Monday, April 19th

I was up at 5:30 again for coffee and to work on the blog. Hard to believe that when I'm up at 5:30, it's only 11:30 in the evening the day before in Potsdam and Canton.

We meet again at the now usual time of 8:00 AM at the high school. By 8:15 we are on the road for the coast of Normandy to explore some of the D Day memorials. We have a three-hour bus ride ahead. The first stop is the Pointe du Hoc Ranger Memorial. The Allied Command needed to capture the gun placements there to facilitate the D Day invasion. Two hundred Army Rangers attacked the gun placement, having to climb a cliff first. Finally successful, only ninety Rangers were left when reinforcements arrived days later. The memorial has left the original bomb craters and German bunkers intact. It is a very graphic reminder of the danger and horror that the young soldiers faced.

Next stop was Omaha Beach. This is one of five beach heads that the Allies landed troops on during the invasion. The students just had to take their shoes off and play in the water of the English Channel. Of course, many of us had to collect a sample of sand from the beach as a souvenir. There is a memorial sculpture built on the beach sand that looks like jagged pieces of metal. Everyone had their picture taken around it. Omaha Beach is about four miles long. The Allies started landing here at 6:30 on the morning of June 6th. Three valleys, each leading to a small village, open up on to the beach. After intense gunfire, the first of the villages, Saint-Laurent was liberated at 9:00 in the morning of the next day, June 7th.

The visit to the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial was very moving and emotional. First a stop at the new Visitor Interpretive Center, where we had to go through airport type security, to view a short movie and walk through a small, but informative museum. Then we had an hour or so to walk among the head stones on the grounds that overlook the English Channel. There are over 9,000 headstones in the cemetery, all perfectly aligned in rows. The grounds are immaculate, and in fact are on American soil. You are free to walk among the stones at will, and many headstones had flowers laid that the base. It was a very moving experience.

Last stop of the day is the village of Arromanches, located on what was referred to as Gold Beach by the Allies. Gold Beach is one of the five beach-heads where the invasion occurred. A temporary harbor was established by the Allies, in this case the British, when they set up a system of temporary piers. In fact, during the war it became the largest harbor on the Normandy coast. Now all you can see are remnants of the old piers and the village is a quaint tourist town with shops and cafes.

We grabbed a quick dinner in Arromanches and boarded the bus by 6:15. We arrived back at Nogent at 9:15 and were picked up by our hosts. It was a long day, but I learned a lot.
Tomorrow we spend the day shadowing teachers and students at Nogent High School. There is still no real information on the airport situation. We've been told that some airports are opening up. We should have a better idea of the situation by Wednesday morning.