Omaha Beach

Friday, February 19, 2024

We arrived in Bayeux France late on Feb 18 and checked into this cool little apartment pictured here. Even with directions, it took a bit of sleuthing to figure out how to get there.

The street was all store fronts with tiny little doors between some of the stores, we finally figured out which door we were supposed to use and got a set of keys from a lock box but now we had to figure out which key to use.

We finally got the door open and walked through a tiny tunnel that required me to bend over and came out into a tiny “atrium” with about four doors. We guessed which door we were supposed to use and went up a flight of stairs into a room with two doors. We guessed which door was for us and then went up four flights of stairs with two or more doors on each level. It wasn’t at all clear which of the many doors was ours, but we correctly guessed that we were on the top floor. We attempted the only door without a name on it. These weren’t people’s names but weird names like “morning” or something similar.

Our room is the one with lighted windows on the top floor. This building must be one of the oldest buildings in the city. I’d guess it is several hundred years old.

We had dinner in this very cool restaurant. We walked down this little alleyway and the restaurant had converted several homes into rooms with tables. We checked in at the main area and they took us outside and into another house where they sat us at a table. The food was good but the atmosphere was amazing.

The next day on Feb 19 we saw the beaches of Normandy. By the time the American’s joined WW2, Germany controlled the European coast and there was no easy way to land an army into Europe. Germany called this control of the coast, the “Atlantic Wall”. It included hundreds of machine gun nests and bunkers and many gun installations.

The allies eventually chose the beaches of Normandy for their attack, but using fake radio signals and fake equipment they made it look to the Germans as if they were going to attack the Pas de Calais region, north of the river Seine where the English Channel is narrowest. This decoy was so good that Hitler refused to believe otherwise until long after D Day happened. He continued to believe that D Day was the decoy and that a larger attack was going to come more than a hundred miles to the north.

At 6:30 in the morning on June 6, 1944, the allies landed 160,000 soldiers on five beaches in Normandy. They had already given the French resistance a heads up, so they were also ready to provide support as they were able. During the night prior to the landing, they had dropped 18,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines, their many job was to prevent any German support from getting to the beaches but they also hoped that they could take out some of the machine gun nests and artillery sights.

The five beaches covered about 50 miles of coast and the first beach we visited was Omaha Beach.

The troops landing on Omaha Beach definitely drew the short straw. More than 2,000 of the 34,000 troops who assaulted this beach, died here on June 6, more than any other landing zone.

Everything went wrong, the pre-invasion bombing missed the Germans due to heavy fog, the beachs are overlooked by cliffs making the machine gun nests and artillary bunkers hard to get to, only two of twenty nine tanks made it to shore due to choppy waves and tank traps that the Germans had placed on the beach.

Eventually the troops made it across the 200 yards of beach, and a few were able to scale the cliffs and take out the German guns. Of the 2,200 who died here on this day, most died in the first few hours of the attack. By nightfall the beach had been secured.

Standing on the beach imagining what it must have been like for those first soldiers running off the first landing craft was a very sobering experience.