A New Look At The Normandy Beaches
Few tourist-frequented sites in Normandy trigger emotions as great as the landing beaches where Allied forces debarked on D-Day, June 6, 1944, to liberate France from Nazi occupation.More than a million visitors a year make the pilgrimage to the imposing D-Day memorial and American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer where lie the graves of 9,387 U.S. soldiers, most of whom lost their lives during those landings and the battles that ensued.
Although the Normandy coast is heavily dotted with war memorials of one sort or another, including those of America’s allies who also participated in the D-Day landings, Colleville easily is the most imposing.
Even if you’ve been there already, there’s a good reason you should think seriously about going again.
It’s because the memorial relatively recently inaugurated a new and impressive Visitor Center which provides an emotional and thought-provoking addition to an already moving experience.
The cemetery at Colleville was the first one established for World War II American forces in Europe with its initial graves put in place on June 8, 1944, just two days after the Allied landings.
For most of its more than 60 years of existence the approach to the now 172-acre cemetery grounds has followed a roughly 100-yard-long tree-lined path leading directly to its vast and breathtaking expanse of neatly tended graves topped by white crosses or six-pointed Jewish stars.
For solemnity and reflection, the site could scarcely be beaten.
Now, however, to provide a better context and understanding of how and why all those young Americans came to finish their lives in Normandy; the entry route goes first to the Visitor Center.
There the role and the complexity of the D-Day landing operations in a world at war is impressively driven home in an extensive display of battle souvenirs, helmets, rifles, maps, flags, radios, uniforms and wartime film footage.
No less than four successive sites in the exhibition provide space for visitors to sit and watch constantly run films of, successively, occupied France, the Allied attack preparations in England, the landing operations themselves and the eventual victory celebrations in a France set free.
The films, essentially compiled from wartime newsreel footage have much the same awesome impact, although with much less blood and gore, as the much praised realistic opening sequences of Saving Private Ryan, or those of another landmark war film, The Longest Day..
In them the visitor can watch and hear Allied wartime Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower personally wishing his landing forces well before their embarkment for France in the wee hours of June 6. Afterward one can see the vast Allied armada assembled for the attack on the French coast, view the landings themselves, amid murderous fire from Nazi emplacements on the hilltop above the beaches, and, finally follow the Allied drive across France, the liberation of Paris and eventually Germany’s surrender.
Entry to the Center is free and, although there is much on display, in keeping with the solemn and sober ambiance of the cemetery the Center deliberately does not have a souvenir shop or bookstore. If you want tee shirts or other memorabilia, you need to go elsewhere.
At the entrance to the Center, visitors have to go through the same kind of security checks they would experience for an airline flight today but, the displays and the films are so riveting that one easily can spend an hour perusing the exhibits before proceeding out directly to the cemetery and the Memorial’s lookout post. Both are located high on the cliff above the landing sites themselves the lookout post stands at the start of a path really adventurous and sure-footed visitors can take, if they wish, to wend their way on foot down to the beaches where the Americans first came ashore.
It is impossible from those beach sites to look up and imagine the difficulty those soldiers faced fighting their way under fire to the cliff top, without feeling a surge of sympathy and admiration for their courage.
At the lookout post also there is a useful orientation map dotted with directional arrows pointing out the locations of various other landing areas on the Normandy coast and their distances and directions from the Allies invasion launch sites in Britain.
With that context established, there remains but a short walk to the rows of individual grave sites. They are bordered on one end by a small circular chapel and on the other by a giant bronze statue dedicated to “The Spirit of American Youth.”
The two walls flanking the statue bear giant military maps whose display of dates and arrows allow the visitor to trace the course and pace of the Allied advance from the landings until the day of victory.
Because many of the cemetery’s visitors come precisely because members of their immediate family or their relatives are buried there, staff in the Visitor Center are constantly on duty to provide details of precisely where a particular grave-site is located.
Colleville is roughly a 170-mile automobile drive west of Paris via the cities of Caen and Bayeux. Rail service runs from the capital’s Gare St. Lazare to Bayeux (about three hours) with multiple tour bus or taxi links available from there to the cemetery, which is open to the public daily from 9: a.m. to 5: p.m.
Considerable information about the site, which is run, as are other U.S. military cemeteries around the world, by the American Battle Monuments Commission, can be obtained at the web site www.abmc-gov
For an experience you are unlikely to forget, Colleville, as the French travel books say, Vaut le voyage. Is worth the trip,.
