Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Wordless Wednesday
I know it's wordless Wednesday, but I have something to say about this. This is Omaha Beach in Normandy. The tides are huge there, and we walked way out on the beach, to the point where the Professor calculated our soldiers actually disembarked from their landing craft. You look up, across half a mile of beach between you and the cliffs, and you see this.
These guns are placed about every quarter of a mile. It doesn't take much imagination to add in the barbed wire coils stretched along the beach, and you wonder, how did they do it? How did they run across that naked stretch of sand, with guns firing and their buddies dying beside them? How did any of them get to shelter of the cliff? But, of course, not all of them did.
11,000 of our World War II veterans are dying every day. If you know someone who fought, go give him a hug and tell him thank you, while you still can.
13 Comments:
What an awesome place to visit! Thanks for sharing that piece of history! My WW is up!
Thanks for the history tour. My vetern has already passed (my grandpa), but I gave him lots of hugs beforehand.
Beautiful pictures, thanks again.
typo... I meant to type veteran.
Sometimes we need a few words for our WW. Thanks for the piece of information and happy WW. Mine is up :)
Thoughtful and thought-provoking pictures. Just watched another portion of Band of Brothers. Breaks my heart to see a depiction of what they endured. Thanks for sharing the photos!
Oh thank you beyond words. Both my grandfathers were in WWII & one lost his brother here. I cannot imagine the magnitude of emotion that is felt when standing on that shore.
I'm up!
Wonderful WW post! That place holds a lot of history. It must have been powerful to actually stand there and imagine what happened on the spot!
I can't even imagine what those guys went through there....
My father fought in WW2. He had night sweats and flashbacks until the day he died.
My WW is up; I'm a newbie.
That last picture is very eloquent, indeed. I recently watched a History Channel special on the invasion and it left me in tears. If hearing about it was that traumatic, I can't grasp what living it must have been like.
Thanks for coming by my WW.
Greg's grandfather was in the Navy and was at Normandy on a minesweeping mission. One night, two of his buddies decided to go for a swim, but grandpop said No. Those two buddies ended up dead, and to this day grandpop gets tears ni his eyes when he tells that story.
We drove along that stretch of coast and visited some of the beaches a couple of years ago. It's a very emotive place. The other thing that struck me about it is that nearly ALL of the farms, villages etc are composed of buildings less than fifty years old. It must have been terrible.
a flood of emotions indeed
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