Our first stop is the church at Angoville Au Plain. Paratroopers landed here on D-Day to try to cut off roads to the beaches. Two young medics, Robert Wright and Kenneth Moore set up a hospital in the church. They saved 80 soldiers, both Germans and Allies, and one French baby.

We can still see blood on the pews and a mortar hole in the ceiling and floor.

Bob and Ken were awarded the Silver Star for the lives they saved. They lived to be old men, and Bob's family brought his ashes to rest in the churchyard.

Today:

Angoville Au Plain
Ste-Mère-Église
Utah Beach
Pointe du Hoc
Omaha Beach
American Cemetery
a return to Bayeux

the longest list, dedicated to the Longest Day

The monument for Bob's ashes. I'm proud to share his alma mater. Go Buckeyes.

Ste-Mère-Église

Our next stop is the town of Ste-Mère-Église. If you've seen the movie The Longest Day (I haven't), you'll recognize paratrooper John Steele and his parachute dangling from the church spire, pretending to be dead.

Okay, that's probably not really John Steele

John Steele survived by pretending to be dead. The two paratroopers who got tangled into this tree were not as lucky. They were shot by German guns.

bullet damage in the fence

The street next to this tree is named Rue Robert Murphy. Robert Murphy was the first paratrooper on the ground in Ste-Mère-Église. He survived and returned to the town annually from the 1960s until his death. We can add Robert Murphy's story to that of medics Bob and Ken, the baby whose life they saved, John Steele, the two paratroopers tangled in the tree...and the rest we'll learn throughout the day.

After our free time, Virginie shares a special snack on the bus: little cakes shaped like parachutes! A little levity for this heavy day.

We have about an hour to explore Ste-Mère-Église on our own. Both Sabrina and Virginie advise against going to the museum, but do recommend its gift shop. The gift shop has a ton of books, which reminds me that there are so many D-Day stories to tell, and we're running out of people alive to tell them.

Confession time: before this trip, I didn't care much about D-Day. When I first saw the D-Day beaches on Rick Steves's TV show, I thought they would be a nice place to visit, but after I booked this tour and was reviewing our itinerary, I was unsure about spending a whole day focused on D-Day. So at home before the tour, I went looking for books or movies to make me care. I found a young adult book called Allies. In concise fiction, it weaves together the stories of several characters involved in D-Day.

The book succeeded in making me care about D-Day by giving the day a collection of stories, even though they were fictional. I can spend today learning the stories of real people, and it will be really powerful.

Utah Beach

We leave Ste-Mère-Église and make our way to the beach. We learn about Hitler's Atlantic Wall, defenses all the way from Norway to Spain. We learn about tanks and landing craft and amphibious vehicles, Czech Hedgehogs and anti-tank obstacles.

Czech Hedgehog

anti-tank obstacle

I feel a little guilty about how much I'm enjoying being on the beach. The casualty count for the Utah Beach landing was just under 200. In 1944, the Nazis were not expecting the Allies to invade on a day with such crummy weather, but the weather today is lovely.

My sandals in the English Channel, washing away the mud from Mont St Michel

I consider storming this castle, but I can't. It's too beautiful. I wonder if any soldiers had similar hesitations during WWII.

A lot of people died on this beach, but thousands survived, making the Utah Beach landing a success for the Allies.

We eat lunch as a group right across the street from the beach. I'm lucky to be at the same table as Sabrina, and she has another D-Day story to contribute. She had an American WWII veteran on one of her tours last week. He just turned 100 years old. He was an MP and landed on Omaha Beach on June 12, 1944. He was traveling to show his family the beach, but it was not his first time returning to Normandy.

sunken ships form an artificial harbor

Sabrina calls this an "optimistic" monument. It was erected in December 1944, well before France was liberated.

Pointe du Hoc

Traveling between Utah Beach and Omaha Beach will take us about an hour, so we'll make one stop on the way. I can't help but think that visiting today's sights without a guide would be exhausting. But with experts guiding and navigating, it's a well-paced day.

Our next stop is the memorial at Pointe du Hoc. It was a German gun battery, a hub of Hitler's Atlantic Wall. The area was actually heavily bombed before D-Day, and the area is still littered with evocative bomb craters.

Pointe du Hoc is now the location of a memorial to the company of US Army Rangers who scaled the cliffs, with the objective of melting the guns.

