Normandy D-Day landing sites and graves

8am departure for a two hour coach ride to the D-Day landing sites. En route, our guide gave us some history of the build up and the day itself. The 75th anniversary of D-Day, June 6th, is a few days away. The first thing that strikes you as you get closer is the obvious feeling the french have for their liberators. In every town and village most of the houses had flags out - mainly French, English and American. Most light poles had a picture of one of their heroes - some of them looked no more than seventeen.
Les vrais heros ne meurant jamais - real heroes never die, is what they say.
The thing we're having trouble coming to terms with are all the people dressed in WWII army gear and driving around in WWII army vehicles. It looks like half the people there are playing dress-up.
There are preparations going on everywhere for Thursday - the 75th anniversary of the landing.
We drove to Sword Beach and along to Juno Beach. Our first stop was at Arromanches, at Gold beach.There is a little cinema there - 9 screens forming a complete circle, no seats, just rows of rails to hold on to, and the 'action' and the noise is all around you. The film showed German occupation, allied bombing, paratroopers on D-Day, troops landing, street to street fighting, relieved local people, children, troops with the children... It was very loud and very emotional. I suspect most people were OK till they showed little children and a kitten...
A little further along we stopped at Longes sur Mer. Here the row of pill boxes, still containing canons, looks out across the English Channel. We had a picnic lunch at one of these. The French, quite understandably, don't like the name, 'English Channel'. They refer to it as La Manche - The Sleeve, because of its shape.
Then on to Omaha Beach and a chance to walk along the sand.
There is a huge cemetery at Omaha - 90,000+ graves. This is where the 75th anniversary commemorations will take place. I spoke to a pommy veteran of 1944, shook his hand and said 'thanks'.
Bayeux is the biggest of the 18 commonwealth cemeteries in Normandy with 4,600+ graves.Read more