Day Two- Normandy- A childhood goal realized (Howard speaks)

I have always wanted to be able to visit the D-Day invasion area sites in Normandy since I was a kid old enough to know history. This is due to me living in the Philippines as a kid only 20 years after WWII and seeing the war sites there, as well as playing "army" in intact Japanese bunkers in the neighborhood. No kidding.

D-Day always seemed so huge on film and in the pictures. This is the small town of Arromanches. Imagine the largest armada in history landing outside your window and creating the largest artificial harbor and dock in six days while a battle surrounded you. This was the British landing site of Gold Beach. There are remnants of the jetty and loading dock still in place. The scale is impressive given that there was no way to test anything due to the scale of the operation. It had to work.

This is the site of Longues-sur-mer. It is an intact German big gun site with four bunkers like this one. It has a sweeping vista of the Channel and was an important target.

This is the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach, a sacred site like Arlington National Cemetery, and the resting place for 9387 brave Americans. WWII for us as we grew up was portrayed in black and white in news films, but when you walk above Omaha Beach and into the cemetery, you realize how much red there really was on the landscape. It is a strangely beautiful and peaceful resting place 64 years later, and very moving.

This is a site known as Pointe du Hoc, the most heavily fortified position on the Normandy coast. It was an important target because the German guns here (similar to Longues-sur-mer) could hit Utah Beach and Omaha Beach with devastating blasts. The photo doesn't portray the devastation. The holes that you see are bomb craters, and that is what the 40 acres looks like. 225 US Army Rangers had to scale the cliffs to take the guns, and two thirds didn't survive.

This is a "peace statue" recently donated by a Korean artist to the local town near Pointe du Hoc.
This is a memorial at Omaha Beach. It is a symbolic rising of Freedom, Liberty, and Justice from the beach where many died for these principles. It is somber and when you look up and down the beach you see the scale of how large the invasion really was.

This is the German memorial cemetery where 20,000 German soldiers rest. It is also somber and when you see the dates of June 7, 1944 on some of the tombstones and it brings back the immediacy of the time instantly. There are many graves of Unknown Soldiers. All the dead were mostly in their twenties. The cemetery is cared for by a German War Memorial organization that cares for 100 sites around the world, not just German. Their premise was stated by Albert Schwitzer: "The best memorial to peace is a cemetery of fallen soldiers".