 excited to introduce from Kohler High School. We have Cecilia Zilke and her teacher, Mr. Matthew Bions, who are here to talk about a wonderful opportunity that they had with National History Day. If you looked out in our exhibit out there, you probably saw their faces on a picture out there, so they are very steeped in National History Day and had a great opportunity to study in the National History Day Normandy Institute. So I will give it to them for them to explain that more. Okay, so for those of you who haven't heard about National History Day, what it is is it's a program throughout the U.S. where you create historical projects, or projects based on historical topics. So I've been doing it since sixth grade and Mr. Bions was my teacher in sixth grade when we started doing this. And so what we did last year was we actually applied to a program through National History Day called the Normandy Sacrifice for Freedom Student and Teacher Institute. So here's a few more pictures of our National History Day experience. But then we'll move on. So this program is run through National History Day and also the George Washington University. And basically what who established this was Albert H. Small and he was a philanthropist, or he's now a philanthropist in D.C. and was once a real estate developer, but when he went to Normandy, he was a veteran in Normandy, and when he returned he realized that he really wanted to convey the sacrifice that the soldiers that fought in Normandy during World War II to my generation and the generations in the U.S. So one of his first ideas was to actually get planes coming from D.C. and fly them over the Atlantic and bring as many people as possible into Normandy. And he asked one of his friends about this and his friend said, you know what, that's probably not gonna work. But so instead they developed this program called the Albert H. Small and Normandy Institute. And so what it is is each year National History Day and then George Washington University except 15 students and teachers from around the nation. And then you study Normandy first digitally and then next you actually go to the George Washington University and then you go to Normandy and then the students throughout the experience conduct research and on a soldier and then when they return, Albert wanted us to present to our communities about our experience so he could convey the message of sacrifice through us. So yeah, I'm sorry. Just a little plug for Mr. Albert H. Small. This was all funded from him. We had to pay nothing for any of this. So being a philanthropist, the one of the things, well the last things we did before we went to Normandy was visit his own museum. He has his own museum on the campus of George Washington. Like I want my own museum and it was pretty neat. He was really amazing. And as part of the research, we read some amazing stories and excerpts and firsthand's accounts and we have a collection of the books up here that we've read and maybe you're familiar with the Bedford Boys, a fantastic account. And Bedford is where the Normandy National Memorial is in Bedford, Virginia, a place that we haven't been to that we constantly talk about that we'd like to visit. But amazing program. Yes. So like I mentioned before, we started this experience. We applied last fall through National History Day so we had to write several essays and then we found out that we got in in January of this past year, or of 2018. So we ended up working with 15 other students and teachers from around the country. So this is a picture of me. So I'm up here right there and then these are the 14 other students that I was working with during the experience. So we started out this experience doing digital research. So we did this through a program called Schoology and what it was was we read those books and then a lot of other primary sources about the Normandy invasion so we could just get an idea of the context before we actually went to Normandy. So one of the tasks that we had to do through this was research a silent hero from our state who was a Wisconsin veteran that actually fought in the Normandy campaign and then died on D-Day or shortly after. So we'll go into more details on our hero now. So I'm just to talk a little bit about the war coming into the US. So first there was like a lend-lease policy between the US and Britain. So first the US didn't really want to go into war so they were kind of reluctant to go into it just because of what happened with World War I. But then Pearl Harbor happened and then we went into war. So the home front and then so I'll talk about the home front and our silent hero. So we chose our silent hero to be Corporal Joseph Brighamon and so what we had to do was we went to the American Battle Monuments Commission which has documented all the soldiers from every state who fought in various campaigns throughout US history. So we chose Joseph Brighamon mainly because he was an engineer in World War II and the Normandy Institute hadn't heard of a lot of engineers, hadn't done a lot of research on them so we wanted to document his experience and Corporal Joseph Brighamon was from Cashion, Wisconsin so that's in Monroe County and it's kind of near the center of the state. I think we'll show a map later. But so the first thing we had to do was look at census records on ancestry and I believe, well so okay so here's a map. So this is Cashion, Wisconsin. The red dot is shown on the map there and then this is a picture of his unit which was taken in Madison when he was drafted into the war and then there's a picture of him on the left. In doing years and years of research with working