Iron Maiden – "The Longest Day" (2006)

Your number’s up

The bullet’s got your name

This past June, I was part of a group of American pilgrims that visited the D-Day beaches in Normandy.

After leaving Omaha Beach – the site of the most stubborn German resistance to the D-Day landings – we travelled to the nearby Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, where 9380 of our military dead are buried:

One of the most notable Americans buried in that cemetery was Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the eldest son of the 26th President, who was the only American general to land by sea on D-Day with the first wave of troops.  

Roosevelt was also the oldest American soldier to land on D-Day, and the only one who had a son who landed on D-Day.

Teddy Roosevelt, Jr.

Roosevelt distinguished himself on D-Day and in the subsequent fighting in Normandy.  But he died of a heart attack about five weeks after D-Day.  

He was initially buried at Sainte-Mere-Eglise – his pallbearers included Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley – but his body was later moved to the American cemetery in Normandy, next to his youngest brother Quentin, a pilot who had been shot down in France in 1918.

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor several months after D-Day.  Here’s the text of his citation:

For gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty on 6 June 1944, in France. 

After two verbal requests to accompany the leading assault elements in the Normandy invasion had been denied, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt's written request for this mission was approved and he landed with the first wave of the forces assaulting the enemy-held beaches.  

He repeatedly led groups from the beach, over the seawall and established them inland.  His valor, courage, and presence in the very front of the attack and his complete unconcern at being under heavy fire inspired the troops to heights of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice.  

Henry Fonda portrayed Roosevelt
in the 1962 movie, “The Longest Day”

Although the enemy had the beach under constant direct fire, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt moved from one locality to another, rallying men around him, directed and personally led them against the enemy.  

Under his seasoned, precise, calm, and unfaltering leadership, assault troops reduced beach strong points and rapidly moved inland with minimum casualties.  He thus contributed substantially to the successful establishment of the beachhead in France.

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From the Normandy American Cemetery, we drove a few miles west to La Cambe, the site of the largest of the six German cemeteries in Normandy.

The La Cambe cemetery is considerably smaller than the American cemetery, but more than 21,200 German dead are buried there.

Each grave at La Cambe contains two bodies.  For example, this grave holds the remains of Alfred Berger (who died about seven weeks after D-Day) and an unknown German soldier:

In addition, a large central tumulus (or kamaradengraben), topped by a large dark cross in basalt lava, marks the resting place for 207 unknown and 89 identified German soldiers, interred together in a mass grave:
  

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Click here to listen to today’s featured song, which was released in 2006 on Iron Maiden’s 14th studio album, A Matter of Life and Death. 

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Jim Radford – "The Shores of Normandy" (2019)

The largest fleet the world had seen

We sailed in close array

And we set our course for Normandy

At the dawning of the day

The largest seaborne invasion in the history of the world took place on June 6, 1944 – better known as “D-Day” – when some 156,000 Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel on over 4000 transport vessels and landed on five beaches in Normandy, France.  

In June of this year, President Trump and the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, and a number of other countries observed the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Portsmouth, England – the most important of the many D-Day embarkation ports.

Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson

I flew to London the following day and travelled on to Portsmouth, where the group of American pilgrims I was with visited the National Museum of the Royal Navy (which is home to HMS Victory, the flagship of the great Lord Nelson) and The D-Day Story Museum (the only museum in the UK dedicated to D-Day). 

That night, we boarded the MV Normandie, a ferry that can carry up to 2123 passengers and 575 vehicles, for an overnight trip from Portsmouth to Ouistreham, France – which is the port for Caen, the third-largest city in Normandy and was our home away from home for the next four nights.

MV Normandie

Our voyage replicated that of the 29,000 British troops who landed on Sword Beach, which was the easternmost of the five D-Day landing areas.

I don’t mean to compare my English Channel-crossing experience to that of those troops.  After all, I wouldn’t have to face mines, artillery, machine-gun fire, and all the other hazards of war at the end of my voyage.

Also, the soldiers crossed the channel in much smaller ships and on much rougher seas – from what I’ve read, most of them were so seasick that they vomited until there was nothing left to vomit.  Our journey was quite smooth.

My zero-sleep berth

But I’m willing to bet that none of those British soldiers got less sleep than I did.  Because I got zero sleep that night, and I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to get less sleep than that.

