Long before serving as the backdrop for opening and closing scenes in Saving Private Ryan, the 1998 D-Day movie, Normandy was the best-known of the 14 U.S. military cemeteries on foreign soil.
Cathedral High School students Jennifer Callahan, of Ludlow, and Emily Pin, of Wilbraham, stand near the grave marker for David Callahan, a soldier killed in 1944 during World War II. The teenagers are standing in the U.S. cemetary in Normandy, France.
Name by name, gravestone by gravestone, Emily Pin searched for a Northampton soldier’s resting place at the Normandy American Cemetery.
On a bluff above Omaha Beach, the Cathedral High School junior walked along row after row of white crosses and stars of David, burial sites for 9,387 soldiers killed in the June 6, 1944 D-Day landing and weeks of ensuing combat.
Each marker summed up a young life lost – name, rank, unit, home state, date of death.
Each row stretched to the horizon.
“Our tour guide told us there was over 9,000 men buried there,” recalled Pin, of Wilbraham, who visited the cemetery last month with six Cathedral students, French teacher Nancy Gadbois and several others.
“I started to realize just how many men that was,” she added.
Two generations removed from World War II, the students arrived in Normandy with a textbook knowledge of D-Day, with its staggering toll – 2,000 soldiers cut down at Omaha Beach alone – and pivotal role in liberating France and ending the war in Europe.
The enormity of sacrifices made six decades ago took on fresh significance once the students reached the cemetery, 172 acres of manicured lawns and precisely-aligned gravestones built on a cliff above the English Channel.
Long before appearing in the opening and closing scenes in Saving Private Ryan, the 1998 D-Day movie, Normandy was the best-known of the 14 U.S. military cemeteries on foreign soil, a battle shrine as serene as it is unsettling.
Buried side-by-side are 33 sets of twins and a father and son; another 307 soldiers, never identified, rest beneath gravestones reading: “Known but to God.
“I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about the war,” said senior Danielle A. Dube, 17, who grew up listening to her grandfather’s tales about fighting Germans and being taken a prisoner of war.
“When you get to the cemetery, it really hits you. You get a greater appreciation for the soldiers,” said Dube, of Easthampton.
Cathedral High students back from their trip to Normandy along with their teacher Nancy Gadbois, left and students left to right, front Emily Pin, Alexa Cecchetelli, Jennifer Callahan, behind them left to right, Alyssa Goehlert, Linnea Carroll, Robert Patrie and Danielle Dube.
Indeed, knowing that thousands of Americans were killed at Normandy is one thing; seeing 9,387 graves, each facing west toward America, is something else, explained senior Linnea F. Carroll, 17, of South Hadley.
“I went from marker to marker seeing ages from 18 (to) 23. All of those men who died were the same age as me, if not a little older,” Carroll said.
With miles of white marble headstones set against the emerald green lawn, the cemetery is striking on purely aesthetic terms.
At the east end, a reflecting pool borders a semi-circular memorial listing 1,557 missing soldiers; a 22-foot bronze sculpture, the Spirit of American Youth Rising, stands at the center, looking out toward the vast burial ground.
Operated by the American Battle Monuments Commission on land donated by the French, the cemetery and memorial was formally opened in 1956 at the site a temporary cemetery established two days after the invasion.
About 1 million people visit each year, finding peace and hushed tranquillity at the site of history’s greatest amphibious assault.
“It’s surreal – knowing what happened there, and seeing how it is now,” said senior Robert M. Patrie, 18, of Springfield.
Adding to the incongruity, the students found Omaha Beach – a killing zone for the first Americans ashore – serene and dotted with sunbathers taking advantage of the 70-degree temperatures and cloudless skies on the April afternoon they visited.
“It was very hard to reconcile the beach with the battle,” Carroll said.
As the trip’s organizer, Gadbois wanted students to get a deeper understanding of France and the role America played in reclaiming it from fours years of Nazi occupation.
In researching the trip, she found that 500 soldiers from Hampden County were killed in the Normandy campaign, including several from Greater Springfield.
“That shows you the size of the Normandy landing,” said Gadbois, who has made three visits to the battlefield.
In 1975, as a teacher at Holyoke High School, she escorted 30 students to France, including one, Marcel Biela, whose uncle quit high school to enlist in the Army and was killed in Normandy.
He was 16.
Responding to pleas from Biela’s mother, the teacher reluctantly took her class to the cemetery, where – to everyone’s surprise – a retired French soldier in full military uniform greeted their bus with a sprig of flowers, and escorted Biela to his uncle’s grave.
The group eventually joined them, saying prayers and reflecting at the graveside.
“That was one of those days I’ll never forget,” said Gadbois, winner of multiple teaching awards in Holyoke and at Central High School and Cathedral in Springfield.
“Sadly, that’s before anyone ever though of calling internationally to report back, and until we landed at Bradley a week later, she never knew whether we located her brother’s grave,” Gadbois said.
For this trip, Gadbois wanted to pay tribute to any Cathedral student buried at the cemetery.
The mission proved tricky; the American Battle Monument Commission, which oversees the cemetery, could not identify soldiers by hometown or high school. Eventually, a list of Hampden County casualties was produced, then cross-checked with Cathedral graduates from 1937 to 1941.
The only soldier turning up, Robert J. Shea, Class of 1940, was buried at St. Michael’s Cemetery in Springfield.
Instead, the students received names of soldiers from Springfield, Westfield and Northampton, with instructions to visit their graves.
After arriving in France, the group – including several parents and grandparents, plus a student from Minnechaug Regional High School – spent a few days in Paris and Brittany before taking a charter bus to Normandy.
At the visitor’s center in Arromanches, they watched the documentary “The Price of Freedom” in a circular theater with nine screens.
Mixing newsreel footage and modern-day pictures, the film recounts D-Day with no narration, using only the sound and fury of the battle itself. To enhance the 360 degree effect, there are no chairs - everyone stands while the film unfolds around them.
Two hours later, the students were fanning out across the battleground-turned-cemetery, tracking down the names of fallen soldiers.
Senior Alyssa C. Goehlert stopped at five graves, paying tribute to each soldier’s selflessness and courage.
It took about five minutes for Pin to find the grave of Northampton’s Pvt. Joseph J. Okolo, killed June 15, 1944, while securing the Normandy beachhead. His parents decided he should be buried with his comrades, according to “Touched by Fire,” a book by Northampton historian Allison M. Lockwood.
Kneeling, Pin said a prayer, and wondered what Okolo’s life would have been without the war.
“I was trying to quantify the loss of his life, and then realized that I could do the same for the other 9,000 men” Pin said.
“It was pretty overwhelming,” she added.