I recently visited the beaches of Normandy and was awestruck at the scale of what took place there 78 years ago. The sheer horror it must have been is hard to capture in words, but the scars are still visible.
Dozens of massive craters dot the fields. The landscape is interspersed with German fortifications reinforced with concrete two meters thick. Huge tangles of metal debris, part of the harbor constructions used to ferry in half a million troops and cargo, are still casually strewn across the beaches and protruding from the water, rusting just off quaint French coastal towns.
It was a massive operation. More than 1,000 aircraft dropped 23,000 paratroops behind German lines in the dark amid incoming fire just after midnight. At dawn, 73,000 Americans joined about 80,000 other allied troops to storm the beaches along 50 miles of coastline.
