Here are a few photos from a visit to World War II sites in 2006. I’ve posted some of these before.
This is my daughter, Annie, and her cousins at the American cemetery Omaha Beach. Annie is the farthest from the camera.
This is the theme building at the cemetery. The statue is called “The Spirit of American Youth.” The web site for the cemetery has a nice video. We walked around the cemetery and spent a week visiting battle sites as I wanted my daughter to know about this and remember.
The view of the bluffs from the top shows the magnitude of the problem of getting from that beach to the land above under hostile fire. This was completely different from the situation at Utah Beach where the transition from beach to the land behind it was almost level. Note the people climbing the path from the beach. It gives a scale of the size.
Here is Utah Beach and it is nearly level with the land inland. The problem at Utah was inland where the land was low and had been flooded by the Germans. The Airborne divisions were tasked with capturing and holding the inland end of the causeways from the beach to beyond the flooded fields.
The inland side of the beach was no obstacle to tanks or men.
Ponte du hoc was a point of land between Omaha and Utah that was believed to hold big guns that could command both beaches. The climb the Rangers made is almost unbelievable. Rangers at the 1984 ceremony for the 40th anniversary said they could not imagine how they did it. The guns had been shifted a mile inland to avoid naval gunfire but the casements still needed to be taken.
A view of Omaha Beach from the bottom of the bluffs show German gun emplacements which were turned to avoid naval gunfire and allow them to sweep the beach. Fortunately, the German guns were zeroed at the high tide line and the troops landed at low tide. This provided some shelter as they left the Higgins boats.
This is a reconstructed Higgins boat.
This is a famous photo from Omaha Beach on D-Day showing troops leaving the Higgins boat and wading ashore.
The Omaha bluffs are just as impressive from the bottom as from the top.