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While in Normandy, we visited three museums that were jam-packed with World War II-vintage airplanes, tanks, artillery pieces, trucks, and jeeps:

Of those museums, I think my favorite was the Airborne Museum in Sainte-Mère-Église, which is dedicated to the memory of the American paratroopers who parachuted into that area the night before the D-Day landings.

One of the buildings at the Airborne Museum houses one of the C-47 airplanes that dropped paratroopers that night:

The C-47 is the centerpiece of a large and detailed diorama showing preparations being made for its mission.  That diorama depicts General Eisenhower exhorting a group of paratroopers:  

Eisenhower did in fact speak with men of the 101st Airborne Division a few hours before they took off for Normandy:

Across the street from the Airborne Museum is the Sainte-Mère-Église church, which was built in the 12th century:

The parachute of one unlucky American paratrooper caught on the spire of that church, so he played dead for two hours while his comrades and German troops battled one another.  (He was eventually taken prisoner, but managed to escape and rejoin his unit.)

Today there is a dummy paratrooper hanging from the church spire:

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The next day, we got a close-up look at the well-preserved German fortifications near the village of Longues-sur-Mer:

Next, we took a walk on Omaha Beach, where German resistance to the D-Day landings was the fiercest.  

Almost everything that could go wrong there did go wrong.   The preliminary naval and air bombardment that was supposed to suppress hostile fire from the German defenders was inaccurate and ineffective.  Many of the landing craft carrying American troops got lost and landed them in the wrong places, or discharged them in deeper water that they were prepared for – which required them to jettison much of the equipment they were carrying to avoid being drowned.    

As a result, there was tremendous confusion and disorganization among the invaders – officers were separated from their men, leaving many relatively young and inexperienced soldiers without leadership – and those that did make it ashore had little in the way of heavy weapons, explosives, or communications equipment.  

Monument to Allied troops at Omaha Beach

Not surprisingly, casualties at Omaha Beach – especially among those in the first landing wave – were very high.

In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you about our visit to two very different D-Day cemeteries.

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Jim Radford was only 15 years old when he participated in the D-Day landings as a galley boy on the deep-sea tugboat Empire Larch.

Jim Radford today

“The Shores of Normandy,” which is about the D-Day invasion, is the first song that Radford ever wrote.  It topped both the Amazon and iTunes download charts in the first week of June 2019 when it was released to raise funds for the Normandy Memorial Trust, which is raising funds to build a memorial to the 22,442 British soldiers and sailors who died on D-Day and the subsequent fighting in Normandy.

Click here to watch a video of Jim Radford singing “The Shores of Normandy” in 2014.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Pete Seeger – "Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch" (1959)

Where, oh where, is pretty little Susie?

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch

On the first two days of my recent three-day guided bike tour, I and my ten fellow bikers rode on the Great Allegheny Passage or “GAP” trail – an unpaved but relatively smooth rail trail that begins in Pittsburgh, PA, and ends in Cumberland, MD.

On day three, we rode the westernmost 30 miles of the C&O Canal towpath – which was bumpier and, in places, muddier.

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We left our Cumberland hotel and hit the C&O bright and early on a gorgeous September day.  Unfortunately, there were several major mudholes on the towpath, and a couple of our group’s members took a tumble as a result.

The C&O Canal towpath

The trail was drier and a little smoother after the first ten miles, but it was still a slower ride than the day before – that’s because the part of the GAP Trail that we had ridden on the previous day features a 1.5% downhill grade, while the C&O towpath is purt near level.

Factor in the fatigue that we were all feeling after riding 75 miles in our first two days, and you can understand why we were happy to get the damned ride over with.

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Our guides laid out lunch just before the towpath passed through the Paw Paw Tunnel, which was by far the most interesting thing we saw on our day three ride.

The Paw Paw Tunnel is a 0.6-mile-long structure that was built to bypass a series of five horseshoe bends along the Potomac River.  If the towpath had followed the twists and turns of the Potomac rather than going through the tunnel, it would have added more than five miles to the length of a canal trip.

The western entrance to the Paw Paw Tunnel

Work on the tunnel began in 1836, and it was supposed to take two years to complete.  In fact, it took 14 years to finish and cost almost 20 times as much as it was supposed to.  

