Word: omaha
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Omaha, the most arduous of the five D-day beaches assaulted (Utah, Juno, Sword and Gold were the others), the sand is a dirty golden color, and the tidal flats reach in for 100 yards to a series of bluffs covered with tamarisk, brambles and wild blackberries. In 1944 the bluffs were ablaze with German fire: in the first violent hours of the invasion, some 3,000 Americans were cut down as they waded in from their landing craft and clung desperately to the perilous band of beach...
...then, it is cold and wet on Omaha. From the Channel, the north wind knifes in, and the beach is desolate except for the occasional lonely figure poking for shellfish. As the tide recedes, the ugly debris of war emerges: a black shape here, a jagged something there. The silence is awesome...
With the Boys. Leo Heroux, a Rhode Islander, first saw Omaha on June 6, 1944, as a 19-year-old G.I. with the 5th Special Engineer Brigade. Later that day, when the U.S. attack had punched inland, a friendly farmer gave him a drink of milk and Heroux met the man's pretty daughter. They were married after the war and returned to Normandy to live. Heroux has four children now and runs a driving school with his father-in-law. Every June 6, he closes his office and wanders down barren Omaha Beach to "walk over the sand...
Utah, the other beach on which U.S. forces landed, is even bleaker than Omaha: a vast expanse of windswept dunes and scrub grass. To Mayor Michel de Vallavielle of nearby Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, the beach is an almost personal possession. "It remains the symbol of liberation," he says. On June 6, 1944, De Vallavielle was mistakenly shot and wounded by American paratroopers, but it did not affect his gratitude to the liberators. Over the years, he has built a small museum in a blockhouse and has seen to it that the original wooden markers naming local roads and paths...
...signal station for fishing boats. A few blockhouses elsewhere have been converted into homes, chicken coops and storage sheds. All along the coast, demolition teams still roam the countryside searching for unexploded ammunition; every so often, when a big enough haul is accumulated, it is blown up on Omaha after the tide has come in. At Arromanches-les-Bains, snuggled between yellowish cliffs, pony-drawn buggies roll along the beach to show tourists the town's main attraction: Port Winston, the Allies' huge artificial harbor of 115 ferro-concrete caissons, each weighing 6,000 tons. Through Winston...