The following was written by Alfred Ryland Howard’s son Ryland Howard in 2019.
This is an excerpt from my 42 page account of my trip last year. As if you had not heard enough.
I certainly enjoyed enough with my time with M. V.
By then the afternoon was well along, my car was low on fuel, and I was planning to drive by Blosville, a small town not far away on the main road from Carentan through Ste Mere Eglise. In reviewing my father’s service records, I had discovered where he was first interred (or last interred in Normandy). It was a US cemetery for temporary burial of the soldiers who died in Normandy. There were three of them. Two were near Ste Mere Eglise, and this one was near Blosville. In Blosville, I asked where the cemetery might have been. I was given good directions. Close to the turn outside of town, I gassed up and asked the nice young lady attendant where I would find the location of the cemetery. I was almost there – la prochaine gauche, prenez la route, et c’est tres proche a gauche (very close). I did and there was the monument, flanked by the French flag and the US flag. In the field that lay beyond the monument, 6,000 men had been buried, awaiting final disposition of their remains after the war ended. Now there was just a beautiful, large Norman field, with cows in the distance and the house and barns of a typical farmstead. There was no one there, just peace. It was so peaceful. It was so appropriate. It was sacred ground, but had returned to its bucolic origins.
Well, it was possible that he was originally buried nearer the battle site, along with all the others who died near Mont Castre, but this was the definite last resting place in France. Some time later, between 1948 and 1950, my father’s remains were repatriated, at the wishes of his mother and father, to the family plot in the venerable Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, north of Buffalo Bayou. When I would stay in Houston with my grandparents over Easter, my grandmother Howard would take me over, we would purchase an Easter Lily, and place the flowers at my father’s, grave, the resting place of their eldest son.