if i’ve been disappointed about anything on this trip, i think it’s that the museums in Normandy were not open because this is not the high tourist season. i knew that some stuff would be closed, but i did not know that the major museums would be closed. even though that was disappointing, i still had a great time going around and seeing what very little of the D-Day sights that i could see. and that just means that i’ll have to come back again in a better time of the year and for a longer period of time.

as we headed out, about 2pm, Tony told me the story of how he and his wife came to live in the Normandy area and why he was so interested in everything having to do with the invasion and the area it happened in. he also told me about some of the veterans that he’s met doing what he does, including many of the men that Stephen Ambrose wrote about in Band of Brothers. we started our trek by going up to the American Cemetery just behind Omaha Beach. he had warned me that since there was about a foot of snow on the ground, i would not get the full effect of the stark contrast between the white marble crosses (and Stars of David) and the brilliantly green grass. when we got there, however, i found the snow to make the scene still pretty moving as crosses seemed to eerily appear out of nowhere as you walked among them. it was truly an emotional experience. i had seen pictures and movie clips with the cemetery in them, but they do nothing to show the size of the cemetery, nor do they give the effect that one experiences when they visit there. there’s a scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan, where an older James Ryan is walking among the crosses and is moved to tears and falls to one knee, overcome by the emotion of seeing endless rows of perfectly uniform crosses. even though i am not a veteran, it was hard not to be moved in that way. the cemetery is a true monument to and a stark reminder of the price of freedom that the 9,387 American men and women (4 women are buried in the cemetery) buried there paid the ultimate sacrifice to secure for us all. American or otherwise. words can simply not begin to describe what one feels in that place.

after the cemetery we headed up to Longues-sur-Mer, the site of a German battery that still has the original guns that were fired on the beaches and ships over 60 years ago. two of the guns are beaten, but not broken, one of the guns is totally demolished. the casemates that housed the guns were simply remarkable. i’ve never seen concrete so thick that it can withold relentless pounding of bombs and artillery shells hurled at them for hours on end. there are a couple of pot marks in the concrete, but the casemates are pretty much fully in tact. the two guns that are still in good shape were eventually taken out by grenades, but they had already done considerable damage to the Allied forces by that time. the gun that was totally destroyed had taken a direct hit from an artillery shell, and the mangled metal shows what kind of destruction one artillery shell was capable of, making the strength of the casemates even more impressive. about 200 yards or so in front of the casemates is an observation post where a German officer would have stood with binoculars and radioed firing coordinates back to those operating the 105mm guns. in fact, this was the very observation post filmed in The Longest Day where the German officer yells “invasion, invasion” at the sight of over 5,000 ships approaching the beaches.

we then made our way down to Omaha Beach. or as close as we could get to it. the roads are very steep leading down to the beach, and they were very icy that day, so we didn’t risk it. we could’ve gotten down them ok, but getting back up would have been pretty tricky. we drove along a little lane between the beach and the bluffs in front of it where several German pillboxes still remain today. seeing movies about the D-Day invasion give you the idea that the German bunkers were right on top of the beach and not very far from where the Higgins boats would have landed. while this is true for some places along the five beach stretch, it is not true at Omaha and this is one of the reasons that Omaha had the overwhelming majority of casualties as compared with the other four beaches (Utah, Gold, Juno, and Sword). the pillboxes are set atop a high ridge of bluffs that are about half a mile to three quarters of a mile away from the beaches. their position is not only greatly defensible from a beach invasion, but also is the perfect place to prey on those coming ashore. however, there were many other obstacles that the American troops who landed on Omaha had to overcome besides the German emplacements. at the head of the beach was a shingle hill, a hill made up of pebbles and larger stones that bullets would bounce off of or back at the one shooting. if one was lucky enough to make it from the beach to the shingles and over the shingle hill, he would have come upon a row of garden houses with large gardens in the back yards. each of these gardens was mined and over 1 million mines of various types were placed in those gardens. after the minefield gardens is the bottom of the bluffs, still about a half mile away from the German bunkers at the top of the hill. Hitler called the defenses along the French shore of the English Channel the Atlantic Wall (which ran from Calais to Cherbourg), and a wall it defintely was. a seemingly impenetrable wall, at that. the rifles and machine guns the Americans came ashore with, however, were lethal up to a mile away, so some well-placed shots would be able to take out the Germans assaulting the invading forces at the top of the Omaha bluffs.

after spending some time just looking around and taking it all in, we got back in the car and started heading back to the house. not only does it not get light this time of year at about 8:30-8:45am, but it also gets dark about 5pm. it was about 5:30 and Tony and Pat were expecting friends of theirs from England to be arriving. they had arrived when we were out, and were there waiting for us with tea when we got back. they were a charming couple and sarah and i both enjoyed listening to the banter between the two British couples that had been friends for quite a long time. Pat made a lovely spaghetti dinner, complete with salad, French bread, and French wine, and with a choice of apple or pear tart for dessert. it was a brilliant meal. after supper we went in the main room for a while and i looked at some of the war books and photos (and other interesting items that i’m not at liberty to talk about) that Tony had and we went to bed soon after that. after my trip to Omaha and the cemetary that day, and seeing how large an undertaking the D-Day invasion must have been (it’s a much grander scale than one would expect by only watching movies, reading books, and looking at maps), i keep coming back to one thought over and over again:

how the hell did anyone make it out of there alive?