We visited two of the five D Day beaches during our vist to Normandy. Americans landed on two beaches, Utah and Omaha; the British landed on Sword and Gold, and the Candians landed on Juno. Our first stop was at the Normandy American Cemetary and Memorial.
The beach is absolutely beautiful and our girls had a wonderful time running up and down and collecting rocks and shells. It is unbelieveable that this same beach was the site of so much death and suffering. On June 6, 1944 five thousand of fifty thousand American troops were killed. 1,200 Germans were killed, wounded or missing by the end of the day.
Omaha was the most strongly fortified beach with German bunkers and machine guns perched on the steep hills above the beach. Here is an Atlantic Article recounting the carnage of that day.
9,387 American soldiers are buried here. Most of them casualties of the Normandy campaign. There is also a wall inscribed with the names of the 1,557 missing.
The girls and Pierre stayed on the beach and played as I walked up to the first memorial. It was raining and hailing and the hillside was muddy and slick. In the visitors' center, they had a typical uniform that the men would have been wearing. They wore big army boots that seemed to have almost no tread.
This does not look nearly as steep as it is. When we arrived at the beach, Pierre and I both looked up and thought, "Why did they choose to fight here?"
As we all walked towards the cemetary, we could hear music; there was a choir singing hymns in one of the alcoves of the memorial.
There is a visitors' center at the cemetary, which is worth visiting. The girls grasped more than I thought they would. Sylvia read several soldiers stories to herself and commented about them throughout the day. I was struck by just how young most of the soldiers were; many of them less than half my age. These soldiers helped liberate France from German control.
War is horrible. I wish we could all remember that.
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