Normandy coastal weather is crisp and bracing. Winds and frequent rains appear, diminish and reappear. The sky stays various shades of gray.

The beaches consist of tiny stones that mix poorly with sand. This sand abuts steep white rock cliffs topped by thick, ancient vegetation. Where populated, a stone seawall secures the compact towns. The North Sea itself remains cold, even in June.

I visited Normandy with my family. We were there 47 years after my wife’s father combat jumped, or more properly, fell into the Normandy plain beyond the hard coastline. He fought there on D-Day, the day of the great Allied invasion of Europe. On that same day, in a nearby French village, a German soldier who would years later become our good friend awaited news of the grand assault.

My wife’s dad, Duane L. Tedrick, was a squad leader of paratroopers. His squad was selected to blow up a bridge on a road leading to the coast. If they accomplished that, German reinforcements would be hindered in reaching the invasion beaches.

He flew with some 10 other Americans cramped in an olive green glider. They took off from England on the moonlit night of June 5, 1944. He had a 36-pound demolition charge strapped to his leg for his part of this behind-the-lines mission. After destroying the bridge, they would reunite with their regiment at a drop zone.

German staff officers anticipated such a maneuver. They opened the dikes and levees controlling ancient, drained swamps. Thus they flooded miles of flat lands, that is to say, of potential parachute drop zones. Hundreds of antiaircraft guns in concrete embrasures along the coast covered potential aircraft approach routes.

My sons sat on such an empty antiaircraft gun emplacement, taking off their socks. They ran down the sea wall and across the beach 200 yards to the ocean waves. There, among the French and English sunbathers, they were unaware of another German defensive measure, visible about 50 meters away. Flush against stone outcroppings were other gun emplacements. These were positioned at either end of the beach to rake oblique machine-gun bursts into the bodies of landing soldiers.

I rested against the concrete antiaircraft gun position fastened to the stone sea wall. I noted the irony of a place once at war, but where now the children’s children of that war’s soldiers played, innocent of all its horrors. As I watched the boys chase the waves, I wondered whether this very antiaircraft gun shot down that glider 47 years ago. My wife’s dad remembered the co-pilot, blood blowing across his face from the shell impact that killed the pilot, cry wildly, “We’re hit boys, you better jump now!” Everyone scrambled in the dark. With sweaty and clammy skin they heaved their equipment toward the door. A din of shouted fear, anger and encouragement vanished into absolute silence as each man hurled himself out into the black night.

In the distance, gunfire and shellfire laced the sky. Surrounded by darkness, he didn’t know whether he was over the ocean or land. The splash horrified him. His rifle, equipment, parachute and demolition charge dragged him straight down like a modern-day millstone. Only the issued switch-blade knife saved him from drowning. He cut all the straps of the embracing military gear, and rejoiced to burst above the waterline and breathe. He had landed in a flooded plain, surrounded by Normandy hedgerows, toward which he swam. That same night, a regiment of German soldiers in the Ninth Army Division received conflicting orders.

They marched to and fro, unsure of where the actual landing would occur. The fog of war was complete. Noise and gunfire erupted everywhere, but in the night sound surrounds the listener, it does not assist. These Germans never reached the landing beaches, and so our friend did not fight on that invasion day. Due to Allied deception, his unit was misdirected to a false landing beach. The Germans only recovered their orientation when it was too late and the Allies were ashore.

The American wandered weaponless for almost two days until he came upon a dead paratrooper, hanging by his parachute in a tree. The German soldier, for his part, was among the last to evacuate Rouen, France, after the battle of Normandy was over. He ruefully remembered watching German V-1 “buzz bombs” slam into Rouen.

He said, “We weren’t even over the bridge and our own rockets were fired at us. Whole blocks disintegrated into dust as the rockets struck. The rockets were supposed to blow up the bridges over the Seine, but we were known to still be on the other side. I later learned that we were indeed the intended targets! Hitler never forgave us for retreating. He had ordered us to die at the landing beaches and resist the Allies to the last bullet and man. We were forbidden to retreat.”

I’m glad these two men did not come across the each other in those deadly days. One is my father-in-law; the other is one of our good friends and the father of other friends. I’m happy that by some strange alchemy reconciliation occurred between my American family and our German friends.

I often wonder if these two men had met under other circumstances if they might not have been good friends, too. The wry World War I saloon refrain seems even more poignant when I think of it in this context: “We might have met at a bar stool/ Or waved from passing trains/ Instead we met on Flanders Fields/ And I blew out your brains.”