The Landing Beaches

At the beginning of the summer we travel to the beaches of Normandy in northern France, site of the historic D-Day landings in WWII.

We set out to experience history itself while at the same time search for its meaning in the present. What we find is an atmosphere both gentle and oppressive at the same time, a theatre of cruelty, together with a theatre of light-heartedness.

The events of that fateful day are well known. More than 60 years later, reminders of that historic battle scatter the coast. German bunkers and the remains of the artificial harbour built by the allies after the initial landings dominate the landscape. War memorials and military cemeteries honour the thousands of soldiers who lost their lives in the battle. Everything seems to speak of the D-Day landings.

And yet, though part of this landscape can never put aside the events of 1944, another part is renewing itself. In a climate of peace, families spend their vacations along the beaches, elderly locals return to their land of origin to spend a few days by the sea, and children play among the war ruins, oblivious to their bloody pasts.

We  travel all over the landing beaches from east to west. A surreal silence hangs over the Normandy beaches, as travellers on pilgrimages to this old battlefield mix with the pleasure seekers on their seaside holiday. Amongst the tourists consulting their information pamphlets and brandishing their cameras, stroll bathers with brightly coloured swimming costumes carrying inflatable mattresses under their arms.

Sowed cornfields and meadows overlook the road that links up Arromanches with Longues-sur-Mer. The German batteries appear in the distance like smell constellations scattered here and there and in the summer sun. These coastal defences were of great use to Germans to control the coasts and to fire in case of sea attack. In the D-day evening the batteries were silenced but not before a bloody battle.

At Croqueville-sur-Mer whose limestone cliffs were the setting of the famous film The longest day, rows of children go down and climb the bomb subsidences among barbed wires and iron scraps. Among the tunnels of the bunker tourists roam like mouses.

Today Omaha Beach, the bleeding Omaha, wind along three quiet villages: Vierville-sur-Mer, Colleville-sur Mer e Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer. Omaha, with all its past difficulties, is now the simbol of the high price paid for European freedom. Here Americans found a very rough sea, an almost impregneable fortress and a larger army than expected.  Close to the coast the military American cemetery rises with its 9.000 white crosses covering the hill in memory of the past tragic events. A ray of light reminds the D-Day bloodshed.

One cannot help but embrace the sun and smell of the ocean along this beautifully jagged coast, while at the same time the sea speaks of the thousands of soldiers who fell in a matter of hours along its shores. The image of a child with a plastic bucket and spade flashes before the visitor’s eyes, only to be replaced, a few seconds later, by the whiteness of a field of crosses from the US memorial cemetery.

And through it all, the lasting and most intimate sensation is how, in this relatively small space, the circle of life is represented in all its fascination, in a delicate balance between the game of life and the silent death. A place where wrinkles and scars live side by side the radiance of youthful beauty, all on the same face.

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About Molo7

Molo7 Photo Agency ha sede a Roma e realizza lavori ad ampio raggio, dall’editoria al commerciale, in Italia e all’estero.

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