June 6
Normandy
Part 1: The Boys of Pointe du Hoc
Music: "Hymn to the Fallen" from the score to Saving Private Ryan, by John Williams
This would have been at the top of my parents' to-do list were they
able to make it, and it was no less of a priority for us. (Most of
the photos here, even the black and white ones, are actually ours.)
The invasion beaches of WWII, while a bit off the beaten path for tourists
to reach, are well worth the effort, and there really is no place like
it in the world. Many Americans waded ashore here that day, from
the famous—Yogi Berra, Robert Montgomery, Rocky Marciano, Andy Rooney,
William Golding—to everyday boys whose names would be familiar only to
their family members back home and the men they shared their singular experience
with, many of whom remain here today. To stand among the eternal
residents of the American Cemetery is to be suddenly struck mute, and to
begin to have some idea of what happened on perhaps the most pivotal day
in Western civilization. Elizabeth wept the moment we entered the
grounds, and I came awfully close.
To get to the Normandy beaches, we hopped on the train to Bayeux, the
nearest sizable town. The minute we hopped off, we discovered
that everyone who had been on the train with us was dividing into two groups:
those heading for the waiting tour group buses, and those heading for buddies
who lived in town. We were the only two people just wandering through
the town. Not to worry, though; thanks to our handy Rick Steves guide,
we had a rough sketch of Bayeux's layout, and meandered through the town
until we found the tourism office. There, we learned that our plan
to rent a couple of bikes and pedal the six miles to the beaches had only
one slight snag: it may be six miles to the shore as the crow flies,
but via the usual twisty back roads, it was more like fifteen.
And, of course, fifteen back. Not to mention the running back and
forth between the various sites along the shoreline. Well, we had
been hoping to get there a little faster; we had only so many hours to
spend seeing everything in the area before our return train departed for
Paris, so we decided to grab a taxi instead and attempt to catch up with
one of the non-charter buses somewhere out there. Mission accomplished;
thanks to the predictably speedy French cabbie, we soon found ourselves
deposited right at the cemetery.
On the morning of June 6, 1944, a fleet of nearly seven thousand ships—the
largest naval armada the world had ever seen—traversed the short distance
across the English Channel and began the largest amphibious invasion in
history, which would prove to be the first opposed landing across the Channel
to be successful in nine centuries.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces,
had finally given the go-ahead to the long-delayed invasion of western
Europe, something the Soviets had been pushing for since entering the war
themselves in summer 1941. The final plan would involve nearly fifty
Allied
divisions from the United States, Britain, and Canada, as well as Free
French and Polish troops fighting to regain their homelands; in all, 1,400,000
troops were committed to the operation.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, recognizing the weakness in defending only
the seaports, turned the beaches of France into what he hoped would be
an impenetrable wall. Only one section remained unfinished, its supplies
delayed because of Resistance bombings of railway lines: Normandy.
Having learned from disastrous earlier landings, chief invasion planner
General Sir Bernard Montgomery had prepared an operation to take advantage
of Allied air cover; however, given the planes' short range, the choice
of targets seemed limited to Normandy and the Pas de Calais, separated
from the cliffs of Dover by just thirty miles. Convinced that everyone
would assume Calais to be the obvious choice, the Allies chose the opposite,
and mounted an immense disinformation campaign to keep convincing the German
High Command that Calais was indeed to be the target. A flurry of
leaked communiques suggested the formation of a massive new invasion force
under the command of General George Patton, for which visual "proof" was
delivered to German spies and double agents in the form of photos of "landing
craft" and "tanks" that were often cutouts or even inflatable dummies.
The phony campaigns (codenamed Operation Fortitude and Bodyguard) helped
to convince the Germans that false preliminary invasions would precede
the real strikes, at likely targets from Calais to Norway to the south
of France and even the Balkans, and troops that might otherwise have changed
the Germans' fortunes at Normandy were rerouted elsewhere. Montgomery's
real plan, meanwhile, called for Allies to secure a beachhead in Normandy—including
the badly needed deep-water harbor in Cherbourg—within the first forty
days, long enough to land the reserve of the troops and material and push
inland, toward the Loire and Seine river valleys.
