Back to Omaha Beach
Normandy, June 1999
by Louis Flynt, as told to his grandson Dallas

I came ashore on Omaha Beach on Wednesday, June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day. I was nineteen years old. Fifty-five years later my grandson took me back. He asked me to tell him what I saw, and he wrote it down, and this is it.

A note from Dallas: These are Granddaddy's words, as close as I could get them. I typed while he talked at my kitchen table in Atlanta on a Sunday afternoon in August. Where I've added something, it's in italics like this. The pictures are mine.

WHO I AM
My name is Louis Flynt. I am 74. I was a machinist in Mobile, Alabama, most of my life, and I am retired. My wife Dorothy and I were married in 1948, and I lost her in 1993. We have a son and two grandsons, and one of them is Dallas, who is 27 and an accountant in Atlanta and the reason I went.

1944
I was a private in an Army engineer combat battalion. Engineers came in to make the beach work. We cleared mines, we cleared the obstacles the Germans had put up, and we built roads up off the sand so the trucks and tanks could get inland. We landed the day after the first wave. A lot had already happened by then, and a lot of men were already gone. I will leave it at that.

After the beach we followed the fighting across France and into Germany, building roads and bridges and taking out mines the whole way. My best friend in the outfit was Harry Kubiak, from Hamtramck, Michigan. He was killed in July of 1944, and he is buried in the American Cemetery above Omaha Beach. I came home in December of 1945, and I never went back. Not once in fifty-four years.

WHY I WENT
Dallas asked me at Christmas if I wanted to go for the 55th anniversary. I told him no. He asked again in February. I told him I'd think about it. By March he had the tickets. He is a lot like his grandmother.

THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 1999
We flew out of Atlanta overnight to Paris. I don't sleep on airplanes. I didn't sleep on the boat in 1944 either.

FRIDAY, JUNE 4
The train from Paris to Bayeux. Green country, cows, apple trees. Bayeux is an old town with a big cathedral, and we stayed there all week in a small hotel with a room up two flights of stairs. Dallas rented a little car. I mean a little car. My knees were up by my ears.

SATURDAY, JUNE 5
Omaha Beach. We went first to the top of the bluff, where I could see the whole thing at once. I had never seen it from up there. In 1944 you saw it from the bottom.

Omaha Beach from the bluff, at low tide. Granddaddy stood here a long time. —D.

The tide was out. When the tide goes out at Omaha it goes a long way, and the sand is flat and wet and shining for what looks like half a mile. That I remembered. I remembered how far it was. It was quiet. A few people walking way out on the sand. Birds. Grass and wildflowers on the bluff where there wasn't any grass at all when I saw it last.

That afternoon we drove west to Pointe du Hoc. That's the cliff the Rangers climbed with ropes and ladders on the morning of June 6, 1944, to get at the German guns on top. The ground up there is still all holes from the bombing and the shells, craters as big as a house, grown over with grass now, and pieces of broken concrete from the bunkers sticking up everywhere. They left it the way it was. I'm glad they did.

Me in one of the craters at Pointe du Hoc, for scale. Granddaddy wouldn't climb down, and he was right. —D.

SUNDAY, JUNE 6
The 55th anniversary. There were ceremonies at the American Cemetery later in the morning, with a lot of people and important people, and I did not want any part of that. So we went early, about seven, before anybody came.

The cemetery is up on the bluff above the beach, at a place called Colleville-sur-Mer. There are more than 9,000 graves, white marble crosses and Stars of David, in rows so straight you can't believe it, on grass as green as a golf course. It is the most peaceful place I have ever been.

The American Cemetery at about 7:15 on the morning of June 6. —D.

The people who work there looked up Harry for me and walked us out to him. I stood there a while. That's all I'm going to say about that.

He said one more thing to Harry, quietly, and I'm not going to write it down. —D.

MONDAY, JUNE 7
Fifty-five years to the day. In the afternoon we went back down to the beach, at the place where I think we came in, though I can't be sure, because it all looks different and it all looks the same. I wanted to walk down to the water by myself. Dallas let me.

He stood there about twenty minutes. I took this one picture and put the camera away. —D.

The water was cold, same as it was. Little waves coming up over my shoes. I got my shoes wet and I didn't care. There were children building something in the sand down the beach and a man throwing a ball for a dog. That's what we went for. That right there.

TUESDAY, JUNE 8
Dallas found a family through a lady at the hotel, the Laurents, who have a farm a few miles inland. The grandfather, Mr. Laurent, was fourteen in 1944, and he remembered the Americans. He remembered the engineers, too: the bulldozers, the trucks, the noise all day and night. He said the soldiers gave him chewing gum and he had never seen chewing gum before.

They had us for lunch in their kitchen, an old stone house with a fireplace big enough to stand in. Mrs. Laurent, his daughter-in-law, cooked a roast of pork with apples, and there was bread and their own cider, and a round cheese from right there in Normandy, and coffee, and a little glass of apple brandy that about took the top of my head off. We were at that table three hours. Mr. Laurent doesn't speak English and I don't speak French. Dallas took French in high school and that helped some. Mostly we pointed and nodded. It worked fine.

Granddaddy and Mr. Laurent at the end of lunch. Neither one would let go first. —D.

When we left he shook my hand with both of his, and he said "thank you" in English. I believe he'd practiced it. I told him the same thing back, and I meant it more than he knew. They kept that country going for four years before we ever got there, and they cleaned it up after we left.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9
Sainte-Mère-Église, a town the paratroopers came down on in the night before the landings. One of the first towns in France to be freed. One of them caught his parachute on the church steeple and hung there, and they have a parachute and the figure of a paratrooper hanging up there today so nobody forgets it. We had a coffee in the square and watched the schoolchildren go by.

THURSDAY, JUNE 10
Home. I slept on the airplane this time. First time in my life.

WHAT HAS CHANGED
Everything is green. The fields, the bluffs, the cemetery. In 1944 there wasn't a green thing on that beach. Now there are children on the sand, and cows in the fields behind it, and houses, and people living their lives. It is quiet. That is the biggest thing. It is so quiet.

WHAT HASN'T
The shape of the bluffs. The way the tide goes out so far. The hedgerows inland, those thick walls of brush and dirt around every little field, that the Germans hid behind. The cold of the water. I knew it all again the minute I saw it.

ABOUT THE WORD HERO
People want to call me a hero. Please don't. I came in the second day. I did my job, the same as about a million other boys, and I came home. The heroes are up on that hill at Colleville and they didn't come home, and Harry is one of them. If you want to do something for them, go and see them. And if you know an old man who was there, ask him about it, and then let him tell it or not tell it, whichever he wants.

For the record, here is what everybody knows: on June 6, 1944, American, British and Canadian troops came ashore on five beaches in Normandy. The Americans had Utah and Omaha. The British had Gold and Sword, and the Canadians had Juno. That was the start of the end of the war in Europe.

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If you were there, or your father or grandfather was, I would be glad to hear from you.
Write to Louis Flynt at [email protected]
(Dallas reads them to him on Sundays.)

Last updated Sunday, September 12, 1999