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Travel
Story and photos by Yvonne Jeffery
Remembering D-Day
A trip to Normandy’s beaches
All along the Normandy coast of France, facing an unseen England across
the notoriously choppy waters of the English Channel, the memories
linger. Like an old negative, double-exposed, the colours of the sunwashed
cliffs and the long stretches of golden beach seem superimposed on a
black-and-white image of coiled barbed wire, minefields and soldiers wading
ashore against impossible odds.
On June 6,1944,thousands of British,Canadian and American troops,tanks,
aircraft and ships — hidden along the coast and hedgerows of England for
weeks — mounted a coordinated surprise attack along this scooped-out coast
on beaches they code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. D-Day wasn’t
the end of World War II, but it was, perhaps, the beginning of the end. It
launched a fight that,day after grinding day through the summer of 1944,turned
the war in the Allies’ favour.
Step onto any of those beaches today and signs still point to the past: concrete
gun emplacements so well reinforced that they’re barely showing signs of
wear, and museums that seek to answer the questions of both past and present
— the whos, the hows and especially the whys. One such intersection of memories
and reality occurs at Pointe du Hoc,a sheer cliff rising out of the sea in the
American sector.
Today,the sun is shining from a brilliantly blue sky and the wind that’s snapping
the massive U.S. flag is warm. Behind me, Normandy is back to being a
weekend home away from home for Parisians, a bucolic county of dairy cows
feeding the Camembert tradition and orchards of Calvados-bound apples.There
June 2008 • 43 • Fifty-Five Plus Magazine
(above) Parts of the World War II
artificial harbour at Arromanches
have since washed ashore, while
others remain in the water.
(below) The shoreline where the 3rd
Canadian Division landed on June 6,
1944 is just visible from the Canadian
cemetery at Beny-Sur-Mer.