Looking out from Pointe du Hoc out at Maisy and the Cotentin Peninsula.

"Here rests in honoroed glory, A Comrade in Arms, known but to God". At the Omaha Beach memorial, there is a room which contains a monument to the "battlefield grave": a soldier's rifle planted bayonet-down in the dirt, with his helmet and dog tag atop it. In this room, one name of an American soldier, sailor, or airman who died in Operation Overlord is played every 30 seconds. It would take you nine days to hear all of the names.

This monument at Pointe du Hoc honors the 225 US Army Rangers who scaled the cliffs to take out an artillery battery that had direct line of fire across Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches. Although the guns had been relocated to Maisy, the Rangers performed critical area denial for 2 days, tying up Axis reinforcements from assaulting the beaches and denying them a critical forward observation post for inland batteries. On the night of June 8 the 90 surviving rangers were relieved by reinforcements who finally linked up from Omaha Beach.

St-Mère Eglise, with the monument to the US Airborne troops who died liberating the town, many of whom were shot when their parachutes caught on structures, trees, and poles. This town was a crucial part of the link-up of Omaha and Utah beaches and the paratroopers prevented effective Axis movement of reserves and reinforcements. In large part due to the actions of the US airborne, there were fewer than 200 casualties on Utah Beach as compared with over 3,000 at Omaha Beach.

Barbed wire at Utah Beach and one of the many monuments to the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Engineers were landed first to clear beach obstacles such as tank traps and barbed wire, and suffered the heaviest casualties. Each beach sector has a separate monument to the Engineers who fought and died, suffering the heaviest proportional casualties of any group in the invasion force.

Monument to the battlefields of Normandy at Utah Beach. Each post has a marker pointing the direction and distance to a major city or a battlefield of Operation Overlord, the Normandy campaign.

One of the artillery bunkers firing on Omaha Beach. These were cleared iwth flamethrowers or by hand-to-hand combat.

Today, peaceful farms (mainly cornfields) adorn the fertile ground around Normandy. This site is the terrain behind Sword beach, close to Caen. The fiercest resistance to the invasion force after D-Day was encountered trying to dislodge SS troops from in and around Caen. As a result, the city was nearly completely leveled and was rebuilt with concrete housing projects, which are only today being torn down and replaced with newer, more aesthetically pleasing construction.

Artillery casement placed to fire at the beaches, gun still intact. The room behind the gun, while too dark to photograph, was nearly completely destroyed by a direct hit from a naval artillery round. Smaller damage from high-caliber machine guns, likely fighter strafing, is visible on the left-hand side of the image.

A nearly completely destroyed casement of the same type as the one pictured in the prior image, likely suffered a direct hit from a 1,000 pound bomb.

Sun setting over a mostly-impact casement. The bombardment of these casements was largely ineffective and they were not cleared until the Army Rangers cleared them by hand, fighting back and forth across this field for two days. As this image depicts, many of the guns were evacuated just prior to the landings.

From Pointe du Hoc, looking out on Maisy. Buried emplacements were recently rediscovered at Maisy, finally answering the question of where the Pointe du Hoc guns had gone.

Small shell crater on Point du Hoc, this one is only about 20 feet across and 8 feet deep. Larger shell craters are 50 feet across and about 15 to 20 feet deep.