A cool Camps Bay Beach image:
The rising generation meets the Greatest Generation
Image by gwilmore
As I mentioned in an earlier photo posted elsewhere in this series, I was alone when I visited Falcon Field on Veterans Day, and I intended to take Vanessa there the following day. Her friend Hailey Jensen had a sleepover at our place that night, and with her parents’ permission, I brought her along, too.
As expected, the girls were bored at first as I showed them the various planes on exhibit in the museum, and explained a display devoted to Operation Market-Garden, the disastrous "Bridge Too Far" campaign in Holland in September, 1944. I introduced them to several veterans, then took them to see Roy Clemons, who was there again, as he said he would be.
He was able to get and keep the girls’ attention, and I took this picture moments after he began speaking to them. He first showed them his Purple Heart, which he said was "a very special medal," and he asked if they knew what it meant. They didn’t, of course, so he explained it in terms of his own battle wounds: one at the hands of a German sniper, and the other by an exploding round from a dreaded "88" gun, which killed seven of the eight men who were with him at that moment.
He talked about Omaha Beach, withholding none of its horrors, at least to the extent he was able to describe them. He spoke of a beach littered with body parts — arms, legs, heads, and everything else — and of a sea so red with blood that "it looked like ketchup." He spoke of crawling through the famous Cologne Cathedral in search of a sniper, who killed his friend, Ssgt. Leonard Komnick. ("God and I were the only ones who saw him die," he told them.)
Then he started describing the liberation of the Nordhausen concentration camp, and pulled out a photograph of hundreds of skeletal bodies stacked like cordwood, all of them dead. Someone standing nearby suggested that the girls might be too young to hear of something so awful, but I told him to proceed, adding that this was not being taught in the schools, and sooner or later they were going to hear people saying that the Holocaust never happened at all. The girls listened, attentively and subdued, as he related the story. Altogether, they were with him for close to a half-hour.
I wanted to get a picture of the expressions on the girls’ faces as he told the story of the liberation of Nordhausen, but I had the wrong lens on the camera, and there was no way I could change it on the spot. But later I saw this image when I uploaded it to my computer, and decided it would do the job just fine.
On the way home a couple of hours later, Vanessa asked me why none of this had ever been mentioned to her at at school, and she said she would write a letter to the powers-that-be, asking that such matters as this be discussed more. (She started writing the letter as soon as we got home, and I’ve never been prouder of Vanessa as I was at that moment. She obviously had learned something that day.) I also told her about Anne Frank’s diary, and she said she wanted to read it.
All was not unpleasantness and harsh facts of history during this little excursion, however. After Roy had finished talking with them, I took the girls out into the tarmac area, pointed to the silver B-17 parked there, and announced that we were all going to get inside and have a look at it. They were afraid of the idea and expressed concerns, but I told them I would go in first, and they followed. I pointed out the turrets and other crew posts, led them across the catwalk over the bomb bay area, and showed them the machine guns and ammunition belts in the waist section. After we got out, I showed them the ball turret and explained how it worked, and how the gunner had to position himself in order to be able to do his job. The girls surprised me by asking if they could go through the plane a second time, and I said sure, but once again they wanted me to go first. This time I quizzed them on the different crew compartments and their functions, and then they wanted a third trip through. For the third trip, I sent them alone, because I had been through the plane twice already that day and twice the day before, and at age 52, I am not nearly as agile as I used to be. (Not that I ever was, even when I was much younger, but that’s another story.)
All in all, this ended up being a fine activity for all concerned. I told Hailey’s mother afterward that her daughter had probably learned more history that afternoon than she ever had thus far in her entire school career.
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Have you tried: Travelling to South Africa?