On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
We will have Normandy posts on Wednesday and Thursday, as well, with submissions from frosty who took a trip to Normandy in 2014.
We will finish up the week on Friday with a post from Steve in Mendocino.
Anyone ready to return to Paris?
Paris After Dark starts again on Thursday of this week. So if you’ve been planning to submit more photos of Paris, now is the time to send those in!
lashonharangue
Omaha beach is about 5 miles long. On D-Day the eastern half was assigned to the 1st Infantry Division (aka Big Red One), the oldest serving division in the Regular Army. It has seen continuous service since its organization in 1917 during World War I.
This monument sits just above the beach.
They suffered some of the gravest casualties of the first day. Overall it took three days to accomplish the objectives expected to be reached on the first day at Omaha.
La Pointe du Hoc is a promontory with a 100-foot cliff overlooking the English Channel. It was the highest point between the American sector landings at Utah Beach to the west and Omaha Beach to the east. There was a presumed emplacement of heavy guns that would have threatened both the beaches and ships. However, the guns had been recently moved a little inland and were not in use. After the heights were scaled, a small Ranger patrol found the guns under camouflage and disabled them.
The Rangers suffered relatively few casualties in the initial scaling of the cliff and fighting its defenders. However, they were isolated on the cliffs, as planned following troops were diverted to Omaha. They dug in and suffered heavy losses from several counter-attacks from nearby German troops and were only relieved on June 8th.
This monument was erected by the French and later transferred to the American Battle Monuments Commission. The inscription calls out the leadership of Lt. Col. James Rudder. He was wounded twice during the fighting. Documentation of Ranger orders released from the National Archives in 2012 indicates he knew the guns had been removed prior to the assault. One of the majors leading some of his troops heard about this on the ship headed to Normandy and objected that this made the assault unnecessary. Rudder relieved him of command at the last minute. Most of the Rangers didn’t find out the guns were missing until they scaled the cliffs.
Looking down from the top. Utah Beach is to the left facing seaward. The Rangers landed to the right.
Looking out from a bunker.
The Rangers were supported by fire from guns on U.S. and British ships, with the bombardment collapsing a part of the cliff. This made the effort to scale them somewhat easier for some of the troops.
Visiting Normandy was similar for me to visiting Little Round Top in Gettysburg. It makes a difference when you can walk the terrain in order to understand a previous generation’s sacrifice.
Raven
If you’re going to be one be a big red one.
Raven
And if you haven’t seen the film by Sam Fuller with Lee Marvin it is intense.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Speaking of Normandy, I just want to point out that James Doohan (Montgomery Scott from Star Trek) was apparently a legit combat hero with the Canucks at Juno Beach. Got shot up retty good, too.
Geminid
The other Divsion making the landing at Omaha Beach was the 29th, composed of prewar National Guard units from Maryland and Virginia. A company from the area around Bedford, Virginia took very heavy casualties, and there is a D-Day Memorial outside of Bedford that I visited some years ago with my Mom, who told me of hearing about the landings on the radio when she was a kid in Wisconsin.
Both divisions were pinned down on the beach and stalled for several hours, and by midmorning Omar Bradley and his command team were uncertain as to whether they should send follow on troops. Three U.S. Navy destroyers helped break the impasse by sailing close to shore and blasting away at the German positions, while small groups of soldiers fought their way into the bluffs above the beach.
Utah Beach to the west was a relatively easy landing for the 4th Division. But the next seven weeks of fighting were grueling and costly for all the Allied forces, until American units broke through the tenacious German defenses July 21-25.
Lapassionara
@Geminid: I’ve seen the monument in Bedford. It is interesting, as it tries to recreate what those landing on Omaha beach would have seen from the sea.
I have visited Omaha at the Vierville Gap, and there are remains of the pillboxes still there, in the side of the hills. I cannot imagine how they were disabled. It is a sobering sight.
Albatrossity
The home of the Big Red One is about 4 miles from my house – Ft. Riley KS.
