BAYEUX TAPESTRY OF WAR

Yesterday marked the 75^th anniversary of D-Day.  One of the sites of the D-Day celebrations took place in Bayeux, the first major town on the coast of Normandy liberated by the Allies.  I visited Bayeux in 1984 to see the famous Bayeux Tapestry, which chronicles another famous battle, this one the Battle of Hastings in 1066. 

The tapestry is actually an embroidered linen cloth nearly 70 meters long and 50 centimeters tall, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England.  The subject of the tapestry is the protagonists, William, Duke of Normandy, and Harold, Earl of Wessex, later King of England, and their antagonism, which culminated in the Battle of Hastings.  Per Wiki:

[The tapestry] is thought to date to the 11th century, within a few years after the battle. It tells the story from the point of view of the conquering Normans, but is now agreed to have been made in England. The cloth consists of some seventy scenes, many with Latin tituli [inscriptions], embroidered on linen with colored woolen yarns.  It is likely that it was commissioned by Bishop Odo, William's half-brother, and made in England—not Bayeux—in the 1070s…. The tapestry is currently exhibited at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux….

In a gesture of Anglo-French goodwill worthy of the collaboration of these World War II allies, French President Emmanuel  Macron has agreed to loan the Bayeux Tapestry to the British Museum after 2020, making it the first time the historical document will leave France in 950 years.

There are interesting tactical parallels and causal differences between the Battle of Hastings and the Normandy Invasion, some 878 years apart.  While World War II was an international fight against tyranny and for freedom, the Battle of Hastings was a fight over succession to the English throne, which had been vacated by the death of Edward the Confessor, who died without heirs.  William, the Duke of Normandy, claimed that Edward had promised him the throne and that the pretender, King Harold, had agreed to the succession.  Harold begged to differ and the game was on. 

On October 14, 1066, William set off across the English Channel from what is now Normandy to England to wage a brutal, decisive one-day battle.  Per Wiki:

The battle began at about 9 am on 14 October 1066 and lasted all day, but while a broad outline is known, the exact events are obscured by contradictory accounts in the sources.  Although the numbers on each side were probably about equal [estimated between 7,000 and 10,000], William had both cavalry and infantry, including many archers, while Harold had only foot soldiers and few archers. The English soldiers formed up as a shield wall along the ridge, and were at first so effective that William's army was thrown back with heavy casualties.  Some of William's Breton troops panicked and fled, and some of the English troops appear to have pursued the fleeing Bretons.  Norman cavalry then attacked and killed the pursuing troops.  While the Bretons were fleeing, rumors swept the Norman forces that the duke had been killed, but William rallied his troops. Twice more the Normans made feigned withdrawals, tempting the English into pursuit, and allowing the Norman cavalry to attack them repeatedly.  The available sources are more confused about events in the afternoon, but it appears that the decisive event was the death of Harold, about which different stories are told.  The Bayeux Tapestry has been claimed to show Harold’s death by an arrow to the eye. 

Operation Overlord, on the other hand--not to mention almost a millennium later, was a 1,200-plane airborne assault that preceded an amphibious assault of more than 5,000 vessels and 160,000 troops.  It was an equally brutal and decisive campaign, but unlike the battle memorialized in the tapestry, it took more than a single day.  It also worked in geographical reverse to the Battle of Hastings.  On June 6, 1944, the British and their Allies crossed the English Channel to land at 6:30 am in Normandy, and they arrived not with archers and cavalry, but with infantrymen parachuting in behind enemy lines or landing on the beaches in amphibious vehicles.   At one of the landing sites, Omaha Beach, like William’s men, the American forces were met with a tight defensive line of German soldiers who fired on them from an elevated position on the cliffs above the beach.   

Per Wiki:

Omaha, the most heavily defended sector, was assigned to the U.S. 1^st Infantry Division, supplemented by … the U.S. 29^th Infantry Division.  They faced the 352^nd Infantry Division [a German Army division], rather than the expected single regiment.   Strong currents forced many landing craft east of their intended position or delayed them.  Casualties were heavier than all the other landings combined, as the men were subjected to fire from the cliffs above.  Problems clearing the beach of obstructions led to the beach master calling a halt to further landings of vehicles at 08:30.  A group of destroyers arrived around this time to offer supporting artillery fire.  Exit from Omaha was possible only via five gullies, and by late morning barely six hundred men had reached the higher ground.  By noon, as the artillery fire took its toll and the Germans started to run out of ammunition, the Americans were able to clear some lanes on the beaches.  They also started clearing the draws of enemy defenses so that vehicles could move off the beach.   The tenuous beachhead was expanded over the following days, and the D-Day objectives were accomplished by D+3.

By the end of August, 1944, more than two million Allied troops were in France and the Second World War would draw to a bloody close in Europe in May 1945.  Like William the Conqueror, the Allies were victorious, but at a tremendous cost.

The reasons for warfare are multitudinous, with some premises being more persuasive, necessary, and urgent than others.  But the outcome is always much the same:  death and destruction; rinse and repeat.   For the fallen heroes of Omaha Beach and the other landing sites in Normandy, there is no tapestry commemorating their heroism.  There are instead acres and acres of white crosses inscribed with their names blanketing the rise above the Bay of the Seine at Colleville-sur-Mer.   As described by the American Battle Monuments Commission: 

The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France is located in Colleville-sur-Mer, on the site of the temporary American St. Laurent Cemetery, established by the U.S. First Army on June 8, 1944 as the first American cemetery on European soil in World War II.  The cemetery site, at the north end of its half mile access road, covers 172.5 acres and contains the graves of more than 9,380 of our military dead, most of whom lost their lives in the D-Day landings and ensuing operations.  On the Walls of the Missing, in a semicircular garden on the east side of the memorial, are inscribed 1,557 names.  Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified.

When I think about the people who spun the flax and embroidered the wool onto the linen of the Bayeux Tapestry, I see the mothers, the wives, the sisters, the women friends, and the daughters of the men who died in the Battle of Hastings.  They, like the women who knew and loved the men who fell at Omaha Beach, were the survivors to whom it was left to pick up the pieces—or in this case, the spindles and the needles—and tell the tale.  We don’t often remember the civilian casualties in war, many of them the women, the children, the sick, and the elderly who did not engage in combat but were killed by war nonetheless.  In the case of World War II, it is estimated that of the total number of war-related deaths, civilian deaths accounted for between 50 and 55 million, while military deaths accounted for between 21 and 25 million.  More than double.  Where is their tapestry?  Where is their Colleville-sur-Mer?

 

Keep it real!  Keep it peaceful.

Marilyn