MAY 12 2002
The Sunday Telegraph
I am standing on precarious scaffolding in blazing sunlight, eating a doughnut.
The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia are ranged mistily behind me. The new D-Day
Memorial, built to commemorate those who died in the Normandy landings of June
1944, stands atop the hill directly ahead. Beneath this colossal granite arch
– a symbolic 44ft 6in tall, with the word “Overlord” carved
in great gold capitals across the top – a colourful crowd of flag-waving
Americans is singing The Star-Spangled Banner as we await the arrival of President
George W Bush to declare the monument open.
Close by, the normally quiet town of Bedford is anything but peaceful. Its campsites and few hotels are packed. All morning an endless stream of black and yellow school buses, not to mention helicopters and limousines, have been bringing in visitors.
“You’ve come all the way from England?” A local newspaper reporter scribbling away beside me is impressed. I am slightly nonplussed. My plane journey to Washington DC, followed by the pleasantly rambling drive down through Virginia in a shiny new hire car can hardly rank (even with the spectacular mountain storm of yesterday evening) alongside the treacherous military expedition of 57 years ago that preceded what we are here to commemorate.
I was just leaving the Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds along the ridge of mountains that are truly, astonishingly blue and awash with wild flowers and chipmunks, when the skies suddenly darkened. Thunder and lightning preceded a shower of hailstones the size of fists. The car cowered under the pummelling, I cowered in the car and the road turned into a river. I spent the night in a roadside motel and had been amazed to wake to clear skies and to find that the world had not been washed away.
“What do you think of it all?” the reporter asks, and seems pleased when I remark that the scene looks so quintessentially American I feel as if I am in a movie.
In fact, I feel as if I am in several movies and the hero of them all is an elderly gentleman sitting inconspicuously in a wheelchair below to my left, in the area reserved for veterans.
I had met Bob Sales the evening before at his home in nearby Lynchburg. We had sat on his covered deck, watching the pouring rain, as he told me his story. In 1941, aged 15, he had left school here in Bedford and enlisted in the army the next day. The following year, he and his companions in the116th Infantry Regiment waved farewell to the Blue Ridge Mountains and sailed in the Queen Mary to Liverpool, zig-zagging across the Atlantic in a bid to shake off the German submarines. When the liner carrying 25,000 men came within Luftwaffe range, one of the cruisers sent out by the Royal Navy to escort her in collided and was cut in half with the loss of all 332 of its crew.
Bob Sales was posted to Bude in Cornwall for training along the nearby north Devon beaches. The rolling landscape reminded him of home, and in Holsworthy he met and fell in love with 16-year-old Doreen Oliver, “the most beautiful girl you ever saw”. Shades of Love Story merge abruptly with Saving Private Ryan, the film about the D-Day landings whose horrific opening sequence Bob Sales describes as “very realistic”. He should know. On June 6 1944, he was in the second wave of men to land on the Dog Green sector of Omaha beach. Desperately seasick from the Channel crossing and with condoms over their rifles to stop sand getting in, the men saw the carnage on the beach as soon as the front of the landing craft went down. The advance party that had landed an hour before had been completely crushed. German machine guns picked off the arrivals one by one. First out was his captain, who was hit immediately. Everyone else followed and walked into a hail of bullets. Bob was the sole survivor in a landing craft of 30 men.
D-Day was only the start of months of fighting, which ended for Staff Sergeant Bob Sales when he was blinded in both eyes. After a spell in hospital in England, during which Doreen could not get a travel pass to visit, he was sent back to America to recuperate. Miraculously he regained is eyesight. The couple kept in touch for a while but eventually they both married other people and their correspondence dwindled.
The D-Day Memorial has been sited in Bedford because the role of the 116th Infantry Regiment at Omaha meant that the tiny town suffered the highest death toll per capita of anywhere in the United States. The sheer beauty and peace of the surroundings, with all the outdoor recreational facilities they offer, make the site even more poignant. It is impossible to stand in the tiny, tidy Main Street and not think of the young men who left and never returned.
When the 50th anniversary of D-Day was celebrated in 1994, Bob Sales and his fellow veterans visited the beaches in France for the first time since the war. The attendant publicity prompted Doreen to write to Bob from Devon. He returned from France to find her letter waiting for him. By now both divorced and with grown-up children, the pair arranged to meet. Doreen flew to America and they fell in love all over again. Then Doreen was diagnosed with cancer and subsequently died. Her family sent him some of her ashes, which he keeps alongside sand from Omaha beach to be buried with him when he dies.
Every June 6 there will be a commemoration ceremony here at which a steadily decreasing number of veterans will gather. An education centre and art gallery are being built so that the place will be interesting the rest of the year, even without any of today’s razzmatazz.
“This is all more like a movie than any I have ever seen,” I remark to an Englishman who has been standing near me on the scaffolding, quietly filming. He is Doreen Oliver’s son.
In the years since his mother’s death, he has become good friends with Bob Sales and is making a film about his life. As a small boy in post-war north Devon, he recalls packets of goodies arriving from America. “I used to have the best pencils in the class,” he recalls. Now “the man from America” has provided him with all the ingredients he needs for a Hollywood blockbuster.
“Ah sure do ’appreciate you coming awl this way,” the local reporter says to me as I climb down off the scaffolding. I think of all the young men who crossed the Atlantic to be fired upon and torpedoed but I smile politely.
I cannot decide whether to spend the rest of the afternoon climbing the Twin Peaks of Otter (you can get a bus to the top and walk down) or boating on Smith Mountain Lake. I am also hoping to explore nearby Roanoke, with its antique shops and cafes, and I want to see the historic centre of Lynchburg, where beautiful old clapperboard houses straight from the set of Gone With the Wind can apparently be purchased for a dollar apiece (although you need a great deal more than that to do them up).
The skies, however, are rapidly darkening so, fearing another mountain storm, I hurry off to shelter in the refreshment tent to be alone with my thoughts.