NI Photowalk - Leaving Utah Beach

We stopped briefly at  La Fiere outside Saint Mere Eglise.  Like the Pegasus Bridge, holding this bridge was essential for the American troops to be able to move off the beaches.  The 82nd Airborne landed during the night and were able to hold the bridge despite fierce fighting from the Germans.

Part of the reasons that capturing his bridge was so essential was that the Germans had flooded the surrounding area all the way to the tree line in the distance.  This bridge and the road were the only means to move the heavy artillery into the interior.

This relief overlooking the river provides a perspective to what the landscape would have looked like during the battle.  You can still pick out some of the taller buildings in the distance behind the tree line, especially the church steeple.

This statue, titled "Iron Mike" is on the hill overlooking the bridge.  According to the teachers in our group who were former military men, Iron Mike is the ultimate symbol of what an infantryman should be.

There are a few other monuments on the hill over-looking the bridge.  This one is has the symbols of the 82nd and 101st Airborne on them.  Because I went to college in Clarksville, TN, near Fort Campbell, the home of the 101st, I have a special affection for the Screaming Eagles.  I even did a practicum at Fort Campbell High School.

Honoring the medics

Honoring the anti aircraft battalion

We made an unscheduled stop at Angoville au Plain

In this little church, airborne medics had set up a field hospital.  They treated soldiers all day as the battle waged back and forth around them.  It is not far from Utah Beach.  After several hours, a German sniper descended from the steeple where he had been posted before the American medics had taken the church.

Like the church at St. Mere Eglise, the interior of the church commemorates the landings and the role that the Americans played in liberating the French citizens.

As wounded came in, they laid on the benches while they waited for treatment.  The wooden benches are still stained with the blood of those soldiers.

Walking through the graveyard of the church was a poignant moment for me.  The inscription on this marker says, "Our dear son, who died for France" and the date of death is 1940, four years before the Normandy Invasion.  This 27 year old soldier, a child in the Great War, died during the initial German Invasion.

This monument is two victims of the war, 1939-1945.  There are three names on it, two military and one civilian.  I think the civilian name really struck me, as this is something we cannot understand as Americans.  The war impacted them every day, and not just economically or because their sons and husbands were fighting, but because the war was in their backyard.

A crossroads between Utah Beach and the town of Carentan, this spot is later nicknamed Dead Man's Corner by the Airborne.  We stopped because it was the site of one of the student's soldier's death, though he is not the reason the spot is called Dead Man's Corner.  We did not go in the museum.