I can add the story of their colonel, James Rudder, to my collection of D-Day stories. Colonel Rudder recognized that the boat delivering them to their target had mis-steered, and commanded it to turn around. They arrived at Pointe du Hoc and scaled the cliffs, but were late in sending their signal flare, so their reinforcements assumed their landing was not successful and moved on to Omaha Beach. So the single company was without reinforcements for 2 days. And due to the earlier bombings of Pointe du Hoc, the Germans had moved the guns inland! But Colonel Rudder and his men were able to find the guns hiding in the hedgerows and destroy them as planned.

As I exit the memorial, I can add a few more stories. There's a plaque acknowledging the French sacrifices of WWII. 90,000 French soldiers died defending France before the Nazi occupation of 1940. 58,000 soldiers serving Free France and 20,000 members of the French Resistance died from 1940-1945. I know plenty of French people cooperated with the Nazis following the occupation, so those members of the resistance are particularly brave. The fiction I read before the trip had a story of a young girl living in Normandy with parents working with the French Resistance. From the book I learned that French citizens fought the Nazis through guerilla warfare, underground radio and newspapers, spies, sabotage of infrastructure like phone lines and railroads, and so on.

We can see how the area would be strategic, as the Pointe juts out into the channel

...and I peek out

Janice peeks into the bunker...

Omaha Beach

We've arrived at the big one--half of the D-Day casualties happened on Omaha Beach. The heaviness of the day is upon me, and it's getting harder to absorb everything Sabrina is teaching me.

She teaches us about the Niland brothers, the inspiration for the story in the film Saving Private Ryan. There's a rule in the US military that if all your brothers die in military service, then you are exempt from service. The fictional Private Ryan is based on the youngest Niland brother. He was ordered back home to the US in the early days of June 1944 after hearing his three older brothers had died. But real life has a twist, because the oldest Niland brother was discovered to be alive in a Japanese POW camp at the end of the war.

While I was reading Allies, I created an image of Omaha Beach in my head. The soldiers in the amphibious landing craft ran across the beach, dodging German obstacles, to hide against the sea wall. And as our group "lands" on Omaha Beach, reality does not match my image.

We've arrived at high tide, and the beach is disappearing quickly. But there's a line of buoys at the end of the swimming area, and that marks the end of the beach during a typical low tide, like in the wee hours of D-Day. And the seawall is tiny, but Sabrina points out that German guns on the hills above the beach cannot reach anyone along the seawall.

After some free time on the beach, we return to the bus, Virginie, and some chocolate-covered caramels. We have just one more stop to go.

The last of my friends to get captured in a photo, this is David and Linda from Ohio

the seawall has existed since before the war; it supports the road

The sailboat in this photo would be almost ashore if the tide were low

Today families enjoy the beach, with kids playing in the sand and adults catching the sun against the seawall

American Cemetery

The American Cemetery makes the perfect ending for our D-Day explorations. And every tourist in Normandy seems to agree, as there are more people here than we've seen all day. We arrive just in time for the flag lowering, and all of us watch in silent reflection of our day.

Throughout the crowd of tourists watching the lowering of the flag, it warms my heart to see a smattering of people I know! It surprises me how close I've grown to my fellow tour members. My heart is so happy seeing them, but it is also starting to feel heavy as I think about the end of the tour that is very near.

a marker for an unknown soldier

The Wall of the Missing is a very intriguing area of the cemetery. Listed are the names of soldiers who went missing in the course of the Normandy invasions. Soldiers that have since been found have a medallion next to their names. See the medallion for William McGowan? His medallion is the most recently added. His body was identified in 2018, then buried in the cemetery last summer!

William McGowan's is the last of my D-Day stories. This has been a very moving day.

Back in Bayeux

We return to Bayeux just in time for dinner on our own. I head to the grocery store. I'm running out of time in France, but I'm definitely not ready to go home. I need to explore more, so I buy some food that I can eat while I walk, and I head out for another walk around Bayeux.

I start on the same trail I took last night, but instead of turning when I hit the busy road, I keep going. I reach a sign post and learn the next village is only a couple kilometers away!

The walk is absolutely perfect. The scenery is varied--I get to see houses and their residents, Normandy's iconic hedges, and golden fields of wheat. It is a joy to get more of this beautiful country under my feet and a thrill to see new places. I wish I could find more scenic and traffic-free paths like this back home.

A walk is also a great place for personal reflection. As I'm walking I'm able to reflect on my day. I contemplate the history and stories of the heroes of D-Day, but then my focus shifts, and I return to living in the moment and having a great vacation!