with students in NHD sometimes you struggle early on finding anything about your topic and that's where we were and Cecilia's been doing a lot of research on different topics over the years and we were actually kind of frustrated. The coordinator said, don't worry about that. You may not find a lot, it's not who finds the most wins or anything like that so we really struggled to find a lot of information. Cecilia talked about the census records but there was a wow moment that happened to us so early on we were like, do we pick the right person? Because there was very little information. Because sometimes they said that people actually don't even find pictures of their silent hero so we were thinking that might be us but fortunately it wasn't. So these are some of the census records that we looked at first. So we were instructed to go on to Ancestry which the National History Day program actually gave our school a grant for but so this is one of the first things that we found so down here you can just kind of see his family. So Corporal Brighamon's father died, passed away when he was very young but his mother was still alive and this is the 1930 census records from Wisconsin. So his mother Agnes was still alive so we found out that she owned a farm from this information and that Corporal Joseph Brighamon actually still worked on that farm at that time and actually we found out from other censuses that he still worked on the farm up to the time he was drafted into the war and from this we also found out that he had three brothers, Matt, Herman and Edward and then one sister whose name was actually Cecilia too which was interesting so. And then just a little bit more about the home front. So Joseph Brighamon like we mentioned he owned a farm but during the Great Depression the prices of crops they were trying to increase them because there was such a surplus of crops in the US so the Agricultural Adjustment Act took place as part of the New Deal in Wisconsin but also during the Great Depression there was a huge movement of farmers from rural to urban areas. So we saw that but then when World War II happened they needed more crops to reinforce the troops so they're actually farm deferments granted in four soldiers, excuse me, sorry, four soldiers who didn't thought that they would do more good at home than actually going to war so we didn't see this with Corporal Joseph Brighamon which we thought was kind of an honorable characteristic. Okay and then just a little bit more about the home front. We had to research the home front as one of the aspects of our research on Corporal Joseph Brighamon. So in Monroe County, Wisconsin, there was a fort called Fort McCoy and I know I talked to a couple other people that had been there today but you can still go today. We're hoping to do that this summer but so it's in Sparta, Wisconsin and during the Great Depression it was a location for the Civilian Conservation Corps and then in World War II in 1940 it became a location where they did the second army maneuvers of World War II so they had over 65,000 soldiers from the Midwest train here and then they also had nurse basic training and then a limited service school so for soldiers who were physically disabled they had them train here and learn some radio skills and other things. So then another interesting point it was also a prisoner of war camp so it had Japanese, Korean and German soldiers at this fort and we found this picture in a Sun Prairie newspaper and it claims to be Japanese prisoners of war outside of their barracks at Fort McCoy so that's kind of interesting. And then it was also a Japanese relocation center. It was a rather small one but it was also that that's another interesting thing we found in our research. And then this is some correspondence from the Monroe County Historical Society which really helped us in our research of Corporal Joseph Brigham in. So this was kind of the wow moment as Mr. Bynes was talking about. So we'd been contacting the curator of this historical society and he found 26 pages of correspondence that Corporal Joseph Brigham in wrote to his family while he was stationed in both England and France during the war. So this told us a lot about his experience and we'll mention some of the stuff later when we talk about our experience in France but a lot of it was that he saw in the Norman countryside kind of very similar things to what there was in Wisconsin which was interesting. One of the other things is the military edited all correspondence going home and we noticed that some of the pages were the exact same but they were in different handwriting. So you could tell that and very little information about where he was or what he was doing. It was all about almost like civilian life like he was living like what he was eating, going to mass, very religious. So really insight into who he was even more than just his military experiences. Yes. So now we'll kind of talk about our experience at George Washington. So after we finished doing this digital research we went to DC this past summer for a week and we studied more from professors at George Washington about the Normandy invasion. So our opening dinner was with Mr. Albert H. Small who we discussed before so we actually got to meet him which was a great experience and then we met some other, another person who was actually working as a beach head beach master. Beach master excuse me in the Normandy invasion. So he was a veteran and he was 105 years old. So we got to hear, he was actually going to speak but instead he just gave us what he was going to say. He had someone else read it for him because he was so old