It is difficult to imagine Normandy in 1944; it is a beautiful place today, as are its people: a simple bonjour earns an American tourist a smile of appreciation, and the little villages are lovely, separated by pastures and farm fields, each with its distinctive little parish church. During the Middle Ages, as the skilled writer and Francophile Graham Robb notes, few villagers ever went beyond the sound of their parish church’s bells. The world beyond was like the ends of the earth.
It is not the ends of the earth, but the D-Day beaches are 5,500 miles away from the Arroyo Grande Valley. Three local men, killed in the campaign to capture and then and break free from Normandy, are buried at the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, an almost impossibly beautiful place above Omaha Beach.
Below the cemetery, just offshore, a visitor today can see young men as they should be—exuberant and free– as they race tiny sailboats, their sails bright oranges and reds, just beyond the surf line, where on June 6, young men floated like dead leaves on the water’s surface. The invasion of Hitler’s Europe nearly failed here. It didn’t, but only because of an American generation that includes those who still hold the high ground at Colleville-sur-Mer.
Omaha Beach today.
Up there, on the immaculate cemetery grounds, and not far from a famous American—the ebullient and popular Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., felled by a massive heart attack soon after the invasion– lies a soldier as far removed from the Roosevelts’ patrician (if rambunctious) Oyster Bay home as a human being can be, in terms of both distance and social class.
He was a farm worker, Pvt. Domingo Martinez: Plot C, Row 13, Grave 38. Martinez is the soldier who more than likely knew the bean-stakes and the smell of sweet peas of prewar Arroyo Grande. The best that can be said is “more than likely:” the Arroyo Grande Valley is where a farm worker, as he’s listed in his 1943 Army enlistment records, would have found a job, or a series of jobs, following different harvests, and migrant farm workers are elusive for both historians and for census-takers.
Domingo may even have been double-counted in the 1940 Census; there are two “Domingo R. Martinez” entries, both from New Mexico; one is living in San Miguel County, hit hard and recovering from the Dust Bowl; he is living with his father, Fulgencio; his mother is deceased. But a second Domingo R. Martinez, also originally from New Mexico, is counted in the same census, and in California. He is living in Redlands, picking oranges, with a man named Thomas listed as his father, and Thomas is married to Aliga Martinez.
They must be different men. But “Aliga” Martinez is listed as “Aleja” in a postwar Redlands City Directory, and it is Aleja who will file the 1946 request for the marble cross that marks Domingo’s grave at Colleville-sur-Mer. The form lists Redlands as her hometown.
It is the measure of a poor man’s life: researchers can’t be certain of where he lived when the war broke out. They know exactly where he died.
Two more soldiers, city boys compared to Martinez, are honored here at the American Cemetery, both from the county seat just to the north, An artillery officer. 2nd Lt. Claude Newlin, from San Luis Obispo, is buried here. Ironically, Newlin’s battalion, attached to the 35th Infantry Division, had spent a year training at the camp just north of his home town. Newlin had survived some of the costliest fighting of the campaign, near St. Lo, only to die hours before the 35th broke out of Normandy to join George Patton’s breath-taking race across France to Metz and the German frontier.
Lt. Jack Langston’s fighter would have looked like this P-38, with is distinctive D-Day identification stripes.
For another San Luis Obispo soldier, an airman, there is a memorial, but no grave. On June 22, 2nd Lt. Jack Langston was flying his P-38 in a low-level attack on Cherbourg with his 367th Fighter Squadron when that city demonstrated the folly of ordering low-level attacks. Langston died that day with four other 367th pilots. His body was never found.
The farm worker, Pvt. Martinez, 26 years old, born and raised in New Mexico, now a Californian, found himself in the streets of Cherbourg in June 1944, far below the speeding fighter planes. Martinez was fighting with the 313th Regiment of the 79th Infantry Division, the “Cross of Lorraine Division”–their unit symbol had been St. Joan’s–and the 79th had seen hard fighting in France before, in 1918.
They were sent into action near Cherbourg soon after landing on Utah Beach, and they fought their way into the heart of the port city–a port the Allies would need, because a capricious Channel storm destroyed the “Mulberry,” the artificial harbor built off Omaha. The Allied armies in France therefore faced an enormous supply problem. They needed a port to help feed, arm, and fuel the growing numbers of Allied solders in France. For the Allied command, SHAEF, Cherbourg was critical.
It was also difficult to take. Its bristling anti-aircraft defenses would claim Jack Langston. Massive coastal batteries could keep naval support for the Americans at bay, and the city’s Wehrmacht defenders, though not elite troops (20% of them were non-German conscripts) were securely dug in and they had nowhere to go, for they were backed into a corner of France, and so isolated that the only alternative to fighting was to leap into the sea.
Once they’d gotten inside Cherbourg, G.I.’s learned to hate street fighting almost instantly. Death came instantly from illusory shadows that a fallen G.I.’s comrades never saw, and from gunfire they sometimes never heard. In peacetime, a French city block can be melodious with the sounds of cafe music or the singing of children at play. In combat, the same block, seemingly empty, can muffle the report of a sniper’s rifle or generate echoes that make soldiers look anxiously in every direction at once.