The initial date for the invasion, June 5, had been pushed back in
the face of unacceptably inclement weather, a sudden change from the perfect
conditions that had been present throughout the month of May. Needing
a full moon for both pilot visibility and the favorable tides that would
enable the Allies' experimental new landing craft to penetrate all the
way to the French shoreline, Eisenhower pondered delaying until July, but
worried about the costly delays (in fuel, logistics, and morale) that would
result from turning around the waves of assault forces, already en route
and taking shelter from the storm along the inlets of southern Britain.
Amidst a group of senior advisors split on when to proceed, Eisenhower
made his final decision to greenlight the operation (codenamed Overlord)
on the strength of chief meteorologist Group Captain J. M. Stagg's prediction
that the storms would relent slightly on the morning of the 6th.
At the same time, the Germans saw the weather as sufficient cause to relax
their guard, and ordered several units to stand down, while many of the
senior commanders left for home or for previously scheduled war games.
Not everyone was in the dark. In the latest in a series of coded
radio broadcasts to various Maquis resistance cells throughout France,
variations on the opening lines of Paul Verlaine's poem "Chanson d'Automne"
("Songs of Autumn") were sent in two parts: the first line, "Les sanglots
longs des violons de l'automne" ("The long sobs of autumn violins"), to
alert the cells in the Orléans region to begin disrupting rail lines
in preparation for an Allied invasion, with the second line, "Bercent mon
coeur d'une langueur monotone" ("Sooths my heart with a monotonous languor"),
to tell them the invasion was imminent. The German High Command's
codebreaking division had already decoded the meaning of the poem (and
many others being transmitted), but their sudden alerts went unheeded by
the upper echelon, who had felt burned by an earlier mobilization when
the aborted May landings did not follow up the same transmissions.
To secure the bridges and German resupply lines in advance of the landings,
waves of four hundred C-47s at a time delivered over 13,000 paratroopers
from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, along with their counterparts
in the British 6th Airborne Division, airdropping them behind enemy lines
shortly after midnight. In the chaos of flak bombarding their aircraft,
nearly half were dropped over the wrong areas, at times directly into enemy
positions. However, the misdrops actually served to confuse the Germans
as to the intended target, and their earlier defensive decision to flood
parts of Normandy served to shield many of the scattered troops from counterattack.
By the morning of the 6th, the fragmented 82nd Airborne had managed to
capture the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, making it the first
French city liberated in the invasion. The paratroopers would spend
the next several days roaming behind the German lines, consolidating into
small groups and fighting wherever they could, often linking up with units
from numerous different divisions.
The official communications blackout, coupled with enough phony radio
traffic to mystify the codebreakers, prevented the Germans from discovering
the real nature of the threat amassing against them, although Free French
General Charles de Gaulle's speech to his countrymen advising them that
their liberation was underway almost wrecked the plan. (A crossword
puzzle which appeared in the London Daily Telegraph several weeks
earlier had also contained a wide range of key codewords, from the various
beach names to Overlord itself; it was later suggested that the crossword
designers had picked up buzzwords from soldiers in camp and innocently
worked them into the puzzle.)
The beach operations themselves began at 3:00 a.m., as the vastly superior
Allied air forces (12,000 planes, vs. 300 remnants of the Luftwaffe) began
pounding the coastal defenses at the first (easternmost) of the invasion
zones, codenamed Sword. The naval bombardment, from the massive flotilla
escorting the slow-moving landing craft, soon followed, and by 7:30 a.m.
the first British troops waded ashore. German resistance here was
among the weakest on D-Day, and the Brits were soon able to link up with
their paratroopers and begin their slow push in toward the city of Caen.