but that was a fantastic experience to meet those veterans. And then just to talk a little bit more about the presenters that we saw. We saw quite a few professors of history from George Washington University and they talked about various topics from the French resistance all the way to like the Nazi regime in the war just to give us background about the Normandy invasion. And then we also heard from a colonel at West Point and then Julian Hipkins III who spoke to us at Arlington about some of the soldiers who fought in Normandy who were buried there. And he was from DC public schools. The students that participated were engaged a lot. These professors took a semester's worth of material and condensed it to about two hours. So it was amazing, the amount of information they were shared and the interaction with the students. They were just two, three hours for kids to sit to do anything these days but they were engaged every time. It was just amazing that research and knowledge that they gave us. So this is a picture from like one of the classrooms that we were in with some of the other students and teachers. So then we were also in DC at this time because George Washington is in DC. So we were there for six days and besides learning from these professors in DC we went to the monuments and memorials. So we went to the World War II Memorial in DC and then also the Holocaust Memorial Museum. And then like I said before we went to Arlington and actually focused on soldiers who had been in the Normandy invasion, who were buried there. While we were at the Holocaust, we got to hear from a Holocaust survivor amazing story of how her family, much like Anne Frank, kind of escaped the persecution. And to make a long story short, the girl was six years old and with her and her brother and her family lived in this apartment for almost seven years. She didn't see the outside world until she was like 12 or 13. Can't imagine. Never saw trees, never saw any other people. That's, and she shared that experience of being with her family and then getting into the outside world after six years, it was just incredible story. I remember her saying like she didn't even want to be outside because of like how bright it was. And seeing other people was just terrifying for her. Amazing. Yeah, that was interesting. Okay. So these are some more pictures from DC. So it was interesting. We were actually there on Father's Day. So they decorated the memorials with roses. And I don't remember exactly which colors the roses represented, but some were for fathers, some were for grandfathers, but of these people who had all passed away and were represented on the memorials. Yes. Okay, and then one of the opportunities that we had while we were in DC was going to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. So what we actually had to do first was we had to go get a researcher card. And for that we went to the National Archives that you'd probably think of that are in DC that house the Declaration of Independence and some of those documents. But then we actually went to the National Archives in College Park and this facility is the largest archival facility in the US and it's just a massive structure. And I was surprised by how large it was. But so what happened was we were paired up with a researcher who's named Ken Whitney and we'd been paired up with him also in like the digital part of our research. So we told him everything that we found out about Corporal Joseph Brigham in. And then what he would do is he would pull stuff at the National Archives for us in the months leading up to it. That would have information on the unit that Corporal Joseph Brigham was in. So he was part of the 342nd Engineer General Service Regiment during World War II. So Mr. Whitney pulled boxes for us which you can see here from textual records, photographic records, and then cartographic records, so map records. So we had the opportunity to look through all of those and we only had one day there which might seem like a lot of time but it definitely was not a lot of time. We probably could have stayed there for the whole time we were in DC but so that was really interesting. We didn't actually find any pictures of Corporal Joseph Brigham in the records but we found a lot of his unit which I believe I'll show you a little bit later which we'll talk about and when we talk about our experience in France. So then we actually traveled to Normandy. So what we did was we had five days there and we stayed in Bayou, France which is a town that was the first to be liberated so it was still largely intact. However, when you went to other towns they were largely destroyed because of the invasion so it was a really neat experience to be in Bayou. We'll actually talk a little bit about it more later but there's a picture over there that Mr. Bynes got from Bayou that shows the Notre Dame Cathedral in Bayou which was actually built before the Notre Dame in Paris so that's interesting. Okay, so this is just kind of a map of the invasion so we'll talk a little bit more about what we learned about the invasion now but this is a map of where each force entered Normandy through. Okay, so the Nazi enemy. So revenge of World War I was the underlying cause for Hitler's development or initiation of World War I. So some characteristics of Nazi Germany that we learned about from the professors at George Washington University were that they were largely driven by, they were driven more so than other enemies and that they would fight to the death so that was something interesting that we learned. And then also another thing though was that the German Nazi party actually