D-Day Beaches Normandy

Your quick history lesson here.  Omaha and Utah Beaches were the code names for two of the five sectors of the D-Day invasion.  Both of these beaches were the responsibility of the American military during the attack.  The two beaches were a stark contrast of each other, Utah being taken with relative ease, and Omaha encountered significant resistance and took heavy causalities.  D-Day was selected as it would provide the optimum conditions for an attack, mainly in relation to the tides.  All of the beaches had been covered with mines and various other obstacles to make landing difficult.  The options were to land closer to shore and brave the mines or further out and traverse the open beaches, and low tide was selected for the invasion.  All of the movies and stories of D-Day including Saving Private Ryan are based on these two beaches.

So naturally being Americans we had to visit Omaha and Utah beaches.  I probably had unrealistic expectations that there would be remnants of the was strune about but there wasn't much more than a beach and the odd historical marker or German bunker.

When we first arrived at the Omaha beach the tide was pretty high, but when the tide went out it was hard to believe just how much beach there was to cover.  When you see it first hand it really makes you stop and think.  The difference between high and low tides here is something like 300 yards.  After being at the cemetery earlier and knowing there would have been thousands of casualties, landing on the beach must have taken unbelievable courage.

 

The beaches at low tide just seemed to go on forever

This monument is to the National Guard, on account of the Bedford Boys.  While all other companies and divisions of the regular Army etc. are made up of individuals from throughout the country the National Guard is locationally based, and thus the town of Bedford Virginia took the most severe causalities on a per capita basis of any place in the country, losing 80% of the soldiers on and shortly after D-Day.

We didn't think about it at the time we decided to go, but it turned out that we arrived just about on the anniversary of the actual landing (June 6).  We missed the big events, but did at least visit the picnic celebration the locals were having.  it was probably 100 yards of table all pushed together, and everyone brought their own meals.  Kinda like a tailgate on steroids.

Lots of wine and bread and cheese, but a lot of weird stuff too.  We decided not to crash the party, visited the local pancake house suggested by the travel book.  Was so much better than our independent choice from the night before, where we ended up eating in a huge wine barrel.

Looked much better than it tasted.  Not sure what
2 out of the 3 meats were