Utah Beach: Walking in My Grandfather’s Footsteps

Erin at Utah. © Erin Faith Allen

On the 73rd anniversary of D-Day, I am walking sand that my grandfather crossed.

He did not land here on June 6th. He came six weeks later, from an airfield in England, in the months after the beaches were taken and held. He moved through villages and airfields with his unit, on through Belgium, and into Germany, before the war released him and he came home to California. He married and had children and had grandchildren and lived for many years after as a gentle and steady presence in our family, and his descendants are now in the double digits.

I think about that as I stand here. The vast and quiet ripple of one man coming home, spreading forward through decades and across lives he would never live to meet.

Utah Beach is the westernmost of the Allied landing beaches, and also the beach with the lowest casualty rate of the five, which is a sentence that contains its own particular weight. Lowest. Still thousands. The language of military history does what it must to hold numbers the human mind cannot otherwise carry.

With sand crunching beneath my toes, I feel the full scale of what was asked of the men who crossed it on June 6, 1944, the ones who fell here on the beach itself, and the ones who made it to the fields and barns and dirt roads and cobbled streets and forests beyond, and fell there instead, and the ones who kept moving all the way through and came home carrying what they carried for the rest of their lives.

My grandfather was one of those, and I know how fortunate that makes me.

His DNA moves through his descendants in quiet and particular ways: a love of books, green thumbs and a pull toward the natural world, hands that need to make things, a seeking after decency and stillness. I recognize him in all of it, scattered across the people who came after him.

It is not hard to feel the presence of the men who did not return at places like the Normandy beaches, or the cemetery that rests just beyond the sea. Every name on every marker is the collapsed future of a family that never got to count its own.

We were lucky. He came home.