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.