Lest
They Be Forgotten
by Toni Witt
What an amazing memoir!
It is hard to believe that Omaha Beach, peaceful and quiet, resting
on the coastline of Normandy, France, with its cool waters and gentle
waves, was once the battleground for one of the biggest battles of our
era.
It
was once a place of so much blood, anger, and hatred, now all washed away
by the gentle wake of the waves. Grasping the amount of lives lost in the
D-Day battle is impossible for any civilian to do. How could a person
understand so much death? It is something that one would have to witness.
Three
out of a company of 250 men survived. Three. And that was the average.
Many of the men never even made it out of the Higgins boats. How would it
feel to be entering a war zone, yet never make it onto the beach?
The first
wave did not know what they were getting themselves into, but the later
waves did. Sitting there, waiting for the landing, hearing the explosions
in the background would have been the worst of all.
One of the best questions asked in their documentary was “What is
human life worth?” There were tens of thousands of deaths that day. The
water had turned red from the blood, and the beaches, water included, were
full of bodies.
Tanks were
unable to move without running over dead or dying soldiers. We treasure
human life here at home, yet in a war zone, men are falling all around
you.
How much is a
human life truly worth?
Soldiers were
dying by the dozens at a time, and there was nothing that could be done.
Fellow soldiers had to watch the men they had grown up with lay and scream
on the shore of the beach, pleading for their lives. But there was no
saving them. And the men who survived knew this. How could a person live
with that image in their mind?
Freedom is
not free. It was this
documentary that really drove that home for me.
The
price for freedom is human life, human sacrifice. One cannot comprehend
how precious freedom is until they experience that freedom disappearing,
or the price that is paid for freedom. The men in this documentary talk
about the number of lives that were lost for the price of freedom.
A quote from
the documentary, “War is hell.” Men can say it, but only those who
have been there and witnessed it firsthand will ever truly understand what
this hell is.
The emotion
during the interviews of these veterans shows how they feel, and allows
the audience to grasp a better understanding of what happened on that day
on the beach of Normandy. Although we can never fully grasp the pain that
these men suffered, and the images that they saw, we can better understand
them.
This
documentary has helped to place me into the shoes of a soldier, and see
things from the way that they did that
June day. I was able to better comprehend the images of the floating
bodies and the terror of the bullets whizzing by their heads.
And I was
able to define a “hero.” As the documentary said, “The heroes are
not the ones who survived, yet the ones who are still over there, buried
in Normandy, who died for their country."