Part of a series I've been doing on my travels in Europe.
ON THE MORNING of our last full day in France, we took an intercity train from Paris out to Normandy. For this journey, we were not on the TGV, France’s futuristic high-speed train system. We were on an intercity express train, which, despite not being a proper bullet train, still moved with dispatch out of Paris and into the sylvan and achingly beautiful French countryside.
We arrived in Caen about two hours after we started, and rented a car for the day. We drove out to the site of Omaha Beach, and parked in a little town called Vierville-sur-Mer situated on the bluffs directly above the sector of the beach portrayed in the opening minutes of Steven Spielberg’s landmark 1998 film, “Saving Private Ryan.”
We walked out onto the sand, and after examining a few remnant bunkers and other structures, we walked out to the edge of the surf. Then I turned around and looked up at what the first waves of men ashore saw on that terrible June morning just over 70 years ago.
Stunned by what I saw, I turned to my travel companion and said, “My God — those poor men.”