see war movies and think it could never have been that scary. I would understand that it had been scarier than I or any movie director could imagine.