If you ever stand at the beach at Vierville-sur-Mer — otherwise known as Dog Green Sector, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France — that’s when you really, really get it. That’s when you first fully fathom the desperate courage born of sheer necessity and the fearsome carnage, the conjoined elements of the D-Day landings.
This is not some beach 50 yards deep with the promise of decent protection from strafing bullets once those 50 yards have been traversed. This is a wide, flat killing ground, more than 400 yards of open sand punctuated only by the shallowest protection of a lone shingle bank, itself still 200 yards from the still-only-partial cover of a steeper hillside.
This was the landing site for the real-life men who were models for the fictional “Saving Private Ryan” characters. They already had endured a long night crossing the channel, in dreadfully rough weather, probably weak and disoriented from seasickness. For the final 200 yards on the water, the German machine guns would already have been riddling their Higgins boats. Then, unceremoniously dumped into frigid, churning water, colleagues exploding in blood all around them, they would have found themselves finally on dry ground but without refuge from the Nazi weapons.
Weighted with wet clothes and hefty equipment, they had to make it 400 yards through flesh-ripping fire. In gym shorts and track shoes, most of these men might make it in about 80 seconds after a lung-busting run. Now imagine trying it with 60 pounds on your back or in your arms. And do it while running into the horrors of mechanized firepower.
They could try a weighed-down version of a sprint and get there, oh, maybe in three minutes. Or they could go on their bellies and slither, hoping that somehow by being at ground level they’d better escape the bullets. Either way, they had to go forward, into the bullets, because they couldn’t stay still or go back.
The German bunkers here in Dog Green, and neighboring Charlie sector, are not like they are down the beach at Point du Hoc, meaning “atop a plateau,” aimed seaward. Instead, they are built into the side of the hills, angled downward and along the beach, the guns able to cover almost every square inch of sand. In fact, not even the base of the hillside is entirely safe: The guns could strafe soldiers even there, unless the soldiers pressed extraordinarily close into hillside crevasses.
This was where, of the whole Normandy coast, the casualties were greatest. But this was also where, because of a natural gap in the hillside, there was access to the interior, beyond that first vicious line of Nazi defenses. Taking this spot was a tactical necessity. Taking this spot was a deadly challenge.
Scaling the sheer, vertical cliffs of Point du Hoc required more specialized training and athleticism. Other sectors of the coast presented their own challenges. But here in Dog Green and Charlie Sectors, topography and German defenses made the terrible savagery the worst. As at Antietam and Gettysburg in the U.S. Civil War, where casualties actually were far more numerous, the sheer terror of the exposure to mass death makes the throat catch and the breath quicken in dread, just at reimagining it decades later.
Seventy five years ago this Thursday, as Ronald Reagan said in 1984 of the Allies at D-Day, “These were the champions who helped free a continent” from a twisted tyranny unmatched in its vile and vicious depravity. Bless their memories always, as the few remaining ones approach their final and most glorious shore.
