Europe Trip 2009 Part 3

D-Day and the Chunnel

As a History teacher there is nothing more real that actually touching the ground or seeing first hand the impact some major event has had on society. It is hard to put into words the emotions I was feeling this day – that we were to cross the English Chanel. To most of the students in our groups this was just an opportunity to sleep on a train. But for me it was much more – you see I knew the date – June 6th, in historical terms “D-Day”.

WWII Multimedia Database
“On 6 June 1944 the Western Allies landed in northern France, opening the long-awaited "Second Front" against Adolf Hitler's Germany. Though they had been fighting in mainland Italy for some nine months, the Normandy invasion was in a strategically more important region, setting the stage to drive the Germans from France and ultimately destroy the National Socialist regime” DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY -- NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER

What a unique honor it was to know that 65 years later I would be crossing the English Channel, certainly not in the same means, nor with the same intensity, but none the less I would be traveling the same land/water that took the lives of so many of our American and Allied soldiers in WWII. The magnitude of understanding what their sacrifice has meant to Americans and others freed around the world. To know that because of these young men, many of them not much older than the boys on tour, sacrificing their lives so that we would have the freedoms to travel, to learn, to see first hand.

I thought back to movies that I have seen, The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan. but mostly the documentaries that aired on PBS World at War series - The announcer in the background, deep voice crying out the horrors of War. Watching film clips of our young soldiers storming the beaches, clips that were shown back home in movie theaters to elicit national pride and encourage enlistment. Those to me were the real meanings behind the invasion. And here I was 65 years later, crossing under, the same waters they crossed. As we crossed under the water in the Chunnel I could not help but want to reach out to all those who died in the water to thank their souls for the sacrifices they made and to their families that will never have a gravesite to visit or honor.


The Chunnel was to start in 1974, ran into problems and was not actually started until 1988. It was completed in May 1994 and opened to passengers in Nov 1994. It is about 31 miles long (under water). It takes only 2 hours and 15 minutes to get from London England to Paris France. There is no “fanfare” letting you know you have entered the Chunnel – it just gets eerie dark for a long long time…………. Then you emerge into the daylight and surrounding new farm land that is France.


God Bless our troops, God Bless our country, God Bless our History
*** Click on Europe Trip 2009 Part 3
at the top of the page and it will take you to a video on D-Day***