D Days

6th June 2009

“I am from Hamburg, where are you from? Did you see the commemorations of the D Day landing in Normandy? Didn’t Prince Charles look small!”

The shop owner was friendly, as she served us in her small fashion shop in Fredericksburg, Virgnia, 146 years after the US Civil War. She seemed really pleased to see some fellow Europeans.

We were in Fredericksburg, about 1 hour south of Washington DC, and we had just finished a short tour of the Fredericksburg Civil War battlefield.

On the road between Washington DC and the Confederate capital, Richmond, it was at a strategic crossing point of the Rappahannock River. One of four bloody, and mostly indecisive battles at the end of 1863 and into 1864 in this area, Abraham Lincoln and the Union army was loosing, and desperately needed victory. He hadn’t yet found a General to bring him the victory needed to turn the war (Ulysses S Grant), and this was not going to give him one either. The Union General in charge hadn’t realized the importance of Geography yet; the key commanders had used 2 different, out of date maps, and the lay of the land was against them as well. The Union army came out of the town, and up the slopes, crossing 200 yards of open ground, with only a small dip for cover - the dip can still be seen if the cars are parked along the residential street that crosses the same ground - the tyres of the cars are hidden below the dip. Confederates lined up behind the wall, and shot the Union soldiers dead, one after the other. The small, quaint wooden house still had the bullet holes. Over 100,000 people died in the four battles.

65 years since D Day. Fighting for freedom.


We walked around the town, and admired the classic cars lined along the street for a local competition, and finished off at the local Irish pub “The Blarney Stone”, before being driven back by our friends Larry and Christine, to DC, past the Marine’s Museum, the memorial to the Air Force, Arlington Cemetery (with its tomb of the unknown soldier), and the Statue that commemorates the raising of the US flag at Iwo Jima.