Street fighting, Cherbourg. These G.I.’s are from Martinez’s 79th Division.
It would be the 79th that would capture the fortress that dominated the city on June 26. Its commander surrendered three days later. Military historian John C . McManus notes that the men of the 79th that day were filthy, exhausted, and bearded, “like burlesque tramps,’ as one soldier said. They got little rest. The division quickly shifted from urban combat to a drive through the farms and villages of the Cotentin Peninsula.
Now, American ground forces in Normandy faced a new, even more difficult challenge. Three weeks after D-Day, they had fallen far short of the objectives set for them by Allied planners and the staff officers working furiously over maps in Gen. Omar Bradley’s custom command trailer. The offensive in the Cotentin stalled in great part because the Germans had the advantage of fighting defensively, in the bocage, the Norman hedgerows, and they winnowed units like the 79th down.
79th Division GIs sprint across a field bound by hedgerows.
The hedgerows enclosed fields plowed since Agincourt, or pasturage for fat Norman cows, and were a hopscotch of natural fortresses—roots and compacted earth had formed defensible walls. The G.I.’s had to assault them, one by one, to try to root the defenders out.
When G.I.’s broke through a hedge and entered a field, the superb German machine gun, the MG42, hidden in the next hedge beyond, or positioned on the Americans’ flanks, annihilated entire rifle squads. It fired so rapidly that a burst sounded like canvas ripping. Army films had incorporated the sound to try to desensitize trainees.
Fighting in the bocage: A 79th infantryman fires a bazooka.
So the Americans could hear, but never see, in the tangle of the hedges, who was killing them so efficiently. The bocage quickly transformed G.I.s, with supreme indifference, into either hardened veterans or into statistics.
American soldiers, adaptive and imaginative, eventually would develop the tactics to overcome the kind of war the Germans fought in the bocage. For the 79th, in early July, what was beyond the hedgerows may have been worse. The Germans would not wait for them this time. They would attack. This came soon after the 79th, along with the 82nd Airborne and the 90th Infantry Divisions, seized, at great cost, several hills around a key crossroads, Le Haye du Puits.
This should have compelled the enemy to abandon the town. They didn’t. They attacked instead, on July 7, intent on destroying the 79th in their positions on a ridge above the town. The German soldiers, including SS-Panzer units, attacked with great ferocity and with great courage. These were not garrison troops, but hardened and determined professionals. In a day of fighting that ended only at nightfall, the 79th stopped them. This was the turning point. On the next day, another day of street fighting, the Americans would capture Le Haye du Puits.
Le Haye du Puits is secured. The lead 79th division GI his carrying a mortar tube; one soldier behind him is carrying the mortar’s baseplate on his back.
Afterward, Signal Corps photographers attached to the 79th captured the images of some soldiers, like patrons arrived for their dinner reservation, enjoying a bottle of wine, sitting around a restaurant table set up on the street outside a partly-destroyed building; other photos reveal the faces of men as blank as those of sleepwalkers. They are utterly worn out, used up, by a month of ceaseless combat.
Le Haye du Puits, July 1944
Ironically, Domingo Martinez survived all this and was killed days later, after the division, including his 313th Regiment, had taken up defensive positions to regather itself. He died on July 12, near a village named Bolleville, and so would not experience the energy and the jubilation of the breakout from the bocage.
With the breakout at month’s end, the Americans would inexorably roll up the Germans, uncover Paris, and liberate the city in August, standing aside to let Free French units and their prickly commander, Gen. Leclerc, enter first. Leclerc would have been furious to learn that Ernest Hemingway and some of his camp followers had preceded him and they were, with great offensive spirit, but also with deteriorating unit cohesion, busy liberating the bar at the Ritz Hotel.
GI’s on parade, Paris, August 1944. These soldiers, from the 28th Infantry Division, marched directly out of Paris and back into combat.
It’s hard not to wish that Pvt. Martinez had been granted at least time enough to celebrate, as well. And maybe, for a migrant farm worker and Dust Bowl refugee, even more time than that.
It is hard not to wish Domingo Martinez the time for a quiet talk with a little granddaughter. She is wearing a crisp white dress–it might be her First Communion– and wide-eyed and attentive, she is looking up at him while they are sitting, nestled together–she is feeling the wonderful safety that a grandfather’s love can provide– on the sofa. They are waiting together for the Sunday lunch his daughters are preparing after Mass, and he is telling the little girl about the five-day leave granted him that summer of 1944.
He decided to visit Notre Dame. Once he’d entered the great church, he took his garrison cap off, crossed himself with holy water, and walked slowly down the nave, the silence pressing on his ears, past the clutter of the pews. There, delighted, he stopped and stood on a spot near the transept where he was suddenly bathed in brilliant, colored sunlight. This is the Rose Window’s gift to men and women of good faith.
