Ladue High School student, teacher set for immersive study of 80th anniversary of D-Day in France

ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - 80 years ago, Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy.

This summer, a group of high school students and their teachers will travel to France. It's is a part of intensive learning experience centered on the D-Day Campaign of 1944.

Among those that will be going are Ashley Lock, a Social Studies and Black Studies Teacher at Ladue Horton Watkins High School and Micheal Wise, a junior at Ladue Horton Watkins High School.

"Dr. Lock has done this program once before with my friend last year and she sent me an email asking if I would be interested in the programs since she knew me since my freshman year," said Wise on Total Information A.M. Thursday. "I talked to (my friend) and he raved about the program."

As part of the program, Lock and Wise will first begin spending a week in Washington, D.C. then spend another week in Normandy, France on the exact locations of 'The Hallowed Land.' Some of the sites they will visit includes the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, France. The city just under 30 miles northwest from Caen, France.

Along with the visit, Wise also had to prepare a eulogy and focus on one soldier who is buried or graved at Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. The soldier he chose was Private Otis Dill , a Missourian who was part of the 149th Engineer Combat Battalion during World War II. Dills' status is listed as missing in action and he was memorialized among the Tablets of the Missing at the Cemetery.

"He was just realistically this young boy in a humungous family and as much as we were able to fund out about him, which sadly isn't that much," said Wise. "He wasn't a high school graduate, so we can't really even find a photo and the Army didn't supply any photos at that time, and they didn't have the resources to maintain all those documents. It's really been a task of maybe using his family tree or whatever information the Army does have."

Lock, who has been on similar immersive studies in the past, says the study helps unveil the human experience on a individual level in major conflicts to students like Wise.

"It's kind of hard to make sense of large numbers, if we look at the losses at D-Day or if we look at the Holocaust," said Lock. "When we see these large numbers, the aim of the Albert H. Small Institute is really to make sense of these large conflicts through the eyes of one soldier....when you take away the noise of the historic conflict and you try to examine just one story, it's a way to make a connection."