Memorial

One of my great dreams was to be a military pilot. A Spitfire pilot, in the Battle of Britain, to be exact. It seemed worth the risk of death to be able to down a few Nazis, and the plane had the same name as a sports car I loved, both sharing a country of origin. I was severely disappointed to learn that the Battle had been won without me, and that there were no Nazis for me to shoot down.

My grandfather Ranville was at the landing on D-Day. I had always thought he had spent his time below decks on a Navy ship, safely away from harm. Turns out that he saw more than enough, including the bodies of other young men, floating in the tide around his boat.

Just a few short miles inland, the town whose name we carry, Ranville, France, was the first town liberated by paratroops dropped in the night before the invasion. Ranville was close to river crossings that had to be taken and held (the town itself was not the target). A small band of men took and held it, turning back the greatest tank army the world ever knew. Today, it is one of the sites frequently visited by D-Day historians and tourists.

In between my grandfather and those men holding those bridges, thousands of young men died. Many are buried in and around Ranville, a site famous for its WWII cemeteries.

Sometimes, I still feel quite bitter about missing the Battle of Britain, or the jump in to Ranville, or the landing on D-Day. It's not so much that I want to die in battle; in fact, I really don't. It's just that what they were fighting for would have been worth dying in battle for.

I wouldn't have been ashamed to lie under a plain, white, cross, in the town that gave me my name.