thought that the invasion would be happening at other points in France and not in the Normandy coast and this was largely because of a deception kind of operation that the US instituted which we'll talk about a little bit later but for this reason they actually had Eastern European and Polish units stationed in Normandy and not their top SS forces which was kind of interesting. So we'll just give you some background now. So the Maginot Line was where Germany invaded France from So Germany invaded France and then the Nazis occupied Paris and then, okay so I'll show you on this map so there's an occupied zone which is in the red on the map and then there's the free zone. So the occupied zone was still largely controlled by the Nazi forces and then the free zone was controlled by the Vici regime which was a government that the French technically developed but it was still largely collaborating with the Nazi forces. So the people that were actually in support of the French Republic were actually a large part of the French resistance which was kind of more of an underground movement and the leader of this movement was Charles de Gaulle. So he fled to London. And we'll talk about this on the French resistance. So this is Charles de Gaulle and so he was in London. I believe, Mr. Bynes, do you remember the date he fled to London? I think it was... It was like June 12th, I wanna say, in 1940. Yeah, June 12th, 1940. So he was in London and he was running this French resistance movement through London. So what he did was he actually communicated with people in France that wanted to be part of this resistance movement and were necessarily supportive of the Nazi party. So what he did was he communicated by radio with them. So he had several appeals that were very popular that you can still listen to today like you'll find them on YouTube but what they did was they advocated for this movement, this resistance movement and these people, what they did, they developed some more militia-like units so they actually fought against some of the Nazis so there were several uprisings but what they also did was they found ways to communicate with the American forces and the British forces in England. So an interesting story about this was actually Cafe Gondre. And so we went to Cafe Gondre when we were in France but it was near Pegasus Bridge so it was one of the first places where the Allies landed in France during the Normandy invasion and so what happened was this family, the Gondre family, was living in Normandy and they'd been there for a very long time but they spoke both German and French and English. So what they did was they were part of this resistance movement and they had decided to communicate with some of the Allied forces and so what Mr. Gondre did, who was the owner of this cafe, was he pretended that he didn't speak German and he would listen into the German soldiers' conversations that were coming to his cafe to eat when the Nazis had occupied the Normandy region and then he would communicate with an Allied commander and tell them what the plans for the German forces were and one of the things that the Germans were doing was building this Atlantic wall at that time which would prevent the Allies from entering Normandy. So that was a really interesting story to hear and this cafe was still standing and actually the lady who served us lunch at the cafe was his daughter who was one year old at the time of the invasion so she was actually at this cafe when the invasion occurred on June 6, 1944 so that was really cool. And the area of the cafe is where the British gliders were the first ones in behind enemy lines and we were able to walk and see the places where they landed and much of it was swamp area as well and so the idea to hold that Pegasus bridge was critical at the beginning of the invasion. So we'll just give you a little bit more context so Operation Overlord was the name for the D-Day invasion. So Operation Neptune, so you can talk a little bit more about this. So one of the things that Professor Long who was kind of our lead professor talked about is that it was massive, it was complex and it was uncertain. For myself, teaching middle school students about World War II, it's now so much more difficult because I know so much more about it. The overview starts to become the details and so that's a good thing I guess. This year numbers and supplies, the mobilization started in 1943 over a year before. The uncertainty, there were so many things that had to go right. They had to be at the right tide when they crossed the channel. They had to be at a full moon cycle so all these things had to line up and then there was still the uncertainty. Is this even gonna happen? If it doesn't happen, are the allies doomed to lose the war? So the preparation, I think there's some things with pictures with that as well, was just massive. It started so much longer, 18 months before the actual invasion started. Yeah. So then I mentioned the Atlantic wall before. So this is what the Nachi forces were building in the time leading up to the Normandy invasion. So they kind of knew that the allies would invade at some point but they weren't sure exactly when or where. So they built this all along the Atlantic coast and I think we'll show you another map. But this extended from Cherbourg which is on the far western side of France, all the way up to Pas de Calais which is on the eastern side of this coastal area. But so some of the things that were part of this Atlantic wall is I don't know if you've seen pictures but there's like things actually on the beaches like barbed wire and crosses that you'll see that