I watched a good part of Saving Private Ryan again last night. It is so compelling, Tom Hanks’s Capt. Miller especially so, that, amid its graphic violence, it reminds us—Miller reminds us—of who we are.
It also reminded me of a local G.I. killed in Normandy. I wrote about Pvt. Domingo Martinez in World War II Arroyo Grande. He was on my mind as I watched this film again.
This is what I wrote about him.
It was…drought that may have brought a fieldworker, whose family had lived for generations in New Mexico, to these coastal valleys in 1940. Much of his native [New Mexico] in the years before had been swept away by the Dust Bowl. Winds had carried the copper-red soil as far east as the Mid-Atlantic to drop it, like gritty rain from a place that had none, onto ships still sailing freely between continen
Those ships would lose their freedom in the years immediately after, and the coyotes that hunted them without fear were U-boats come out of their lairs in Kiel and later in Lorient. U-boat captains called this the “Happy Time.”
The U-boats would someday kill that young fieldworker, if indirectly, as part of an inexorable chain of events that would lead him to Normandy, so far away from the fields that border Arroyo Grande Creek, and to pastures bound by hedges and grazed by fat dairy cows, cows that lowed piteously to be milked in what had become killing zones. One of them, dead in the crossfire, may have provided scant cover from the German machine guns that harvested crops of young men for fieldworker, now rifleman, Private Domingo Martinez
It is difficult to imagine Normandy in 1944; it is beautiful today, as are its people. A bonjour from an American tourist has more traction here than it does in Paris, and the little villages, separated by pastures and farm fields, are lovely, 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 eart
It is not the ends of the earth, but the Arroyo Grande Valley is 5,500 miles away from the D-Day beaches. 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 serene place above Omaha Beach.
Below the cemetery, just offshore, a visitor today can see young men as they should be—exuberant and free—racing tiny sailboats, their sails bright oranges and reds, just beyond the surf line, where on June 6, 1944, 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
…The [Norman]hedgerows enclosed fields that had been plowed or grazed since Agincourt and were a hopscotch of natural fortresses—roots and compacted earth had formed defensible walls. The GIs had to assault them, one by one, to try to root out the defenders. When they 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. So the Americans could hear but never see in the tangle of the hedges who was killing them so efficiently. With supreme indifference, the bocage quickly transformed GIs into either hardened veterans or into statistics. This is what Private Martinez and the 313th Regiment faced in the attempt to seize the approaches to a key crossroads town, Le Haye du Puits.
There, the Americans fought first-class combat troops, not garrison soldiers, many of them veterans of the Russian front. As the 313th fought to envelop the town, the regiment’s combat chronicle is almost monotonous with passages that have the Americans falling back to their jump-off points after repeated failed attacks through fields, then across a creek, where every time they would be driven back by concentrated German artillery fire. The Germans had not only the finest machine gun of the war but also the finest artillery piece, the versatile 88-mm gun.
Other elements of the 79th Division would take La Haye du Puits while the 313th Regiment continued its sledgehammer attacks to the south. Martinez died during three furious assaults near a little town called Le Bot on July 12. It was likely an 88-mm shell that killed Martinez. Shrapnel to the head and chest ended his life quickly, but his death wasn’t recorded for three days, an indicator of the intensity of the stress the 313th had to endure. The division was victorious, but both the regiment and the division were depleted and their dogfaces, real veterans now, were used up. Signal corps photographers show some Seventy-ninth soldiers playacting outside a wine shop along a street in La Haye du Puits—they sit at a small table amid the rubble, enjoying a fine red wine as if they had dinner reservations and were awaiting the first course. But other photos of other soldiers show men who resemble sleepwalkers: their faces blank and few of them celebratory.
With rest and replacements, the veterans of three weeks’ combat soon joined the breakout from Normandy. Two weeks after Martinez’s death, the Allies launched Operation Cobra, a coordinated drive to the east. They uncovered Paris and liberated the city in August, standing aside to let Free French units and their prickly commander, General Leclerc, enter first. Leclerc would have been furious to learn that Ernest Hemingway and some of his camp followers had preceded him and were, with great offensive spirit but also with deteriorating unit cohesion, busy liberating the bar at the Ritz Hotel.
It’s not hard to wish that Private Martinez had been granted more time—maybe, for this migrant farmworker and Dust Bowl refugee, time enough for a few days’ leave to explore Paris. Perhaps he would decide to visit Notre Dame, where it’s not hard to see him in your mind’s eye. He would enter the great church, remove his garrison cap, and cross himself at a holy water font. Then he would walk up the nave, the silence pressing on his ears, to stand for a moment at the transept crossing, where he would stop to smile with delight as he was bathed in brilliant, colored sunlight. This is the gift of the Rose Window to men and women of good faith.
A Work in Progress 