Pointe du Hoc

9th August 2026. Fujifilm X-T2, XF18-55mm.

---

Back to Normandy, then. Seven years since the last lot, and this time we went west, into the Manche and the far end of the Calvados coast, which is a different sort of trip altogether. Fewer coach parties than Omaha and a lot more grass. I came through Saint Lô and drove past Omaha beach on the way here. It hadn’t changed in the seven years since I last stood on it.

This is the first of three posts from one afternoon. I got out of the car at Pointe du Hoc at twenty to four and back into it at Utah Beach just after seven, and in between I filled a card and wore out a pair of shoes.

The first thing that hits you is that it is busy. I’d half expected the sort of reverent emptiness you get at a war cemetery, and instead there’s a car park, a path, and a steady file of people walking out towards the cliff with rucksacks and sun hats. I saw cars from Italy, France, the UK, and so few from Germany…. Pointe du Hoc took something like 640,000 visitors last year. On the afternoon I was there it felt like a decent proportion of them had come at once.

I mention it because it changes what the place is. This is not a quiet field. It’s a site, run and maintained and signposted, and you look at it through other people’s shoulders.

What actually happened here

Worth getting this right, because the popular version is wrong in an interesting way.

On the morning of 6 June 1944, roughly 225 men of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel James Earl Rudder, set out for the foot of this cliff and climbed it. The cliff is about 30 metres — call it a ten-storey building — and at the bottom there’s a narrow strip of shingle. They came in on a rising tide, roughly two hours after low water, and went up on ropes and ladders while the Germans on top dropped grenades on them.

The point of all this was a battery of six 155mm guns sitting on the headland, which could reach both Utah and Omaha. When the Rangers got to the top, the gun positions were empty. The guns had been pulled back inland, and the Germans had set up dummies made from telephone poles in the open emplacements.

And here’s the bit that usually gets told wrong. You often hear that the Rangers climbed the cliff for nothing. They didn’t. Two of them, First Sergeant Leonard Lomell and Staff Sergeant Jack Kuhn, pushed inland and found five of the guns sitting in an orchard — laid, loaded, ammunition stacked, aimed at Utah Beach. Lomell put thermite into the recoil mechanisms of two of them and smashed the sights of a third with his rifle butt; a second patrol under Staff Sergeant Frank Rupinski came along behind and finished the rest. It was somewhere around nine in the morning. The sixth gun was never accounted for.

So the guns were found, and they were silenced, and they never fired on the beaches. The job got done. It just didn’t get done where anybody expected.

The bunkers are the thing I keep coming back to. From outside they’re lumps of concrete in a field. Inside, with the light coming through the embrasures and the rooms running back into the dark, they stop being ruins and start being somewhere people had to live and work and be frightened.

What the bombardment did

Before the Rangers ever got there, the headland had been bombed and shelled for weeks and then hammered again on the morning itself. That’s most of what you actually see now.

I took ten goes at the craters and nine of them are useless — craters photograph as bumpy ground and nothing else. This one works, and it works entirely because of the line of people along the path at the top. They give it a scale. Without them you cannot tell whether you’re looking at a bomb crater or a dip in a golf course.

There’s a particular thing that happens to reinforced concrete when something very large goes off next to it. It doesn’t shatter. It cracks into slabs the size of a garage and those slabs lean over and stay leaning, with the steel hanging out of them like tendons. Eighty years on it hasn’t moved.

The cliff itself

You can’t get down there, and you can’t really photograph the climb. What you can do is stand at the edge and look at the water, and understand for about four seconds what it would be like to be at the bottom of it in the dark with people shooting at you. Then a family walks past eating ice cream and the four seconds are over. That’s honestly what the place is like.

A note on the monument I didn’t photograph

There’s a granite pylon on the clifftop, standing on top of a German observation bunker, and I completely failed to take a decent frame of it. It’s often described as being shaped like the daggers the Rangers climbed with — though I’ll be honest, the American Battle Monuments Commission’s own description just calls it a granite pylon, so treat the dagger story as a nice idea rather than a fact.

The site has been in ABMC care since January 1979, when France formally handed the land over. The French built the monument; the Americans look after the ground.

Next time. There’s always a next time.

---

The tools of the trade that day were the Fujifilm X-T2 and the XF18-55mm, shot in monochrome and finished in Lightroom.

Three frames from this afternoon are in the shop, as prints and as high-resolution downloads — the bunker doorways (download), the tilted slab (download), and the cliff they came up (download). The whole series, Normandy, 1944 — the prints → the downloads →

Any photo on this site is available as a print. → Ask me.

Next in this series: Sainte-Mère-Église, where a town has kept a paratrooper on its church tower for sixty years. And if you missed the 2019 posts, they start at Pegasus Bridge and carry on through Ranville and Omaha Beach.

If you'd rather have one of these on a wall than a screen — prints from €99.99, Ilford or Baryta paper, made by WhiteWall in Berlin. The shop →