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The towpath within the Paw Paw Tunnel is extremely narrow, and the tunnel isn’t lighted.  I had a headlight for my bike, but it was what a Louisiana friend of mine would call a piss-po’ headlight.

I rode a short distance within the tunnel just to say I had, then walked the rest of the way.

Inside the Paw Paw Tunnel

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If you’re wondering where the Paw Paw Tunnel’s name comes from, it comes from the pawpaw tree, which is native to eastern North America.

In 1541, Spanish explorers reported that native Americans cultivated the pawpaw tree for its fruit, which has a very soft texture and tastes vaguely like a banana.  (Maybe that’s why it’s also called the Indian Banana, the West Virginia Banana, the Hoosier Banana, the Appalachian Banana, the Ozark Banana, etc.)   

Chilled pawpaws were a favorite dessert of George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson grew pawpaw trees at Monticello.  

Our guide gathered a few pawpaw fruits from trees growing between the C&O towpath and the Potomac, and sliced them up for us to sample:  

To be perfectly honest, the pawpaw doesn’t do much for me.   

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After our pawpaw-tasting session was over, the guides loaded our bikes on to the roof of our van.  We then loaded ourselves in the van and settled back for the hour-and-a-half drive back to Ohiopyle, PA, where we had parked our cars at the beginning of our trip.

We said our goodbyes and hit the road to drive to our respective homes in Colorado, Oklahoma, Tennessee, New Jersey, and Maryland.

In my case, I hit the Falls City Pub and had one for the road first.  (Yes, I said one – not that it’s any of your business.)

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“Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch” is an American folk song that’s over 100 years old.

Click here to listen a 1959 recording by the legendary folksinger Pete Seeger, his daughter Mika, and the Rev. Larry Eisenberg.

Click on the link below to buy a recording of the song by Burl Ives from Amazon:

Simon & Garfunkel – "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" (1970)

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright

I can't believe your song is gone so soon

I barely learned the tune

Several years, the staff of Smithsonian magazine published an article titled “28 Places to See Before You Die.”

The sites on their list include both manmade structures (the Pyramids of Giza, the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal) and natural wonders (Mount Kilimanjaro, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef, the Iguazu Falls).

There’s no way I’ll ever cross most of those sites off my personal “life list” – I’ve never been to Antarctica, Easter Island, the Serengeti desert, or the Yangtze River, and there’s almost zero chance that I ever will visit those places.

In fact, the only place on the list that I had seen before last week was the Grand Canyon.  

Fallingwater

But I recently visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s most iconic building, Fallingwater, which is probably the most surprising of the sites on the Smithsonian magazine’s list.

At first blush, Fallingwater isn’t in the same league as places like Pompeii and Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu.  After all, it’s just a house – and a relatively small house at that.  

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When you tour Fallingwater, you’re struck by the innumerable details that demonstrate Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius.  But the whole of Fallingwater is much greater than the sum of its individual parts.

By definition, buildings demarcate the indoors from the outdoors.  But even when you are indoors at Fallingwater, you somehow are outdoors as well.

One way Wright accomplished this was to forbid curtains, blinds, or other window coverings.    

Another essential element of Fallingwater are the terraces that accompany each of the house’s rooms.

The windows demand that you look outside, while the terraces demand that you go outside.

My bike tour group prepares
to enter Fallingwater

Fallingwater is not a place for catching up on work or watching TV.  It’s a place for gazing at wildflowers in the spring or turning leaves in the fall, and for listening to the murmur of the waterfalls that the house was built above – a murmur that is ever-present regardless of where within Fallingwater you are.

Click here to learn more about Fallingwater.

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A tour of Fallingwater was included in the three-day group biking tour I took part in last week.

At first, I wondered why we were spending the morning walking through Wright’s house instead of riding our bikes.  After all, we had a lot of ground to cover on day two of that trip, and our visit to Fallingwater meant that it would be after noon before we hit the trail.

On day one of our trip, we rode 32 miles before breaking for lunch.  But on day two, we had to ride 32 miles after lunch.

At the Mason-Dixon Line:
I'm in PA, they're in MD

Not only that, but the first several miles of our postprandial route were slightly uphill.

Once we reached the Eastern Continental Divide, it was downhill all the way.  We lost almost 1800 feet of elevation over the next 25 miles.

