Triumph of the Dead

Signal monument at Omaha Beach. 

I shared a long car ride with a relatively new friend who posed this question to me:

"When did you know you loved history?"

I had no answer. I don't remember a time when I wasn't aware of my love for history.

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This week marked the final webinar for my upcoming World War II trip. For about five months in a row we committed to reading a book then meeting online to discuss what we had read. Since each of us have been on trips of this sort, the reading list was a fairly advanced one, with titles on World War II I hadn't heard of before.

Except for our last one, Triumph of the Dead. I heard of it because the author presented to our Normandy '17 group while she was finishing her work on it. It was published this summer. The book explores the meaning behind (and controversies of) our World War II cemeteries in France. Reading it made me feel like I was back in my methods class at Gettysburg. It was a book that made me grateful for all the formal training I had in history more than two decades ago. I could appreciate it as a work of history and hang in there with the discussion of aesthetics and design. I could see angles with which I might disagree and avenues worthy of further research. The book has added to my list of places to experience when I go overseas.

Lemay's presentation on it back in 2017 set my Normandy Institute scholar and I on an amazing odyssey. It sparked Lauren's interest in writing an outstanding paper on the repatriation of the dead. It permitted the two of us to be more conscious of what we were seeing in a cemetery or memorial. It enabled me with the gifts to articulate what we see at a cemetery or memorial when I'm with students or adults.

World War II is an era about which I can keep reading and not find myself fatigued with the topic. It's the first topic in history to draw my passions. It's the topic to which I find myself returning in my middle age. It's the topic that might give me chances to continue researching even after my time with these institutes come to a close.

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The book does give some explanation for the memorials I saw in France that captivated me so much. They're called Signal Monuments, and they were an attempt by the French government to memorialize the fighting in Normandy. Like the American monuments and cemeteries, the design of these Signal Monuments is somewhat asynchronous with the design trends of their age. They also reflect a conflicted view of they French as they tried to create memory of the battles for Normandy, conflicted as the American cemeteries were certain (and in some senses blunt).