were preventing them from entering the beaches but then also they were worried about air invasions so they'd actually flood some valleys in the Normandy region prior to the invasion to prevent gliders from landing and such and then there were also these things that were interesting called Rommel's Asparagus but what they were was essentially they took trees and they stripped them of all the branches and put them up in fields again to prevent gliders from landing. So that was kind of interesting. And then so these are some of the pictures from one of the spots just off of the beach that we found. So these were some of the weapons that the Nazis had set up as part of the invasion. A pillbox, really you're referring to the gunnery sites as pillboxes? Fortunately, they were not very accurate in actually firing so they didn't end up hitting a lot of the American forces. So this is just a picture of the Allied leadership and this was actually when they were discussing whether or not they would go in because the weather was a large concern. They actually were planning the D-Day invasion for June 3rd and 4th but the weather, there was a huge storm that came in on those days and they thought that on the night of the 5th there would be kind of like an eye in the storm so they were considering either going in on the 5th which they eventually did or actually moving it back to June 18th when the tide would be correct and like the correct tide again. So they actually decided to go in on the 5th as we said but this is a picture of them discussing that. We also have a picture that we were all given from Albert E. Small which is general Eisenhower talking to the troops the night, the preparation the night before we're ready to go. One of the things that they really wanted to make sure that it was time for the troops because they had been training and training and training and then to put it off for almost another month they were actually cargo ships and transport ships in the channel ready to go. They would have had to call them all back and they just thought the morale would have been just so bad so they made the decision to go on the night of the 5th. Okay so this is another picture. So as I was mentioning before you can see Sherberg in this picture but it's kind of on the far left and then Pas de Calais which is actually the shortest crossing point between France and England which is really where the Nazis thought the invasion would occur is up here. And then training in England. So just to go back to Corporal Brigham in a little bit. He trained in England from July of 1942 through June of 1944. So again some of the letters that we found we're talking about this so. So here's some pictures of the preparations which Mr. Bions was kind of just mentioning. So this is them getting onto the ships and loading to actually go into Normandy. And so this is Operation Bodyguard. So this was kind of the deception part of the invasion that I was discussing before. So the objective of the Allies was to convince the Nazi forces that the invasion would occur somewhere else besides the Normandy coast. So what they actually did was General Patton was a general in North Africa during World War II and he was very successful in the Mediterranean in gaining back land in Operation Torch. So the Nazis knew about this general and they thought that he would be the one leading the invasion into France. So what they did was they actually chose General Eisenhower to lead the Normandy campaign and then they stationed General Patton in Dover which is just across from Pasaday, Calais and it's the shortest crossing point. So they actually developed General Patton's ghost army. So what they did was they actually had movie producers put in these fake tanks and just a lot of infrastructure that would appear as if the Allies were preparing for departure from that point. So this is an interesting picture. So they're actually carrying one of these like fake inflatable tanks with four soldiers. So that's a cool picture and then. It's an amazing story. They would pipe in music to make it sound like they were doing training exercises and working and even once the invasion actually happened Hitler said, well, this isn't it. They're still, he still believed they were going to Calais to attack because the deception was so good. It had to be. An interesting figure that we learned about at George Washington was Juan Pujol Garcia. So he was a Spaniard but he was not supportive of the Communist Party that was in his country at the time so he wanted to kind of collaborate with the Allies and I think his quote was to do something good for humanity. So what he did though was he worked with the Allies and but also he convinced the Germans that he would be a spy for them since they were collaborating, the Spanish government was collaborating somewhat with the Nazi party at the time. So what he did was convinced Hitler, I believe it was the night before the Normandy invasion that there was going to be an attack at Pasad Calais two weeks later. So Hitler actually didn't end up sending all of the SS units that were up at the station in Pasad Calais to Normandy to counter the Allied attack because he thought there would be a second invasion. So this picture was taken in Dover. I'm not sure by who but yes. So we kind of talked about this before and we showed that picture. So this was just the decision. And then these are some of the images on the beach. So as I was mentioning before the Atlantic wall, there were a lot of reinforcements on the beaches. So you can kind of see those here, the barbed wire and then some of the crosses but you can also see the Allies