On a more sombre Normandy note, I visited Caen's excellent Memorial musuem and then a few of the D-day beaches recently, a must if you want to see the remnants of the largest organised military invasion in history, on June 6 1944. 135 000 troops, 20 000 vehicles, 4 000 ships, 5 800 bombers, 11 000 casualties, all in one day. Over the 80km stretch of beaches, one comes across blown-apart steel and concrete bunkers, cavernous landscapes from dropped bomb shells, visible remains of Churchill's brainchild - a temporary harbour made from 70x7m concrete blocks that were brought across the English Channel from the UK, and many monuments to fallen soldiers. During that time I was briefly on American soil (France granted the US a concession to the land occupied by the cemetery, free of any tax), when I visited the American cemetery where just under 10 000 US soldiers are buried. The Garden of the Missing also has the names of 1500 odd soldiers who died, but whose bodies were never found. If they were after the 1950's, a small bronze flower was placed after their name. A most recent one was found in 2009!
It's difficult to imagine those calm quiet shores as the final resting place for so many brave soldiers (some drowning before they even got to shore from their back packs being too heavy). A few pictures below show how truly amazing Churchill's harbour was, and what a colossal task was won by the sacrifice of so many.
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