Landing Beaches

Our final full day in France was spent visiting the D-Day landing beaches of Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach. These two locations were kind of the whole reason Jared wanted to go to France for spring break. He'd been here before, in 2002 or 2003 for the Transatlantic Council's Normandy Camporee and pretty much loved every minute of his time at these historic locations. Jared has wanted to go back with our family ever since and it only took almost twenty years to finally make it happen. 

We started out kind of late in the day, it was a vacation after all, and arrived at Pointe du Hoc just after lunchtime. Pointe du Hoc is a cliff eight miles from Omaha Beach and was the location of German artillery batteries that could have fired on American troops landing on Utah and Omaha beaches. Army Rangers scaled the 100-foot cliffs with the mission to disable the German positions and they were successful but at a great cost. Only 90 of the 225 Rangers who started the climb up the cliff at Pointe du Hoc survived to see the successful completion of their mission. 

The battle-scarred cliff top is much the same today as the Rangers left it in 1944. Those enormous bomb craters tell a story of unimaginable fighting and devastation for both sides.  It was a strange experience to be in this place, that is certainly hallowed ground, on a day filled with sunshine and laughter. The girls enjoyed running up and down the paths that crisscrossed the craters and exploring what was left of the bombed-out concrete bunkers. I wish we would have spent more time before our visit talking with the girls about the events that happened here.

We did stop in the visitor's center there before heading out to the cliff and read a little bit about the sequence of events that day and in the days afterward. We also watched a video with first-hand accounts that left me teary-eyed. It's definitely worth watching and it tells the story of what happened at Pointe du Hoc on June 6, 1944, better than I ever could.

Next we made the short trip to Omaha Beach and Normandy American Cemetery. The cemetery was the first American cemetery in Europe during World War II with the burials taking place here on June 8, 1944. There are 9,385 military dead buried in Normandy, most of whom lost their lives in the D-Day landings.  We arrived near closing time so we skipped the visitor's center displays in favor of visiting the cemetery. It's always sobering to see the perfectly spaced rows of crosses stretching almost to the horizon. Our nation and our world will forever owe our thanks to these brave men. When Jared was here before there was a path from the cemetery down to Omaha Beach but it has since been closed because of security concerns so our original plan to walk to the beach was switched to a quick drive in our car to the beach.

Omaha Beach was another place that was beautiful, making it hard to imagine what it must have been like on D-Day. We walked along the smooth, firm sand of the beach for at least an hour, just taking our time and enjoying the quiet, peaceful surroundings. We even saw a rainbow as we were getting ready to head back to our car, which was kind of a perfect ending to a really perfect last day in France.