Overlord Tour

Today I saw the Normandy Landing Beaches.  I went with a tour group called Overlord Tours, taking their name from the codename of the landings: Operation Overlord.  We left at 8:20 in the morning and got back around 6:45 in the evening.  It was a very emotional day, full of ups and downs and I am quite exhausted from it.

We started out by seeing German anti-ship gun batteries off the coast of Gold Beach, the westernmost of the three beaches tasked to the British and Canadian forces, bordering Omaha Beach.  The bunkers, while damaged from Allied ship-based artillery, are remarkably still intact, still containing the remains of their weapons.  One bunker we saw had taken a direct hit on top and still failed to be breached by the ordinance, so they were remarkably built.  The one next to it, however, had been hit at just the right angle to knock the entire top off of the structure, which still rests several yards behind it in a field.  A third had been neutralized by a one-in-a-million shot that had entered the firing slit, ricocheted off of the wall and exploded, killing the six-man German gun grew and knocking the gun off of its bearings.  Most of the unit manning the artillery batteries had been captured without much of a fight after British forces from Gold Beach reached their position.  Their forces had mostly consisted of men conscripted from Nazi occupied Poland and very old and very young recruits.

We next drove to Omaha beach and went down to the waterfront.  Unfortunately, it was at high tide, unlike when the landings occurred.  On D-Day, the Allies attacked at low-tide in order to avoid the mines and obstacles put in place by the German defenders.  Unfortunately, that meant that the Allied infantry had to cross over 300 yards of open beach before trying to scale up very difficult terrain and/or sheer cliff walls.  Rommel, the German office in charge of the defenses of the Norman coast, saw the area that the Allies codenamed Omaha as being one of the most important areas to defend in the months leading up to the invasion.  He had it manned with more elite forces than the rest of the beaches and was in the process of strengthening its defenses.  Luckily, the invasion occurred before all of the bunkers and gun emplacements were finished, which saved countless more lives.  As it was, the American forces taking Omaha suffered horrendous casualties.  The pre-landing bombardment of the coastal defenses had overshot its target, missing the German weapons emplacements entirely.  Thus, the weapons were free to open up on the landing boats even before they got into deployment range.  Over 90 percent of the first wave that went ashore was killed before the second wave even arrived. It was absolute slaughter.  We were told the story of one German who was manning a machinegun who killed over one thousand men on Omaha Beach by himself.  In his memoirs, he wrote that on that morning, a German officer who he had never seen before told him to start shooting and not to stop until he ran out of ammo.  So, he obeyed.  Whenever he ran low on ammo, that same officer returned with more ammo.  He was forced to change barrels of his machine gun several time as it overheated, but he kept shooting as long as he was brought ammo.  Eventually, the officer stopped coming, he ran out of ammo, stopped shooting and immediately surrendered. 

Even after the second wave, the American forces still were unable to make it off of the beach.  Those who made it across the open beach were hunkered down behind the long seawall that had been built by a now-demolished resort town or seeking shelter where they could.  Brigadier General Norman Cota arrived on the beach, as one of the only officers and the highest ranking one at that.  He was dismayed to find that none of the units had moved off of the beach yet and he knew that if they stayed there, they would all die sooner rather than later.  So, he began to rally the infantry and he tried to get them moving.  He spotted a group that looked fresher than the others and he asked their commander what outfit they were from.  Someone yelled, “5^th Rangers!”, the Rangers of course being the Army’s elite special forces outfit.  Cota then yelled the famous line, "Well, God damn it then, Rangers, lead the way!"  The last bit of that has since become the motto of the Rangers.  The 5^th Rangers then promptly led the charge up the slopes off of the beach.  Inspired by seeing their own men moving, other units along the beach then braved the hail of bullets to storm the heights above the beach and the invasion was back underway.

By the afternoon, a beachhead had been established and the bluffs above Omaha were under American control.

We also visited Pointe du Hoc, which was a redoubtable bluff jutting straight out of the ocean and protected by sheer cliff walls. There were six canons located here that were mounted on platforms that permitted them to rotate 360 degrees.  Their twelve mile range meant that they could threaten both Omaha and Utah Beaches, which they were situated between.  A multi-month bombing campaign dropped over 5,000 bombs on the area, but only succeeded in damaging one of the guns.  Thus, on D-Day 125 Army Rangers scaled the cliffs (all were up in 15 minutes) and destroyed the guns without losing a single man.  Unfortunately, they were forced to hold off the German counterattack over the course of 3 days with only 30 some men reinforcing them.  They took massive casualties over this period, as they ran low on supplies having lost most of them during the trip to their objective on D-Day.  Still, they held their position until the forces from Omaha Beach fought their way to them.  Today, Pointe du Hoc is marked by the immense craters left over from the bombing campaign.  When viewed from above, the surface almost looks lunar, albeit covered in grass and yellow canola flowers.  When the Rangers arrived on D-Day, they had found that the Germans had been in the process of constructing a concrete bunker complex with trenches.  So, when threatened with the counterattack, they detonated the ordinance storage bunker in order to render it useless should the enemy regain the position.  This is the largest crater on the point.  The force of exploding ordinance utterly destroyed the bunker, tossing giant pieces of concrete dozens of yards away.

Perhaps the most emotionally moving part of the day was the visit to the American Cemetery.  One third of all of the American dead from the Normandy Campaign are buried here, the rest were brought home at the request of their families or their remains were never found (there are over one thousand of the latter).  The names of the missing are inscribed in a massive curving wall and divided by what branch they served in.  The cemetery itself is row after row of white crosses or stars of David, depending on the faith of the deceased.  It is difficult to comprehend that each little white grave marker was a man killed during the period of three months.  It was very sickening to think that such a terrible thing happened.  I kept thinking back to the WWII video games that I played growing up, including Medal of Honor: Frontline, the first level of which is the Omaha Beach landing.  Back then, I only thought of one-man-armying my way through the conflict.  I never stopped to consider the actual consequences of the real event.  Once again, I find myself unable to properly put into words how I feel about the event.

