The Beaches of Normandy

August 6, 2007 by Tiffany.

Jason and I drove to Normandy this weekend to visit the D-Day beaches and sites.  It was an incredibly powerful experience, kind of like visiting Pearl Harbor but on a larger scale.  We stayed the night in Bayeaux, which proved to be a nice place to stay to visit the beaches and was so old and quaint it seemed unreal.

We first visited Omaha Beach, where the American troops encountered the most resistance on D-Day.  To look at the beach now, you would never guess that at some point so many lives were lost on those same shores.  It is a recreational beach now.  Hundreds of families and children were beached out with towels and umbrellas, playing games, running in and out of the surf.

The beach itself is beautiful.  It’s also long: 4 miles.  Neither of us had any idea how long the beach was, especially considering that Omaha was simply one of five beaches attacked on the same day.  As if it didn’t seem so before, the task seems even more daunting and impossible.  Making it onto the beach itself would have been an amazing feat considering the heavy firing, but the troops also had to climb up cliffs and steep embankments.

It’s no wonder why Omaha suffered the greatest casualties and took the longest to claim.  We visited the Point du Hoc memorial and site, where members of the U.S. Army Rangers had to scale up cliffs under heavy fire to seize German guns, only to find when they arrived at the destination that the Germans had already moved the guns.  They later found the guns about a kilometer away but had lost well over half of their men, (only 90 remained of over 225).  The area above the cliffs still has the remains of the German artillery bunkers and fortifications.

Also present are tons of enormous craters in the earth left over by the bombings.

We spent most of Saturday on or around Omaha Beach, walking around and driving by as much of it as we could.

Sunday we first visited the Normandy American Cemetery that overlooks Omaha Beach.  The grounds have an impressive museum site that talks about preparations and strategies in preparation for D-Day, as well as specific stories of soldiers who fought that day, both from the survivors and from those who did not.

We also went to see Pegasus Bridge, which was captured by the British to take control of the Caen Canal and and thereby seize control of a major port of entry.

Looking around it’s hard to believe what happened there just over 60 years ago, but reminders exist everywhere.  All over the names of streets, memorials and plaques thank the liberators for their deeds and sacrifices.  It’s a good thing, because the outcome was priceless but the cost was incredibly steep.

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