Remembering Pointe du Hoc

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Peggy Noonan’s opinion piece of the May 25-26, 2019, print edition of The Wall Street Journal is entitled: “Which Way to Pointe du Hoc?” While the second part of Noonan’s piece is about her speaking at this year’s Notre Dame commencement ceremony, the first part of her piece is about the Allied taking of Pointe du Hoc on D-Day.

She writes:

The week after next marks the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. People will be thinking of D-Day and seeing old clips of the speechifying that marked its anniversaries. I will think of two things. One is what most impressed Ronald Reagan. He spoke at the 40th anniversary, on June 6, 1984, at the U.S. Ranger Monument, and seated in the front rows as he spoke were the boys of Pointe du Hoc.

“Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here,” he told them. “You were young the day you took those cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys.” Many were old now and some wept to remember what they had done, almost as if they were seeing their feat clearly for the first time.

Reading these words brought tears to my eyes, because in the spring of 1972 my husband, First Lieutenant Mitchell R. Miller, and I had stood at the top of Pointe du Hoc looking down at the sea.

Here is what I have written about this experience in my unpublished memoir — OCCUPYING GERMANY: ON THE FRONT LINES OF STOPPING THE RED MENACE:

Chapter 27: April 28, 1972

President Nixon announces that 20,000 more U.S troops will be withdrawn from Vietnam over the next two months, despite the intense North Vietnamese offensive launched in Indochina in the past three weeks. – April 26, 1972

“MILLER, Phyllis Z., Resignation, 03-11-72, Clerk Stenographer, 66th MI Group, OCI Section, CI Division, APO 09108. To travel prior to returning to CONUS with sponsor.” – Notification of Personnel Action

Mitch and I stood at the site of the Allied D-Day invasion during World War II – the audacious landing in Normandy that began on June 6, 1944, and eventually led to the end of the war.

We were the only ones here on this windswept French landscape, the five landing beaches spread below us as Mitch explained the invasion to me.

When we reached Pointe du Hoc, a 100-foot cliff with Nazi concrete gun batteries still visible at the top, I gasped.

“To get off the landing boats and face this cliff, they had to know they would die,” I said.

Mitch nodded.  “Tremendous casualties here.”

Then he added, “By the time my father landed in France, Normandy was already secured.”

The enormity of this military operation was almost too much to imagine, especially as the surrounding landscape was now so barren.

Equally disquieting was the thought that the success of the invasion did not immediately end the war.  The Allied forces had to fight the Nazis for 11 more months after D-Day.

Let us always remember all the men and women since the the creation of the United States who have given their lives, their physical health and their mental health to protect our freedom.