October 18th - D Day Tour

Today was a very cold and sobering day. We met our D day tour guide at 830am - he was a funny young British guy with some piercings. We rode in a van with two older couples - one from Tampa and one from Virginia.
This is the tour guide Sean




Our first stop was the church of Sts Come and Damien in Angoville au Plain, a village of approximately 50 persons where two paratroopers, aged 18 and 20, one a medic and one a stretcher bearer, treated around 80 people on June 6,7 and 8 1944. They treated American and German soldiers (the town changed hand multiple times during the day) and one civilian boy whose entire family had been killed. This part of the tour was to describe the plan or the paratroopers and all that went wrong. None of the men that they treated died of their wounds.
This is the church in Angoville au Plain

Blood that is still present one a pew where a wounded soldier was treated

From there we went to the town of Ste Mere Eglise (the first town liberated by the American Forces and the subject of the film "The Longest Day"). More interesting stories of paratroopers and a museum to visit (where my feet recovered from a bit of their frostbite). We then headed to Utah Beach, Pointe du Hoc (where Rangers were able to scale the cliffs against incredible odds and didn't lose a single man). Then we went to Omaha Beach (where things didn't go nearly as well as they did on Utah) and finally to the US Cemetery. The scale of the entire operation was simply amazing. 3500 American men died at Omaha beach on June 6th. In contrast 4400 have been lost in Iraq since 2003. Each year the French are called to disarm over 1200 unexploded ordinances that are found. In addition about 12-15 German bodies are recovered in Normandy every year

Pointe du Hoc (the rock is supposed to look like a hook. It is hard to tell how vertical these cliffs are from this picture.

Not sure if you can see these deep craters that are from bombing at Pointe du Hoc prior to D-Day. They are very deep even after 50 years.

This is looking down from Pointe du Hoc. Can you imagine how easy it would be up here with a machine gun to just pick guys off of the beach? Thankfully they only had two of the five guns up and operational because they were fortifying the defenses after all the bombing.

The American Cemetery is beautiful. The monuments are in perfect rows in all directions (an amazing feat 50 years ago). When you enter the inscriptions are all facing away so that everything is uniform and no particular detail such as a name or a state captures your attention. They buried the men randomly (except that brothers are buried together) with no respect to rank because no one person's sacrifice was greater than another. The only exception is that Medal of Honor recipients are inscribed in gold.

We capped off our day with another dinner of traditional Norman cuisine - the entire front room of the restaurant spoke English - a couple from Melbourne, a couple and their 6 month old from Sydney, a couple of brits and a table of 4 from Virginia. On Tuesday it is off to Uzes in the south of France - hope the weather is warmer and a bit sunny!