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Tourists Flock to D-Day Landing Site
Visiting Capt. Miller
source: http://archive.abcnews.com/sections/travel/DailyNews/normandy980922.html

O M A H A B E A C H,   Normandy — The tremendous success of Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan has spurred a sudden wave of visitors to the cemetery where the real characters who inspired the film are buried.
     “People come by the hundreds daily and we’ve been told the flow will probably continue into winter and increase in the spring,” says Michael Green, Assistant Superintendent of the sprawling, starkly beautiful, Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.
     “Many visitors ask to visit the grave of ‘Captain Miller,’ the character played by Tom Hanks at whose tombstone the film opens and closes,” says Green, a veteran of the U.S. Marines employed by the American Battle Monuments Commission.
     “We explain Miller is a fictional character, but the family whose odyssey inspired the film existed and two of its sons are buried here,” says 47-year-old Green. “The film could have been called Saving Private Niland, his real name,” he says.
     Green recounts the saga walking across immaculately groomed lawns dotted with endless rows of crosses and Stars of David, a total of 9,386 graves plus a wall with the names of 1,557 missing.
     In the film, Captain Miller (Hanks), whose unit has suffered heavy losses landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day—June 6, 1944—is ordered to find and bring to safety paratroop Private Ryan, played by actor Matt Damon, when the army realizes his three brothers have been killed in action.

3 Brothers, 3 Telegrams
The story mirrors the saga of Frederic, Edward, Robert and Preston Niland from the Buffalo area of upstate New York.
     “Frederic ‘Fritzie’ Niland was with the 101st Airborne Division dropped in the Saint Mere Eglise area of Normandy early on D-Day,” says Green.
     Edward Niland went missing at about the same time when his plane fell behind Japanese lines in Burma.
     “Here are the two other brothers,” says Green, pointing to two crosses side by side, engraved Robert and Preston Niland.
     They are one of 38 pairs of brothers buried in the cemetery overlooking the windswept, deceptively calm beach where more than 2,000 young Americans fell in just a few hours on D-Day.
     They were cut down by murderous, near point blank fire as they clambered ashore.
     Veterans have recounted how some of the wounded were crushed to death by their own tanks as they lay on the beach.
     Hundreds never made it out of the water, and the wrecked barges in which they died can be made out by moonlight at low tide.
     Robert Niland, a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division, was killed on D-Day near the Saint Mere Eglise area while Preston, a second lieutenant with the Fourth Infantry Division, was killed nearby by a sniper on the following day.
     It was said their mother received three telegrams in a single day advising her of their fates.
     The War Department sent urgent orders for Private Frederic Niland to be be located in the war zone and brought home.
     “The mission was given to Chaplain Francis Sampson who found him and gave him the news. He would not go. ‘If my brothers are here, I’m not going to leave them,”‘ Niland reportedly said.
     Sampson, later head of the Army Corps of Chaplains with the rank of Major-General, finally bundled “Fritzie” out of the combat zone to England. He died in 1983, aged 63.
     “Miraculously, Edward also survived. He emerged, emaciated and half-dead from a Japanese prison camp after the war.”
     As Green speaks, a group of Americans listen, spellbound.

A Veteran Returns
“There are many Americans but we get all others too: English and plenty of Germans.” The figures may dramatically increase next month when the film is released in France, making those closest to the site potential visitors.
     The area is dotted with memorials including one for “Big Red One,” the 1st Infantry Division at which current members of the unit now based in Germany held a small ceremony.
     “We’re from 201 Forward Support Battalion of One-Eye-Dee (1st Infantry Division) and we’ve come to honor the history and lineage of our unit,” explains Lieutenant Colonel Tom Schneider of Arlington, Texas.
     A bugler sounds a poignant “Taps,” the U.S. military’s tribute to its dead, as a color party presents arms, the Stars and Stripes flapping into the wind.
     Schneider lays a wreath at the memorial on the bluffs overlooking the Channel before heading to the cemetery, American ground ceded for perpetuity by a grateful France.
     The French government also bought the land around the cemetery to prevent construction within sight.
     The cemetery’s staff of 26 gives special attention to veterans like 73-year-old John Savard of St. Paul, Minn., back for the first time since being wounded nearby on June 21, 1944.
     “I’m still carrying German shrapnel in the center of my chest after 54 years,” says Savard, who saw Private Ryan shortly after its release in the United States.
     “It was hard to watch even after all this time. … I had a hard time with the parts at the cemetery at the opening and the end,” says the retired postal worker.
     The film helped prompt him to seek the graves of Woodrow Hill and Jacob Horowitz, comrades from G Company, 38th Infantry, Second Infantry Division, killed by the same mortar shell which wounded him.
     He also wrote a poem, “Visiting an American Cemetery,” which he mailed to Spielberg. “But I didn’t have the right address and it came back.”
     Savard chokes as he reaches Hill’s grave. “All these years … 54 years and he’s been here ever since. It’s hard.”