By the time an inoffensive counterattack was launched in the afternoon,
the British had secured the landing zone with a loss of only 630 men out
of nearly thirty thousand. The British were also assigned the central
landing zone, codenamed Gold. Here, however, they met heavier resistance
than at Sword, partly because the experimental new floating Sherman tanks
bogged down in the shoreline. By the time this group had begun to
push in toward the town of Bayeux in the late afternoon, their casualties
had reached four hundred, out of a landing force of 25,000.
The Canadian forces were assigned to take the next landing zone, codenamed
Juno. It would prove to be the second-most-heavily defended site,
with a natural seawall twice the height of Omaha Beach's augmenting the
sea mines and heavy guns. Air attacks here had proved ineffective,
and by the time the weather permitted the Canadians to land, the Germans
had regrouped and began inflicting massive casualties on them, approaching
the same fifty percent level in the first hour that the Americans would
suffer at Omaha; the attrition rate was so high that Commonwealth military
officials would have to coin a new term—Double Intense—to describe them.
Once they were ashore, however, they quickly worked their way inland, and
by noon had moved several miles inland to seize nearby bridges; by 6:00
they had seized the town of Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, having pushed farther
inland than any other Allied force. Among the young officers leading
the way was Lieutenant James Doohan (who would later become "Scotty" on
Star
Trek), who led his men up the hill and took out two snipers as they
crossed a minefield. Hit six times by machine gun bullets that evening
(including one which severed his right middle finger, and a chest shot
which was stopped by his cigarette case), he would later transfer and train
with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and learn to fly an artillery observation
plane, becoming notorious for slaloming between telegraph poles to show
it could be done. By the end of June 7, the Canadians were able to
link up with the British group at Sword.
The landing zone that was the farthest to the west, codenamed Utah,
would also prove to be the most lightly defended, an afterthought landing
added to the Overlord plan only when extra landing craft became available.
Though coming ashore in the wrong area, the Americans who seized it were
able to wade in with little resistance, especially after B-26 strikes pounded
German positions to smithereens. Led by General Theodore Roosevelt,
Jr.—the eldest son of the former President and at 57, the oldest soldier
and seniormost officer to storm the beach, at his own insistence—they quickly
regained their bearings and pushed back toward the fighting, aided by Roosevelt's
own reconnaissance of the area and his calm, even humorous greeting of
the waves of soldiers arriving on the beach (including future author J.
D. Salinger), as well as the floating tanks that were able to maneuver
here more easily than the ones in the choppier seas further east.
The real reason for the light infantry casualties—just two hundred out
of 23,000 men—was the earlier sacrifice of the Airborne troops, who had
been fighting their way toward the beaches at tremendous cost; the 101st
Division alone lost forty percent of their men on D-Day.
By far, the most brutal fighting of the day occurred at Omaha Beach,
the other landing zone assigned to the Americans. Here, a mixture
of the battle-hardened 1st Infantry Division and the untested 29th Infantry
Division joined together with eight companies of Army Rangers who had been
retasked from their objective to take a fortified battery at the nearby
cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, a total of 43,000 men in all. Facing them
was the cream of the experienced German defense, the 352nd Division, equipped
with nearly a hundred heavy machine gun emplacements and an equal number
of artillery and anti-tank guns. No area of the beach had been left
undefended, and the concavity of the inlet allowed for overlapping fields
of fire; in a rare breakdown of Allied intelligence-gathering, no one had
discovered Rommel's fortification of the area. When the first wave
of infantry and engineers stormed the beach (including future actor Charles
Durning and director Sam Fuller), they found themselves mowed down by the
heavy guns before they could clear the heavy steel obstacles blocking the
larger landing craft. Hemmed in at both ends by rocky cliffs, the
troops found themselves without an exit, and soon bunched together around
the few cleared channels, further delaying reinforcements.
It was just one in a series of terrible developments for the Americans.
