The following day we bade farewell to the French capital and headed towards the once beautiful medieval town of Caen, blasted into submission by Allied ground and air forces. Though rebuilt in the post-war years, it sadly lacks the grandeur of its glorious past. As we traveled on the bus towards this graphic illustration that war has no respect for architectural history, I listened in awe as the vets began to talk amongst themselves:

Stories of soldiers lying wounded on the battlefields, unnoticed by passing medics in the wake of the assault troops and quiet matter-of-fact reminiscences of long periods recuperating in hospitals from horrific wounds. As I eavesdropped, I wondered just how my generation could ever really grasp what these old soldiers had endured. No grief counseling, no financial compensation for lives endangered, they simply got on with what had to be done in the name of freedom and then went home and picked up their lives, many barely uttering a word until now!

Families travelling on the bus, hopeful of gaining an understanding of what their older relatives had been through,were straining to listen, note pads discreetly poised as deeply personal stories started to bubble to the surface. Some like Louise Thompson knew that her father Les had been wounded in the hand, but she was not to discover until later that as part of an advanced recce party, he had stumbled across two German infantrymen in a French chateau. A struggle ensued with bayonets slashes in the air, before Les in the quiet unassuming manner of the combat veteran admitted that he and his pal, "quieted the Germans down."

Another eager listener was Doris Davis, niece of Robert Layton of the 315th and daughter of Leonard Schneider of the 313th Infantry Regiment. She wanted to make this trip to understand what both her father now 81 and her late uncle, who was subsequently taken prisoner in the fierce fighting around Normandy, went through. The D-Day museum at Caen, with its multiplicity of video screens showing US newsreels of combat on D-Day would give the younger members of or tour party a graphic illustration of what this important pilgrimage was all about. Already Doris had begun to feel her father's spirit willing her to make this tour and I could see how important it was for her to be on the very ground he had trodden nearly 60 years ago.

From the museum we drove to the coast heading for one of the most infamous names of June 6th 1944, Pointe du Hoc, the heavy German gun position high on the cliffs overlooking the invasion beach of Utah in the distance. Heavy bombing by Allied airforces had tried to wipe out the massive German concrete gun emplacements before US Rangers scaled cliffs against murderous fire. Cresting the cliffs to find the Germans had withdrawn the guns to the rear, the Rangers soon located the artillery and after a heavy fire-fight neutralized these threats to the invasion beaches. Today the headland is an vivid testimony to the terrible pounding by allied bombers, the clifftop strewn with massive craters looking for all the world like a scene from the First World War.