landing. And we learned a lot in our research about these landing craft vehicles and they had a lot of trouble with those because they were getting off of the larger ships when they were coming into Normandy but they were actually kind of like sinking because the waters were so rough at the time because it was kind of just after a storm when they were coming in. So there were actually a lot of those that ended up sinking during that time. The soldiers themselves, well they went through a lot of training. They never trained, at least from my understanding, they had 80 pounds of equipment and supplies on their backs and once they ended up in the water they weren't able to get rid of them and so a lot of them just drowned. They weren't even necessarily shot because they were weighted down so much because of the turbulent waters and the tides and some of the landing crafts got turned around, they didn't end up landing on the right spot. Familiar with the movie Private Ryan? That's one of the things we had to watch and it's pretty true to that Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg used the Bedford Boys and the Good War primary sources of people to actually make that so it's pretty true to what we researched as well. Yeah, it really is and one of the reasons why we saw so much like death on the beaches was because they thought that they would have like tanks or larger vehicles coming in before and taking out some of the guns that were on the cliffs but they actually couldn't get those in because as I said before a lot of the vehicles that were supposed to bring them in and like calm waters were sinking so the soldiers were getting onto the beaches and they were just alone and they didn't have any other support. They also expected the air traffic to take out some of that and because of the cloud cover they couldn't fly low enough to get in so they had to be above the clouds because so they missed their drop points. Probably saw that Private Ryan showed that they're scattered everywhere and nobody was with their right units or battalions and so that was a definite difficulty they had to overcome. Yeah, I think I have a picture of us myself and then some of the other students I met a hedgerow later but it was actually kind of fortunate that they did miss their dropping points because it was kind of more chaotic and the allies were planning on kind of grouping together but it was the Nazis had already experienced the land and knew kind of the terrain of the hedgerows which the allies really didn't know so a lot of the professors that we spoke to actually thought it was very fortunate that they were landing at just different spots and attacking from different points instead of trying to approach in a more like uniform fashion which was interesting. So this is one of the first landing spots which we kind of talked about before with Cafe Gondre which is shown in the left corner but it was Pegasus Bridge and so this is one of the first places or actually the first place for the landing circuit so these actually occurred late in the night on June 5th and so what happened was there were gliders that landed here successfully and they took these bridges which prevented the Nazis from retreating so the allies could just get them before they were able to retreat back into France. And then this is one of the first U.S. landing points at St. Miraglis so what this is, this is a cathedral there which is kind of like the town center but there were paratroopers that were coming down here into this town. There's an interesting story though so I don't know if you can see it but on the top of the cathedral. Point, oh yeah, okay. So like up here there's a man hanging from one of like the steeples. Not a real man. Steeples, yeah. But what happened was when the paratroopers were coming down into this town he actually got stuck on the cathedral and he was there for over five hours and he acted like he was dead so that the soldiers wouldn't shoot at him but he actually wasn't so he was actually just hanging there kind of just observing everything and there's some interesting accounts from him too. Some of you are familiar with the longest day in the movie? That scene in there where he's hanging there so they still have the replica there to memorialize him. Okay, so another thing that we write about as part of the institute was Marie-Louise Asmont so who she was was a civilian that was in Normandy during the Normandy invasion and she actually hosted Nazi units and then also allied units at her chateau from 1940 all the way through 1946. So her chateau is shown in this center picture up here and then so we read her diary as part of our research and then we got to visit her chateau which is still standing today and it's actually, it's owned by private owners so unfortunately we couldn't go in but it was really interesting to see that and then also her grave, we got to see her grave which was only several blocks away from her house and this year for National History Day I actually created a performance on Marie-Louise Asmont's experience which you can actually, I believe you can see it out there by the National History Day exhibit so. Okay, so this is another spot that we went to Pointe du Hoc so what it was, it was in between Omaha and Utah beaches but what the allies did at this spot was the planes that were flying in if they had any bombs left over, sorry, excuse me, when they were flying back out to England they would just drop them at this spot. So we were able to go here and I think this was one of the spots that I would definitely, if you're going to Normandy I would definitely make sure to go here