The aerial bombardment had gone awry when the bombers, steering aside to
avoid the returning paratroop carriers, dropped their ordinance well inland
of the German positions, something not discovered until the men walking
ashore found themselves facing an untouched defensive wall. Engineers
assigned to clear the beach obstacles were blown to pieces when German
weapons fire set off the explosive charges they were carrying. Out
to sea, ten landing craft and the men in them went down before reaching
the shore, tossed about by the choppy waves. Some of the floating
tanks were brought ashore under ferocious assault, one entire battalion
losing all but one of its officers in the process. To make matters
more confusing, the landing craft at Omaha had become as misdirected as
the Airborne landings, and only one of the nine companies coming ashore
was where they had practiced landing, the others scattered across the length
of the five-mile beach. Unable to come all the way in lest they become
lodged in sandbars, many landing craft released their men several hundred
yards out to sea, where they sank under the weight of their heavy weapons
and equipment or cast them off only to come ashore empty-handed.
Those that managed to make it to land found themselves slugging along at
a slow walk through a hail of machine gun fire, bogged down by wet clothes,
sand-clogged weapons, and a marshy beach. By the time the first wave
crawled the three hundred yards to the relatively safety of an overhang,
they had lost half their forces within a matter of minutes.
The second wave began arriving at 7:00 a.m., and suffered the same
losses as the first. As the vehicles and resupply equipment bogged
down in the sand and became easy targets, the men on shore found themselves
virtually without equipment, ammunition, and radios. Morale sank
as the men watched successive waves meet withering fire; bullet-ridden
landing craft burned away just off shore, while the uncountable wounded
began to drown as the tide came in. General Omar Bradley, commander
of the U.S. First Army, pondered evacuating Omaha altogether, with Montgomery
considering diverting them to Gold Beach.
The only spot of hope for the Americans—many in combat for the first
time—was that the Germans were on their own, their reinforcements rerouted
to the other landing zones where the Allies had been able to come ashore
more easily. The scattered survivors struggled to regroup and launch
a series of improvised attacks on the tough German wall, and at 7:50 the
Rangers succeeded in blasting a hole in the barbed-wire-strung fortifications
with a Bangalore torpedo. Scattered Ranger companies began to link
up with each other and spread the gap in the German lines, and by 9:00
six hundred men had crested the hill above the "Dog White" section of Omaha
Beach. From here, they fanned out in all directions, turning back
the increasingly panicked Germans against great odds; in one spot, an American
lieutenant and two soldiers fought off an entire group of Germans in a
pitched two-hour battle, killing an unknown number of enemy fighters and
taking 21 prisoners in the process. Colonel George Taylor, one of
the senior officers at Omaha, had arrived by 8:30 and told the men still
huddling behind the remaining barricades, "Two kinds of people are staying
on this beach—the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's
get the hell out of here." Reorganizing anyone nearby into impromptu
combat teams regardless of unit, he sent them through the Rangers' gap
and into the fight. By 9:30, the regimental command post had finally
been established below the crest of the bluffs, and two more battalions
had made it inland. By 10:00, the naval forces, previously fearful
of hitting the clusters of men on the beach, shoved their way to the shoreline
and began blasting away at the German emplacements. When one destroyer
got so close that it threatened to become lodged in the sandbar, the men
aboard her watched an immobilized tank continuing to fire away at the concealed
German positions and used the info to launch its own crushing strikes.
The Germans held out, however, and after four hours of trying to outflank
a hidden machine gun nest, the 5th Ranger Battalion was forced to give
up any hope of pushing further inland. Despite the penetrations that
had been achieved at great cost, the key beach objectives had still not
been achieved, and by 8:30 the landing craft still heading for the central
portions of Omaha were rerouted to easier-to-achieve areas off toward the
ends. The tanks coming ashore, being a slower-moving and more tempting
target for the Germans, wound up diverting most of the German assault away
from the infantry, although nearly all were lost in the process.
One battalion commander reported that the tanks "saved the day...they shot
the hell out of the Germans, and got the hell shot out of them."
Without the clear channels for landing and coming ashore, reinforcements
fell further and further behind, and the forces on the beach were still
waiting to come over the hill and move inland until 2:00 in the afternoon;
by the end of the day, only two small footholds had been achieved.
