• France Guide

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  • The north
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  • Normandy
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France Guide

Normandy

The D-Day beaches

Despite the best efforts of Steven Spielberg, it's all but impossible now to picture the scene at dawn on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when Allied troops landed along the Norman coast between the mouth of the Orne and Les Dunes de Varneville on the Cotentin Peninsula. For the most part, these are innocuous beaches backed by gentle dunes, and yet this foothold in Europe was won at the cost of 100,000 soldiers' lives. That the invasion happened here and not nearer to Germany was partly a result of the disastrous Canadian raid on Dieppe in 1942, which showed the perils of attacking fortified positions without strong air and artillery support. The ensuing Battle of Normandy killed thousands of civilians and reduced nearly six hundred towns and villages to rubble but, within a week of its eventual conclusion, Paris was liberated.

The beaches are still often referred to by their wartime code names: from east to west, Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah. Substantial traces of the fighting are rare, the most remarkable being the remains of the astounding Mulberry Harbour at Arromanches, 10km northeast of Bayeux. Further west, at Pointe du Hoc on Omaha Beach, the cliff heights are deeply pitted with German bunkers and shell holes, while the church at Ste-Mère-Église, from whose steeple the US paratrooper dangled during heavy fighting throughout The Longest Day, still stands, and now has a model parachute permanently fastened to the roof. Note that Utah Beach, the westernmost of the Invasion Beaches, is on the Cotentin Peninsula.

Just about every coastal town has its war museum. These tend as a rule to shy away from the unbearable reality of war in favour of Boy's Own-style heroics, but the wealth of incidental human detail can nonetheless be overpowering. Veterans and their descendants apart, visitors these days come to this stretch of coast for its seaside: sand and seafood (the best oysters are at Courseulles), plenty of campsites and no Deauville chic.