I had an uncle who was at Omaha Beach on D-Day. He survived, but I never heard him talk about it. My dad served in North Africa and Italy, but not in combat; he was in a photo recon unit.
Thanks for these pics. I’ve never been to that part of France, and likely never will, but these images are a good reminder of what previous generations did for the antifa cause.
MelissaM
Normandy is a bucket list item of mine. My father and my husbands grandfather were both WWII vets, but neither went through DDay. Father entered service in 1943 but didn’t hit France until January 1945. Grandfather was a colonel in Italy under Patton and I’m not sure how he spent DDay. We know Patton was sidelined.
I’m a fan of the Ambrose books and of Band of Brothers.
JoyceCB
My mother’s cousin’s husband (got that?) was one of those Rangers who scaled the cliffs the night before the invasion. He wasn’t a big guy but he was wiry and had been a gymnast in high school, which probably helped. I cannot imagine landing at the foot of those cliffs. I guess you turn your mind off and let training take over. He survived the war and had a good life and died of old age about fifteen years ago.
Yutsano
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Yep! Doohan was in fact shot six times and lost several fingers during the battle. The producers of Star Trek used several different tricks to hide the fact that Doohan had a mangled hand. Legit war hero he was.
lashonharangue
@Albatrossity: You are welcome. Glad to share them.
JanieM
My brain grinds its gears over the juxtaposition of the beauty of land and sea, and what happened there in 1944. Thanks again for the pictures, and the history lessons.
J R in WV
Thanks for these photos. Would like to tour Normandy and the scenes of those battles. There are still no-man’s-land areas in France from both WW I and WW II where no one can enter because of the buried and now fragile munitions everywhere. They still work to decontaminate and disarm buried exploisives to reclaim farm land. Battlefields where the terrain is shaped by long ago cannon-fire and trench warfare.
My bucket list never shrinks, grows all the time…
Zelma
My family story about D-Day is that my dad’s naval unit was assigned to drive landing ships onto the beach, probably at Omaha. But literally as they were marching toward the troop ship, it was discovered that they had not been given their shots. They were told to about face and return to the barracks. It apparently took the Navy two weeks to get the shots into their arms, so that by the time they got to England, those billets had been filled by others. He ended up as a dispersing officer (paymaster) in Plymouth. He had a very easy time since everybody is nice to paymasters.
I once asked him whether he regretted missing D-Day. (I was quite young and naive at the time.) He asked me if I liked having a father, since casualties amongst those who drove small boats onto Omaha Beach were around 35%.
I visited Normandy in 2015. We were there on June 6 and the place was a madhouse. Like most people, I was especially moved by the cemeteries. Also the Airborne museum, at Ste. Marie Eglise. Also the museum at Caen. I was on a WWI and WWII tour with a Yale professor. I spent two weeks visiting museums, battlefields and cemeteries. Perhaps not for everyone, but it was the most memorable trip I have ever taken.
SteverinoCT
@Geminid: I read somewhere that a US destroyer was trying to find hidden targets, when they noticed a damaged tank on the beach. It couldn’t move, but its gun worked, and the tank was shooting at the enemy guns it could see from its position. The destroyer captain ordered the gunners to fire on the tank’s hits. The tanker was amazed when his hit was followed by a barrage of 3″ (5″ ?) shells. He saw the ship, waved, and began acting as a spotter by firing on targets.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@J R in WV: When I visited Ypres and the surrounding WWI fighting areas, there were lovely little ponds dotted around, adding to the bucolic calm. Turned out they were shell holes that had filled up with rain.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Zelma: I found the Normandy beaches and the WWII museum at Caen great, and yes, the cemeteries are very affecting. But the amazing WWI museum in Ypres (in a reconstructed medieval building like every other building in Ypres – the entire town was destroyed by shelling and meticulously reconstructed after the war) was depressing as hell. All that suffering and waste for really nothing, except for giving birth to the modern world, I guess.