because you can really see the devastation that was caused by these bombs so you can see there were craters all over the place and there were still some that you actually, they recommended you not step in because there could still be explosives in them but this was just really a neat place to go and then this is Utah Beach, just some pictures from the actual invasion and this was one of the spots where the US landed and then this was Utah Beach when we went so you can just see the sign and then this picture over there I think Mr. Byans took that but it was myself and then three of my other friends from the trip. While I wanted the students in the picture I was kind of to project the distance that the soldiers had to travel to get there it's amazing that everybody wasn't killed it really was that this was successful on these beaches and so a .2 hot day to climb 100 foot cliffs and it was just perseverance to do what they did just amazing. Okay and then these are some pictures at Omaha Beach and I believe we found these at the National Archives when we were there. So you can really see like the Atlantic wall defenses over here in this one and then but these are also some of the actions that the engineers were taking so what the 342nd did which was Corporal Joseph Brigham's unit was they repaired the railroads that were taken out by the allies before the invasion so that the Nazis couldn't travel easily throughout France. Okay and then. The hedgehogs that you just saw there too referred to were those defenses so they can get the tanks on board and then talk about the rhino tank what they use them for. So they were having trouble getting through hedgerows which were just essentially large piles of rocks with like brush growing over them so the allies couldn't get through these and they were having trouble with these throughout the Normandy region when they were progressing into Normandy. So what they did was they actually attached some of the hedgehogs to the tanks and then they were able to plow through them. I don't know if you can see it really well in this picture but that's what they did and that was really successful. So these are the hedgerows and this is myself and then some of the other students add a hedgerow and then just some soldiers hiding behind a hedgerow there. The interesting point about the hedgerows is the allies had such great information from the resistance but they never were told about the hedgerows like well everybody knows about them that's how the French country started is and once you got through one you couldn't go over the top because the Nazis would have their guns on the next one so it was that one difficulty that like nobody told us about these how do we get through this and the engineers came up with this to use the hedgehogs and made them part of the tanks and they were able to plow right through them so. Okay so just to talk a little bit more about Corporal Brighamman's experience in Normandy. So he went over on the SS Empire Brodsburg which was a ship from England and then he landed on Utah Beach on June 28th, 1944. So since he was an engineer he wasn't coming in right away but he was more of a support troop. So there were actually a lot of different categories of support troops. Some brought in oil some were actually part of this express called the Red Ball Express which was a series of drivers that since they didn't have railroads in France because they were destroyed they actually had many African-American units come in and then drive these trucks and supply the troops that were progressing into Germany with supplies to just reinforce them. But so what Corporal Brighamman was doing was he was constructing railroads that were taken out. So we found we learned about this through the letters that we got from him. So these were some of the pictures that we found at the National Archives of what his unit was doing just as part of their time in Normandy. So and then these are some more pictures. So what actually happened to Corporal Joseph Brighamman while he died in this campaign was the first thing that we realized from his IDPF which is an individual deceased personnel file that every soldier that has fought in conflict in the US has at the National Military Archives in St. Louis. So we received this and then we read a little bit about what happened to him. So he was actually in a hospital in Carintan, France and what happened was he fell off some sort of tower and we don't know exactly what kind of tower it was. It was never identified. So what we did at the National Archives was if we saw a picture of a tower, we took a picture of that picture and then we kind of speculated from there. So this was like, it could have been like a church tower because he could have been watching from a church and then electrical towers. You can see another one up here but electrical towers and water towers were often by railroads so we thought maybe he could have fallen from that. But so while he was in the hospital he actually contracted pneumonia and so two weeks after he was in the hospital he actually died from pneumonia in Normandy and so that's how he perished. So then the last part of our experience in Normandy was being able to give a eulogy for him to honor his sacrifice at the Normandy American Cemetery which is off of Omaha Beach in Normandy. So what we did here, what you can see us doing in the first picture is well first we went to his grave site and then the people we were with brought sand so we had to rub the sand onto this marble otherwise you couldn't see his name. But so we did that and then I presented the eulogy that we wrote for him about his experience