St Laurent Cemetery After D-Day

By Jean Kavale

On a windy day in September 1947, the following officials marched to a speaker's stand at St.
Laurent temporary cemetery in Normandy, overlooking Omaha Beach: Jefferson Caffery, U.S.
Ambassador to France; Lt. Gen. Clarence R. Huebner, deputy EUCOM commander; and Brig.
Gen. Howard L. Peckham, commander of the American Graves Registration Command (AGRC)
in Europe. A photograph of the event appeared shortly afterwards in the U.S. Army newspaper,
The Stars and Stripes.

The officials were there to pay homage to soldiers buried at St. Laurent who were to be
unearthed that fall."Many will be returned to the United States, per the request of their next of
kin," General Peckham explained to the crowd of spectators (which included several veterans'
groups). Other deceased soldiers would be reinterred at St. Laurent, again in accordance with the
wishes of the next of kin. My father also explained that the cemetery would be reopened as a
permanent resting place, one of the ten permanent American cemeteries in Europe to be graded
and constructed under his command.

Five of those ten cemeteries were to be located in France: Draguignan in the south, Epinal in the
northeast, St. Avold near the German border, St. James in Brittany, and St. Laurent in
Normandy. These five were selected as the resting places of predominantly First, Seventh, and
Third Army casualties. All of these sites had an association with a nearby battle or engagement.
With the exception of St. Avold, which was to be built on new ground, all would be on the site of
a former temporary cemetery.

St. Laurent, overlooking Omaha Beach, came into existence only twenty-four hours after that
first grim D-Day assault on June 6, 1944. ("Omaha" was the code name for the six-thousand-
yard beach between Vierville and Colleville, the main landing area for the American forces).
Immediately after they disembarked from the landing craft, many soldiers were mercilessly
gunned down by enemy machine-gun fire. They were buried as soon as possible on the beach but
were later interred at St. Laurent. Several others laid to rest at that cemetery had participated in
an airborne assault near Sainte-Mere-Eglise, "where the American flag was first raised over
French soil on D-Day" (U.S. News and World Report, September 27, 1993). Many others died in
operations that occurred after D-Day.

Near the end of March 1948, Dad was scheduled to meet with Col. Stevenson, the officer in
charge of AGRC activities in Normandy. My mother and I decided to join him. I was sixteen at
the time and living with my parents in Paris, where I attended high school. On this particular
journey, we motored north of Paris for several hours, past diminutive thatch-roofed farmhouses
and quaint villages. In some areas, the flowers of early spring had already started poking their
heads through the softening ground. It was a pretty drive. Eventually, we arrived at a small town
in Normandy west of Le Havre, where Colonel Stevenson met us and drove us to his seaside
villa, where we would be staying. My diary notes that we lunched with the colonel and his wife
on delicious coq au vin, accompanied by welcome glasses of cold Perrier water (according to my
diary, which I still have in my possession).
A bit later the colonel took my mother and me down to see Omaha Beach, where the D-Day
landing had taken place fewer than four years earlier. (Because of his work, my father had
already visited that area of France many times.) Mother and I found the view to be unbelievably
sad, especially considering the loss of life that occurred there. Barges and military vehicles,
strewn at various angles on the broad beach, now stood in vacant silence. Foxholes on the sandy
banks were as empty as air, and machine-gun nests that once rattled with German gunfire now
sat quietly.

That night, while I was asleep in one of the guest rooms at the villa, the sound of a dog's
plaintive barking suddenly awakened me. It was an eerie bark, and it seemed to come from far
away. I wondered whether the dog sensed what had happened in that area of Normandy during
World War II, or if he had even been a witness to it. I finally got back to sleep, but that sound
stayed with me for a long time.

AGRC personnel would soon start the grading work and construction at St. Laurent, a subject
that both my father and Colonel Stevenson had discussed at length. Because of the cemetery's
proximity to the English Channel, construction work was difficult. "AGRC engineers often had
to trudge through thick mud, and workmen frequently had to move their heavy equipment along
in clay-like soil," my father explained to us later. Dad had spent twenty years in the Army Corps
of Engineers before transferring to the Quartermaster Corps, so he sympathized with the
workers. Subsequently, reinterments proceeded at a slow pace. Considering its D-Day
significance, the results were well worth the painstaking efforts made by AGRC personnel in the
grading, construction, and reinterments.

St. Laurent (now called Normandy American Cemetery) is probably the best-known U.S.
cemetery in Europe, due to its connection to the history of D-Day. It movingly appears in the
opening scenes of a film made several years ago, Saving Private Ryan. Recently, many
Americans saw it on TV when President Obama of the United States, President Sarkozy of
France, and Prince Charles of Great Britain came there to commemorate the 65th anniversary of
D-Day.

Upon the completion of reinterments, and still bearing their original names, St. Laurent and the
other ten permanent cemeteries in Europe were progressively transferred from the AGRC to the
American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC). These transfers occurred between July 1949
and early 1951, when the AGRC's work was finished. The ABMC later replaced the U.S. Army's
simple wooden crosses and stars with those of marble. That agency also erected other structures,
such as chapels and statues, and continued to beautifully maintain them.

Near the beaches where the Allied forces landed more than fifty years ago and where the
Rangers climbed the steep cliffs with ladders and grappling hooks, there is now a memorial, the
Caen Memorial and Museum for Peace. It is significant that a memorial for peace is located so
close to the location of the D-Day landing, the dramatic event that preceded the liberation of
Europe in 1944. As correctly noted by Ohio Governor John Bricker, D-Day was "the beginning
of the end of the forces of evil and destruction."

The heroic soldiers who were laid to rest at St. Laurent Cemetery did not die in vain.
____________________________________###_______________________________________

Much of the information in this article appears in the biography I wrote about my dad, A Salute
to Patriotism: The Life and Work of Major General Howard L. Peckham.

I'm a former Silicon Valley editor and the author of three books, published by Cypress
Publishing in Saratoga. You can read more about them at the publisher's website.

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