However, the German numbers were diminishing, and their commander radioed
that he had only enough men to hold up the American advance until "D-Day
+1." There were no more reinforcements available to give him.
Night fell, late as it does in France in the summer, with the landings
finally beginning to see some signs of progress. By 9:00 p.m., the
initial landings had been completed, though at tremendous cost. Fifty
landing craft, ten larger ships, and fifty of the fifty-five tanks had
been lost, along with 2,300 of the 2,400 tons of equipment due to come
in with the first wave. V Corps had suffered an estimated 3,000 casualties
on D-Day, with some divisions losing over a thousand men each. In
a story that directly inspired the film Saving Private Ryan, brothers
Preston and Robert Niland (of the 4th Infantry and 82nd Airborne Divisions,
respectively) were both killed at Normandy, and as a result, brother Fritz
(of the 101st Airborne) was sent home to serve out his tour in America;
later, it would be discovered that the fourth brother, Army Air Force technical
sergeant Edward, was actually still alive and living in a POW camp in Burma.
For their part, the tough German 352nd Division had lost 1,200 men, roughly
twenty percent of their forces. Still, the twin pockets of Americans
at Omaha were still in danger of being turned back, and throughout the
next day they continued to take scattered artillery fire even as they consolidated
their landing zone and began bringing more men and equipment ashore.
Over the next few days they slowly pushed their way inland, and by June
9 had finally linked up with the British at Gold Beach and with the 101st
Airborne at Utah. By July 13, all five of the Normandy beaches had
been linked together into a true beachhead on the continent.
The Rangers who scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc using simple rope
ladders soon found that the artillery placed there had been moved further
inland, and struck out early in the battle to find and destroy them.
Lest other guns be brought back to the cliff outpost and used against the
struggling landings going on below, they then returned to Pointe du Hoc
and held it without reinforcement for two days, losing more than sixty
percent of their force in doing so.
With the eventual dissipation of the German 352nd Division, the way
was finally paved for the introduction of the Mulberry harbors, prefabricated
artificial harbors towed in pieces across the Channel and assembled just
offshore, with the scuttled landing craft being used as a breakwater to
hold back the tides. By June 16, D-Day +10, the first of the harbors
became operational, and began unloading two vehicles every minute.
On June 19, the worst storm in forty years hit Normandy, wrecking the harbors
irreparably over the course of three days, although by this point the beaches
had finally been secured enough to bring supplies directly ashore.
In their brief three-day lifespan, the temp harbors had helped bring in
11,000 troops, 2,000 vehicles, and 9,000 tons of equipment. Over
the next hundred days, more than a million tons of cargo would be offloaded
at Omaha Beach, along with 100,000 vehicles and 600,000 fresh troops, enough
to begin to turn the tide in Europe.
The nearby town of Caen, one of the original prime targets of Overlord,
was still in German hands by the end of June. A massive aerial bombardment
preceded a concerted effort to take the town, which finally began to see
success by July 7, a month and a day after D-Day. The ten-foot-thick
hedgerows of western France proved to be an immense advantage to the German
defenders, who could not be clearly seen through the thick foliage; the
field-to-field combat would continue to slow the Allied advance for weeks
and months to come. However, by the end of the Normandy operation—much
later than its planners had hoped, though with only half of the 20,000
casualties Churchill and others had expected—the numbers game which had
served the Wehrmacht so well during the early days of the war had been
reversed, as the Allies in France now outnumbered the Germans four to one.
On August 1, Patton's Third Army was unleashed, tearing across the countryside
and surrounding the Germans within three weeks. With tens of thousands
of German POWs secured, the itinerary for the liberation of France was
back on schedule, and on August 19 the Resistance rose up in open opposition
against the Nazis controlling Paris. Six days later, the city would
finally be freed from four years of occupation as the U.S. 4th Infantry
Division and the Free French 2nd Armored Division under General Leclerc
rolled up the Champs-Élysées on their way to the ultimate
celebration out at Place de la Bastille.