And while a 1.5% downhill grade may not sound like much, it was enough to enable me to average 15 or 16 mph – about 20% faster than my average speed on more level ground the previous day.  (I spent much of the afternoon in a gear that I had never used before – I had never taken a ride where I could ride fast enough for long enough to get into that gear.)

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The last 116 miles or so of the Great Allegheny Passage (“GAP”) bike trail parallels a working railroad track.  

That railroad line and the bike trail share the 914-foot-long Brush Tunnel, which was built in 1911:

Click here to see a video that shows you what it would be like to be in the tunnel when a train passes through it.

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I was the first of our group to reach Cumberland, MD, where our second day’s ride ended.  I was more motivated than my fellow riders – I had handed one of our guides a cooler full of beer to stick in our luggage trailer that morning, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a cold one.  (Maybe two.)

After a hearty meal at an old-fashioned Italian restaurant in downtown Cumberland, it was early to bed so we’d be early to rise the next morning for day three of our group bike tour – which I’ll describe in the next 2 or 3 lines.

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“So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” was released in 1970 on Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album.  It’s not much of a song, but there aren’t a lot of songs about Frank Lloyd Wright to choose from.

Click here to listen to “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: 

Julian Cope – "Psychedelic Revolution" (2012)

If you’re a greedhead, you’re going down

If you’re a fat cat, you’re going down

If you’re a moneybags, you’re going down

The greedheads, fat cats, and moneybags – moneybagses? – who made up the “Fuller Syndicate” hoped to create a transcontinental railroad by buying up a number of smaller, interconnecting railroads.

But the financial crisis that resulted in the stock market falling 50% in October 1907 threw a monkey wrench into their plans.  Several of the railroads that were controlled by the syndicate were forced into bankruptcy, and that was that.

The easternmost of the syndicate’s railroads was the Western Maryland Railway, which operated independently after the Panic of 1907 brought an end to the syndicate.  It hauled mostly coal from West Virginia and Pennsylvania to Baltimore, which was the railroad’s eastern terminus.  

The Western Maryland Railway’s logo

In 1975, the Western Maryland merged with a larger railroad that served the same territory.  So most of the its lines were abandoned in favor of those of its merger partner – including a 90-mile-long spur line that ran northwest from Cumberland, MD, to Connellsville, PA. 

A few years later, the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad – another railroad that depended on coal for most of its revenues – decided to abandon a 60-mile-long line that continued from Connellsville to Pittsburgh, PA.  

By putting those two connecting railroad lines together, you had a continuous 150-mile-long abandoned rail corridor just waiting for someone to turn it into a hiker-biker trail.

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The Great Allegheny Passage – or “GAP” – got its start when a nonprofit group acquired the chunk of the Western Maryland’s right of way that ran through Pennsylvania’s Ohiopyle State Park, which includes more than 14 miles of the best whitewater-rafting river in the eastern United States, the Youghiogheny.  In 1986, that group opened a 9.5-mile-long stretch of rail trail to the public.

The GAP Trail project really took off in 1995, when seven trail-building groups formed the Allegheny Trail Alliance. 

The GAP Trail

Construction moved in fits and starts over the next two decades, but the final piece of the GAP Trail opened in 2013.  

And since the C&O Canal towpath connects to the GAP Trail in Cumberland, that meant you could ride all the way from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC – a distance of 330 miles – without worrying about cars.

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Wilderness Voyageurs is one of several companies that offers guided bike rides along the GAP and C&O.  

The company offers a six-day tour that goes all the way from Pittsburgh to the nation’s capital, but that requires you to ride as much as 73 miles in a single day.  (I don’t know how your ass would feel about riding a bike 73 miles in a single day, but my ass said NO F*CKING WAY when I asked it what it thought about trying that.)

The Wilderness Voyageurs HQ in Ohiopyle, PA

So I signed up instead for a condensed, three-day GAP/C&O ride that required “only” 106 miles of riding.  (That’s more than I’ve ever ridden a bike in three consecutive days, but I was able to talk my ass into giving it a shot.)

Last Saturday, I cleaned and lubed my bike, packed every pair of padded bike shorts I owned, and drove to a cheap hotel near Wilderness Voyageurs’ Ohiopyle headquarters, ready to hit the trail early the next morning.