After lunch, we began the second phase of our tour, visiting sights associated with the 101^st Airborne, Easy Company.  This is the unit made famous by the book and HBO series Band of Brothers.  We saw St.-Mère-Église, home to the Airborne Museum.  The American paratroopers dropped into the area just before 2:00 in the morning.  They were expecting all of the civilians and most of the German soldiers to be asleep when they began landing, but in Sainte-Mère-Église, the entire town was awake, fighting an intense blaze that was burning down a house.  Thus, the German garrison was awake, keeping an eye on the civilians who were all out past curfew.  Most of the American paratroopers landed off target, and some landed directly in the town and thus came under fire, as the sky was illuminated by the fire.  Paratrooper John Steele of the 505^th Paratrooper Infantry Regiment had the misfortune of being caught up on the steeple of the church.  After struggling to get free, he was noticed and shot in the foot.  He played dead for over two hours.  Two German snipers in the steeple attempted to pull him inside, but he was too heavy.  So they decided to cut him down.  If he feel on the roof and rolled on to the ground, he could be recovered and made prisoner.  If he died, well, so be it from their perspective.  Luckily, he survived.  He was taken prisoner, but escaped later on.  He was evacuated to England, where he recovered from his wound and went on to jump in Holland as a part of the disasterous Operation Market Garden and he served in Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge and he served in Germany, surviving through the end of the war and earning the rank of sergeant.  Today he is commemorated by the town with a bronze statue of a paratrooper hung on the church steeple.

We also saw Carentan, a village that was the site of a very bloody struggle for control between the Germans and the 101^st Airborne.  On the approach, Lt. Colonel Cole was in command of 200 men tasked with taking the four bridges leading to the town and then taking the town itself.  Taking the four bridges took five days due to the strength of the German position.  On the fifth day, down to 100 men, they were across the fourth bridge, but the German defensive line stood between them and the village. Virtually out of ammo, Cole ordered his men to fix bayonets.  The charge was to be covered by a smokescreen and he told his men that he would blow a whistle to signal the charge.  The smoke grenades were thrown, the smokescreen was established, Cole blew the whistle.  Unfortunately, only twenty men heard the whistle, who, led by Cole himself, charged German line.  Fortunately, there were high winds that day that very quickly dispersed the smoke.  The other eighty me saw their comrades charging and took off after them.  The charge was a success and drove the Germans back into the town.  Over the next several days, the 101^st surrounded the town and Easy Company under the command of Richard Winters successfully cleared the Germans out.  

Nearby, there was a small crossroads village called Angoville-au-Plain where Colonel Sink temporarily held  his field headquarters.  Across from this farmhouse was the Church Saint-Côme-Saint-Damien, where medics Robert Wright and Kenneth Moore held an aid station.  They were treating American wounded when the German counterattack retook Carentan, but they refused to leave the wounded behind and continued to treat them, despite fears that they would all be executed by the Germans.  Shortly after retaking the town, the Germans arrived at the church, saw the aid station, and asked the two medics if they would please help several German soldiers who had been seriously wounded in the fighting.  The two agreed.  In all, the pair treated 80 wounded soldiers, fifteen of whom were German and one French child who had been wounded in a shell burst that had killed both his parents, his brothers, and his sister. Years later, a veteran was riding in a tour bus of the Normandy invasion that was passing through Angoville-au-Plain on its way to Carentan and pointing out Colonel Sink’s headquarters building.  He wasn’t really paying attention to what the guide was saying, but he thought that the area looked really familiar and asked the tour guide if he could stop and take a look around.  Surprisingly, the guide said it was okay, and the veteran walked into the church, saw the blood stains on the pews from where the wounded had been lain, and also the damaged ceiling and floor from where an unexploded mortar round and fallen into the church and he recognized it as the make-shift aid station.  This veteran was Robert Wright, back in Normandy for the first time since the war decades before.  Every year since then, he returned and was greeted as a hero by residents of the village, including the young French boy whose life he had saved.  Our tour guide told his that ten years ago, he suffered a stroke and was only given months to live.  He still continued to come to Angoville-au-Plain every year for nine years after that.  Last year, however, his family did not allow him to come, as he was now mostly paralyzed from the stroke and they felt that the trip would be too much for his health.

It was the little moments and little stories like that which really made the experience extraordinary.  We had a very good tour guide who knew what she was talking about and was confident in her ability to tell it.  Her father and several uncles on both sides of her family served in various capacities during the war, and she grew up in the region, her family living in Normandy for generations.  Thus, she was able to provide a very intimate look into the events from the French point of view.

We also stopped briefly at the German war cemetery.  Due to stipulations in the Treaty of Versailles, the Germans were forbidden from being buried in coffins and forbidden from having their graves marked with white crosses, furthermore they were buried in mass-graves of 2-5 bodies each.  Scattered among the placards in the ground giving the names in the group-graves are sets of five gray concrete crosses, symbolically marking the group burials.  In the center of the cemetery is a mound atop which is a giant Saxon cross flanked by two statues representing German parents mourning their lost sons.  Another stipulation of the treaty forbids the repatriation of the deceased, even if their parents asked for their remains to be sent home.  Surrounded by maple trees and given the German name for “peace garden,” the cemetery is a very forlorn place and is quite sad, even for a cemetery.

If you come to France, I highly recommend taking a day to come to Normandy and going on a full-day tour like this.  It is very emotionally charged experience that every American should participate in.