93,000 wounded soldiers would also pass through Omaha on their way
back to England, passing along the way 9,387 of their comrades buried in
the new cemetery at the seaside town of Colleville-sur-Mer, most of whom
had been killed on D-Day or in the nearby fighting over the ensuing days
and weeks. The 172-acre cemetery would be bequeathed in perpetuity
to the United States from a grateful French nation. The graves face
westward, toward America.
The cemetery—now permanently designated American soil—contains thousands
of gleaming white grave markers, themselves arranged in a perfect Latin
cross formation. In every direction, the exacting layout reveals
the precise lines and intricate geometric patterns.
In addition to the expected large number of infantry, we occasionally
came across the graves of soldiers from other branches of the service,
stark reminders that even those who remained behind in the ships were never
far from danger.
Jewish soldiers are buried under a Star of David of a design comparable
to the crosses. Visitors traditionally leave a small stone on the
headstone.
Four of the dead are women, nurses who died during the war and were
interred here. In addition, there are thirty-three pairs of brothers
buried side-by-side, along with one father and son: Colonel Ollie
Reed and Lieutenant Ollie Reed, Jr.
The tiny town of Bedford, Virginia, lost 19 men on D-Day from a population
of less than 4000, making their sacrifice the greatest per capita of any
city in the United States.
For his role in reorganizing the taking of Utah Beach, Brigadier General
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was awarded the Medal of Honor. On July
12, he succumbed to the heart trouble that had long plagued him and was
buried at the American Cemetery at Normandy, one of three Medal of Honor
winners to be interred there, along with Lieutenant Jimmie W. Monteith,
Jr., and Technical Sergeant Frank Peregory (the three men have their names,
dates, and unit info inscribed in gold leaf on their crosses to distinguish
them). Beside Roosevelt lies his brother Quentin, who had died in
World War I and who was later moved here from the cemetery at Chamery,
France. The calm heroism this privileged son displayed on D-Day led
to his portrayal in the film The Longest Day, as played by Henry
Fonda. In the same film, Robert Mitchum plays General Norman Cota,
with whom Colonel George Taylor is often confused, and whose part has been
rewritten to include Taylor's memorable quote.
Beyond just visiting the cemetery in general, I wanted the experience
of actually being there on the anniversary of D-Day. Usually, a high-ranking
muckety-muck from America comes to give a short speech; this year, it was
former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. We arrived just as
he was wrapping up his remarks, although he also stayed around a while
to talk with several of the soldiers, veterans, and their families in attendance.
The backdrop behind him is part of the main pavilion facing the reflecting
pool and cemetery.
1,557 soldiers who could not be located or positively identified are
memorialized on the walls of a semicircular garden at the east end of the
cemetery, surrounding the pavilion which contains maps of the invasion
and a bronze statue entitled The Spirit of American Youth Rising from
the Waves.
A number of other unknown soldiers are buried in various locations
throughout the cemetery, with the traditional epitaph, "Here rests in honored
glory A Comrade In Arms known but to God."
The rotunda at the opposite end from the pavilion is a small chapel.
A special squad of Frenchmen dress up as American soldiers to frequently
re-enact a graveside ceremony.
It's very sweet, and you can just make out their marching orders...in
French, of course.
"Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
"You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
"Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained,
well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
"But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given to us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
"I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill
in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of the Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking."
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander
Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
June 6, 1944
"We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied peoples joined
in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years,
much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had
fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation.
Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in
Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against
tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.
"At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June 1944, 225 Rangers jumped
off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs.
The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers—at the edge of the cliffs,
shooting down at them with machine-guns and throwing grenades. And
the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over
the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one
Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut,
a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed,
shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers
pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top
of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe.
Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting
only ninety could still bear arms.
"Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were
thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who
put them there.
"These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war."
Ronald Reagan
speaking at Omaha Beach on the 40th anniversary of D-Day
June 6, 1984