and this was just a really powerful experience because it was not only me that was giving this eulogy but the 14 other students also. So throughout this day we heard 15 eulogies for people that we had come to know really, really well and that had sacrificed so much their lives so that we could have the freedom to do the stuff that we do today. It was by far the most emotional experience. Getting choked up now, not a dry eye when you heard the eulogies in Cecilia did a great job presenting hers, it was just amazing. We brought some artifacts, his picture, we brought a little cow from, being from Wisconsin and we were so into the moment that we forgot to put those things out for him and so later on we had some times like, you know what, we forgot to put all that out so we went back and we were able to do that. Yeah and then you can also see here the French flag and the American flag that we put into the ground there. The French flag is actually over on that board over there which is a really cool thing that we still have from that experience but. So this is another just image of the Normandy American Cemetery and well okay just one other interesting thing. When I was there I was considering researching one of my uncles or one of my dad's friends, uncles who actually died in the invasion also but it was really interesting because his grave site was actually just a couple rows away from Corporal Joseph Brigham in so I got to see his site also while I was there so that was really nice. And then there's still a memorial for Corporal Joseph Brigham in Cache in Wisconsin at St. Peter and Paul Cemetery at Pine Hollow where all of his family was buried so this is just an image of that headstone which we haven't visited yet but we'd like to visit this summer. So this is another story. So through NHD, National History Day, probably our experience was the eighth year that the Normandy trip had been going and I think it was probably five years prior to that a student I think from, she was from Nebraska was researching, I don't remember which one one of the Piper twins and they were both stationed together, their twins and both perished going over across the English Channel and she was researching the one twin who was found and the remains of the other were never found. About 1962, they think they found the remains of the brother, never were able to identify it but through the research of this student, yes they were able to identify that this was Julius and Ludwig and the week that we were in George Washington CBS News ran this news article that now the two brothers were united once again so the military never puts twins together but mom kind of requested that, they kind of died the same and you can see that the grave here has just been laid within weeks and one of our leaders, Lino Herre gave the eulogy for him so we were able to experience it and it was pretty close to Corporal Brigham's site as well so it was pretty neat, something that came out of this NHD to unite the brothers again and kind of was kind of a national story so we got to experience that. So this is Bayou, this is where we stayed in France and like I said, it was largely untouched unlike other cities by the Normandy invasion so this is our hotel but then this is the Notre Dame Cathedral in Bayou which is actually older than the one in Paris and then this is myself and some of the other students I met one is from New Mexico, one's from Minnesota but they were from all over the country so it was a great experience to meet people who are also really passionate about history and who had been involved in the National History Day program so that's Bayou, this is the Bayou Tapestry which is one of the things that was still preserved despite the Normandy invasion which was nice to, and I believe it depicted William the Conqueror's invasion of England. Okay, these are just a few more pictures of Bayou. This was our favorite restaurant. It was a crepery, so we enjoyed that and then this is Monet's Gardens which we got to stop in, it's kind of between Normandy and Paris so if you're traveling from Paris to Normandy I would highly recommend stopping here but it's where Monet gained the inspiration for the Water Lily series of paintings so that was a really cool place to see. It was kind of unexpected, it wasn't on our schedule we got to stop there, pretty neat. And I was actually in Cleveland a couple of weeks later and they have one of the Water Lily paintings so I saw the inspiration and then the actual painting which was really neat. So then we stopped in Paris on our last day and we didn't have a lot of time there but it was still really neat to see this. We got to see Paris in three hours so if you're going there take more time than that I would suggest. Yeah, so we saw the Eiffel Tower and then we went to the Notre Dame which was really a neat experience and we're really glad that we got to see that considering what's happening now so. And then now, some significant dates. So last year was the 100th anniversary of the Armistice of World War I and this year it's actually the 75th anniversary of D-Day which is something that's really important and that we should remember and just be very grateful for the sacrifice that the soldiers did give in the war and then Veteran's Day on November 11th. So I just always remember that day because that's the day that Corporal Joseph Murgerman actually passed away so that's really important and then if we keep going. It was interesting because it took us a while to recognize, oh, November 11th, Veteran's Day that's when he died and so it was pretty neat. And then, yeah, think of Veteran for their service.