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I introduced myself to the other members of the tour while our guides loaded our luggage and the food and drinks that would sustain us through the 39 miles we would ride on day one of the tour

Our merry little band of bike riders

Our merry little band consisted of three married couples, two pairs of female friends, and me.  I had expected to be the oldest person on the trip, but I wasn’t: most of my fellow travelers were within a few years of me in age.  (Two of the women on the trip were significantly younger, but they certainly weren’t spring chickens.) 

Almost immediately after saddling up, we rode past the Youghiogheny River’s Ohiopyle Falls – not something I would ever want to take on in a kayak, but a lot of people do exactly that:

A kayaker takes on Ohiopyle Falls

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After 16 miles of riding, we took a breather in Connellsville, the only sizable town on this stretch of the GAP trail.  Our guides had laid out a spread of rice crackers with peanut butter, carrot sticks, apples, and the like for us.

Chowing down in Whitsett

We then rode another 16 miles or so to Whitsett, a tiny hamlet that was once a company town built to house coal miners and their families.  After chowing down on some turkey-bacon-avocado-tomato wraps, we mounted our bikes and rode a few more miles to the 479-acre Cedar Creek Park, which was the end of our first day’s ride.

At milepost 100 of the GAP Trail

Once the guides had loaded our bikes on to the roof of our 15-seat van, it was time for an hour’s drive to the Trillium Lodge, which was our destination for the evening.  After beer and wine on the lodge’s wraparound deck, it was time for a guide-cooked meal.  Everyone was in bed by 10 PM.

In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you about our second day’s journey from Meyersdale, PA to Cumberland, MD – which is the end of the line for the GAP trail.

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You probably remember Julian Cope’s 1986 hit single, “World Shut Your Mouth.”  I prefer his follow-up release, “Trampolene,” which I featured in a lengthy 2014 post about Cope.   Click here to read that post, which discusses Cope’s love of Krautrock music and his expertise regarding Neolithic and Bronze Age archeological sites in the UK and Europe.

Today’s featured song, “Psychedelic Revolution,” is the title track of Cope’s 2012 double album of the same name:

Cope, who is about as left-wing as it’s possible to be, dedicated that album to Che Guevara and Leila Khaled, a Palestinian terrorist who became the first female to participate in an airplane hijacking in 1969.  (Khaled later underwent six plastic surgeries in hopes of changing her appearance enough that she could participate in future hijackings without being recognized.)

Click here to listen to “Psychedelic Revolution.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Kinks – "Dandy" (1966)

They long for Dandy, Dandy

Knockin’ on the back door

Climbing through the window

Contrary to what you may have heard, today’s featured song was not inspired by yours truly.  After all,  yours truly was a seriously geeky 14-year-old when Ray Davies wrote “Dandy.” 

(Ten years later, it would have been a different story, of course.)

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I didn’t know until today that “Dandy” was written by the Kinks’ Ray Davies.  That doesn’t surprise me – it’s a very clever song, and Davies was as clever a songwriter as there was.

“Dandy” is about a man who loves the ladies – and vice versa:

You’re chasing all the girls

They can't resist your smile

Oh, they long for Dandy . . . Dandy!

Dandies

Dandy doesn’t discriminate between the unmarried lasses and the married ones:

Hubby’s gone away

And while the cat’s away

The mice are gonna play

Oh, you low down Dandy . . . Dandy!

Playing the field is all well and good when you’re young, but society frowns on older men who live their lives that way:

Look around you
And see the people settle down

And when you’re old and grey
You will remember what they said

That two girls are too many
Three’s a crowd, and four you’re dead

Davies predicts that Dandy won’t give in and settle down.  A leopard can’t change his spots, and neither can Dandy:

You always will be free

You need no sympathy

A bachelor you will stay

And Dandy, you’re all right!

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The Kinks released “Dandy” on their Face to Face album at about the same time that Herman’s Hermits released the song as a single in the U.S., where it went all the way to #5 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”  

The Kinks version was a hit in Europe – it went to #1 in Germany, #2 in Belgium, and #3 in the Netherlands.  But for some reason, the Kinks didn’t release “Dandy” as a single in the UK – and neither did Herman’s Hermits.

Both groups were British, so that seems odd.  Maybe there was an Alphonse and Gaston situation going on: 

Herman’s Hermits: “After you, my dear Kinks!” 

Kinks: “No, you first, my dear Herman’s Hermits!” 

Click here to listen to “Dandy”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: