Eleven O’Clock
On 11 November most French communes stop for a wreath, a short speech and a roll call of the local dead. Then everyone goes home for lunch. I have stood at the other end of it, and I have been thinking about it since Normandy.
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Utah Beach, and the road to Strasbourg
Last of three, and the one that surprised me. I went to Utah expecting the American story and came away with a French one, and I didn’t work that out until I got the pictures on a screen and started reading the writing on things. Two armies, two months apart, same sand.
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Sainte-Mère-Église
Forty minutes up the road from Pointe du Hoc, and a completely different kind of remembering. At Pointe du Hoc it’s in the ground. Here it’s on the houses, on the church, in the street names — and on a black plaque outside somebody’s front door that took me a while to properly read.
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Pointe du Hoc
Back to Normandy after seven years, and this time west into the Manche. I got out of the car at Pointe du Hoc at twenty to four and back into it at Utah just after seven. This is the first of three posts from that one afternoon — craters, concrete, and about six hundred thousand other visitors a year.
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Normandy, 1944 — All Sixteen
Two trips, seven years apart, and I only worked out this week that they were ever the same project. Sixteen photographs between Pegasus Bridge and Utah Beach, all in black and white now, all live in the shop.
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The Merville Battery
I went to the Merville Battery in August 2019, between Pegasus Bridge in the morning and the war cemetery at Ranville in the afternoon. I wrote about both of those and never wrote about this, and the photographs sat on a disk for seven years. This is the part of that day I had let go of.
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Omaha Beach, Normandy
Omaha Beach, a critical D Day landing site, witnessed the immense sacrifice of the 1st and 29th Infantry Division of the US Army. General Bradley nearly abandoned the operation due to heavy casualties. Today, American families visit as a form of pilgrimage, while the nearby American War Cemetery stands as a somber reminder of the price of warfare.
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Commonwealth War Cemetery, Ranville
In my last article I talked about Normandy and the battle to take Pegasus Bridge, and in this article I want to talk about the soldiers that didn’t…
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Pegasus Bridge
This is the first in a series of posts about Normandy, and now you know where I went on holiday this year! Having lived in France for so…
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