D-Day (My trip to Normandy)

In Sept of last year (9/16-9/26), I took a bucket-list trip to France and the Netherlands to visit the WWII battlesites for Normandy and Operation Market-Garden. I went with a buddy. He and I had gone through Officer Candidate School and The Basic School at Quantico together a long time ago. We both ended up on the west coast together (he at CAmp Pendleton as a tank officer and me at MCAS Tustin flying CH-53Es). We had stayed in touch through the years and are both history buffs. We didn't want to do a canned tour so he basically planned the whole thing. We stayed at BnBs in tiny villages all over Normandy and Holland. Great trip.
The other thread concerning D-Day - and it being Memorial Day - spurred me to post some of the pics*. Not a professional photographer, so here goes.


The BnB we stayed at was right on Omaha Beach. I mean, right on. The front door was literally across the street from the seawall and the Beach. Looking at the pic, you can see two similar small buildings. Our BnB was the one on the middle right (has a small, paved parking area in front of it). This pic was taken about halfway up the bluff immediately behind the BnB looking back at Omaha. Referring to D-Day maps, it looks like we are at the "Easy Green" sector of the beach where the 29th Division got chewed up.


Similar view, but from the top of the bluff.


View from the top of the bluff looking westward towards the Vierville draw. This is pretty close to high tide, BTW.


An anti-tank gun on the eastern portion of Omaha nearer to the Colleville draw. This did not face the beach. That concrete "wing" extending out protected the gun from direct naval gunfire. It was situated to ambush armor from the side at pretty much point blank range. It had machine gun nests ("Tobruks") surrounding it to support it from infantry assault. You can see a rather sizable impact at the top - most likely from a BB's or CA's main armament.


Same view basically as the first shot, but this is at first light. I wanted to see what it was like at the time of H-Hour. The biggest difference here, obviously, is it was beautiful weather and calm seas unlike what our boys faced that day. As luck would have it, it was about low tide, too, which the Overlord planners were aiming for to expose all the beach obstacles. More on that next pic...


This is the view from the waterline back towards the beach. It was 255 paces from the waterline to the seawall/shingle. That's a helluva long way to slog through wet sand loaded down by wet clothes and combat gear while the high ground in front of you is exploding with rifle, machine gun and cannon fire. Not to mention landmines. That doesn't count the guys who got dumped out in the water and immediately sank and had to fight trough the surf zone before they even got to this point. It was another 150 yards or so from that seawall to the base of the bluff behind our BnB. (Vierville is to the right in this pic, Colleville and the 1st Inf Div's portion of the beach is to the left)


Looking west towards the Vierville draw from the beach in front of our BnB.


The seawall/shingle. I thought this had been built after the war, but I saw some pics from 1944 that had this exact stone pattern, so this is pretty contemporaneous with the invasion. (That's my buddy to give some scale to the height.)


One of the main bunkers at the Vierville draw. The enclosure is facing eastward along the beach giving the Germans enfilading fire almost the entire length of the beach. If I recall correctly, this had a 75mm or 88mm PaK AT gun.


A view from that blockhouse looking back eastward of the beach.


Another emplacement at Vierville further up the slope.


Another view of the beach at the Vierville end to give you some idea of the depth these guys had to cross under fire.


Cellphone pic of the monument to the 29th Division. The 116th Regiment of the 29th got absolutely brutalized on Omaha. The Rangers that hit the beach (Saving Private Ryan) also landed in this area alongside the 29th.


It was pretty humbling to know that I was staying at a home built almost at ground zero for the carnage of June 6th.









* My camera was old and the menu settings were messed up. I couldn't change the time on the time stamp, neither could I delete it from the frame. The dates are correct. Obviously, the hours are not.