"06-06-1944"

Hello again!

On Friday, Mackenzie and I were taken on a guided tour of Normandy's famed D-Day historical sites and Mackenzie was put to the test trying to remember her World War II history from last year. Our tour, booked through Overlord Tours, specifically emphasized the American involvement in the invasion of mainland Europe and looked at several of the actual battle grounds depicted in the HBO mini-series, "Band of Brothers." Overall, the tour was incredibly informative and fascinating, despite being quite long with us touring all over Bayeux from 8:30am to 5:30pm. Some of the highlights of the tour were...

The bunkers that were still intact from the 1940s, which we were able to go inside and climb around. These bunkers were found everywhere the fighting took place, but they were pretty hard to spot of the cliffs of Omaha beach; there they were tucked away so that the Allies couldn't locate them from the sun glinting off the metal in the daylight.

Omaha Beach, one of the two American beach heads established on D-Day; the others were nicknamed Sword (British), Juno (Canadian), Gold (British), and Utah (American). It was heartbreaking to hear about the awful odds that the first waves of soldiers faced when they reached the beach with an intact German defense raining rounds of ammunitions down on them. 

After touring Omaha beach, we headed up to the top of the bluff overlooking the beach, which is now where the American Cemetery is located. The entire monument consists of a reflection pool (symbolizing the English Channel) facing a semi-circle of stone pillars that have inscriptions of the movements of all the regiments on D-Day (symbolizing the . The statue in the middle is a man rising up out of the waves of the Channel, representing the American spirit of the men who gave their lives on that day in combat.

Around 40% of the men who died at Normandy were buried in the American Cemetery, as per request by their next of kin. The grave markers were unusual, in the fact that they only gave the name of the soldier, their company, their hometown, and their death date...President Eisenhower, when he commissioned the building of the Cemetery and the reburial of all the soldiers from their mass graves down on the beach, claimed that he didn't want to look out on a sea of dead young men, therefore the birth dates on all the graves was never added so that you wouldn't be able to tell the man's age when he died.

The coastline of the Pointe du Hoc, the only place where men had to climb up the huge bluffs. This was also one of the most intense combat scenes on D-Day. 

The view of the English Channel from the inside of a German Command Station at the top of the Pointe du Hoc.

The top of the Pointe du Hoc was riddled with craters from shells exploding in the attempt to blow up the German guns stationed there. It was hard to imagine that the land used to be flat before World War II.

Mackenzie and I down in the middle of one of the shell craters just to show how deep they still were after all this time.

After visiting the Pointe du Hoc, we traveled over to Sainte Mére- Église to see the Musée Airborne. Both Mackenzie and I liked looking at all the different insignias and medals that the men wore on their uniforms; seeing the inside of the gliders was pretty amazing too.

The town's church, complete with a fake paratrooper stuck up on one of the spires, representing the actual event of paratrooper, John Steele, getting stuck on the church during his landing and watching the fighting from up above for two hours before he was discovered by the Germans. 

Brécourt Manor, one of the locations for a battle scene in the second episode of "Band of Brothers" when Easy Company, under the command of Major Dick Winters, took out four German guns that were shelling Utah beach while Americans were still trying to land ashore.

A memorial specifically dedicated to Major Dick Winters, who passed away now three years ago. He wouldn't allow for any monuments to be commissioned while he was alive, so this monument is quite new to the scene. Our tour guide said that Normandy erects about 20 new monuments every year to commemorate various companies or persons in action.

One of the new stained glass windows in a church that served as a medical camp during the Battle of Normandy, headed by two American medics, Kenneth Moore and Robert Wright.

A street renamed after Easy Company's training camp in Georgia. The street was located right outside the aforementioned church.

The American monument in Carentan (which was our last stop of the day), dedicated to all the soldiers who fought and died in the Battle of Normandy. It was pretty cool to see old pictures taken at the time of the dedication ceremony and compare them to the modern looks of the town, which still has many of the same buildings intact.

That completes our day in Bayeux and Saturday we headed back to Paris for one more day of Spring Break bliss before we traveled back to Bath for my classes that start up again on today!

Au revoir!