I’ve been absent from the blog-o-sphere for awhile now, BUT I’ll be back at least once a week throughout the summer to post about my internship, for class credit and to commemorate my experience. I’ll start each post with some information about what I’ve done, then what I’ve learned from that. Secondly, I will post the same topics about an essay that I have read from this book:
“James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia, editors. Public History: Essays From the Field. Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing Company, 1999, revised edition, 2004.”
DAY ONE (Training)
I arrived on site at the Memorial at about 9:45 AM (my internship will be taking place at the D-Day Memorial itself and at the D-Day Memorial Foundation office downtown). My coordinators, Felicia and Maggie, met me there and showed me around the gift shop, where I got my official badge.
Then I got to go into the education tent, where they take field trip groups and give them some insight into World War II life in the war and on the home front. More on that later, but at 10:30 AM I got to take my first tour of the Memorial.
It was a beautiful day that felt just like summer, and I forgot my breakfast, so the hour long tour was brutal; however, the Memorial was gorgeous and my tour was informative. The architect of the Memorial tried to tell different stories about June 6, 1944 (P.S. that’s D-Day), and he did an excellent job. The Memorial itself is shaped like the shield on the back of my badge, each part of the shield representing something to do with that day:
The black background = Nazi oppression
The Crusaders sword = justice the Allies wanted to give to the Nazis
The rainbow = the coalition of countries that fought that day (British, American, Canadian forces)
The blue at the top = promise of liberation
The first stop on the tour was the British garden, which encompassed the leadership of D-Day and is designed similarly to the shield symbol (you can see the sword in the above photo). The S.H.A.E.F. (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) was made up of many military men from the Coalition, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Each leader is represented by a bronze bust, except for Ike, who has a whole statue of himself modeled after this photo of him talking to a paratrooper (side note: about fishing, not war).
He is protected by a gazebo, whose ceiling is made up of a battle map mosaic of the troop movements on D-Day. The tour moved on to plaques that represented the companies of people that played a role in the invasion…including my personal favorites, the Keydets (RAH VA MIL!):
We then stepped up onto the recreation of the beaches the soldiers landed on in Normandy. In the East was Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, and Utah respectively as we went West. Canadians made up the Sword beach, Canadians and British made up Juno, British made up Gold, and Omaha and Utah were reserved for the U.S. Omaha was the deadliest of the beaches and on it marched the Bedford Boys from the 29th Infantry Division.
The major proponent of the D-Day Memorial, D-Day veteran J. Robert Slaughter, helped choose Bedford, VA as the place to build it because the community of Bedford lost the highest percentage of men (nineteen out of thirty five soldiers they sent in) of any community in the entire U.S. during D-Day. The scene in the reflecting pool depicts the different struggles the men may have encountered that day as they left their Higgins boats and headed for shore.
The giant arch on the Memorial site has the same idea as the Arc de Triumph in Paris, with the rooftops that must have been seen by Airmen that day represented in black and white. The arch is inscribed with the word “Overlord,” which is the name the operation was given. The significance of the black and white is that those colors were the indication of “invasion,” and were painted on every plane that flew above the beaches of Normandy that day.
The D-Day Memorial Foundation’s motto is that their site remain a memorial to the “valor, fidelity, and sacrifice” of the Allied forces that took part in the landing on June 6, 1944 in Normandy. From what I saw my first tour my first day, I look forward to continuing the values of the Foundation because they were obvious and they are honorable goals. So many soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice that day.
After I left my tour, I went down to the downtown office to fill out paperwork and talk about the expectations for my internship. I will be traveling there on Tuesdays/Thursdays through the summer, with the exception of going only Fridays during my summer class and three days in a row for the day camp they hold in June.
To get a taste of my pathway of education, after lunch I got to watch Maggie give a presentation to a field trip inside the education tent up at the site. She used artifacts and information to appeal to the children to help them understand the importance of what happened in World War II, specifically D-Day’s importance. It was helpful to me to see what caught the kids’ attention and what did not. She dressed up one of the boys like a soldier and let the class decide what he might have needed when landing on the beach June 6, 1944. The education tent and its contents were a great way to put the kids in the perspectives of the soldiers, as the tent itself was a replica of a M.A.S.H. tent.
After the hour long education program I got to tag along for the tour for the kids to see how it was different for them. There was not much of a difference, which is convenient because it is my individual “project” for the summer to tailor a tour specifically for field trips. My goal is to make it interactive and make it more relatable to children of varying ages. We will see if I achieve that goal.
>>>>>Day One was important to my understanding of how the Foundation ran the Memorial. I learned about its fundamental values and its mission statement, and about the sacred nature of the site. I learned more about D-Day than I ever learned in school and I understand now the significance of it not only to Bedford, VA, but to the entire state of Virginia, as the 29th Infantry was made up of Virginians. It was a good start to the summer. I am looking forward to learning more about D-Day and more about how we as historians can make history applicable, interesting, and relatable to the general public.<<<<<<<<
For now, it’s off to bed because I’ve got an early start for Day Two (Training)———
oh the places you'll go 
Nice job. It’s a real challenge to make old stuff (history) come alive for younger people who spend all day with their noses in their phones. Buena suerte.