THE ASSAULT
Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach: Where the Fighting Was Hardest
The cliff assault and 'Bloody Omaha' — what happened on this ground, and what remains of it today.
See Normandy day trips on GetYourGuide ↗The cliffs of Pointe du Hoc
Between Utah and Omaha, a German battery stood atop cliffs of around thirty metres — near-vertical, rising straight from the shore. On the morning of 6 June, some 225 US Rangers under Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder scaled those cliffs under fire to destroy guns that could range both American beaches. It was a mission of extraordinary danger: by the time relief reached them two days later, only about 90 of the 225 were still fit to fight. The site is preserved almost exactly as the battle left it, and walking it is the most immediate encounter with the assault the day offers.
The cratered ground
Pointe du Hoc today is a moonscape. Deep bomb craters pit the clifftop, and shattered concrete casemates and bunkers stand open to the sky and the sea; you can walk down into them and out across the broken ground. Unlike the beaches, which time and tide have smoothed back into calm, Pointe du Hoc still looks like a battlefield. It is often the most physically striking stop of the whole day, precisely because the ground itself carries the memory.
'Bloody Omaha'
Omaha was the costliest of the five beaches. The US 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions landed into concentrated fire from the bluffs; Company A of the 116th Infantry lost nearly nine in ten men in the first waves, and by the end of the day there were around 2,400 American casualties — more than on any other beach. Roughly 34,000 men had come ashore here by nightfall. The name 'Bloody Omaha' was earned in a single morning on this sand.
The beach today, and 'Les Braves'
What unsettles most visitors is how serene Omaha now looks — a wide, pretty, open beach where families walk and the tide comes and goes. Standing on it, the events of 1944 are invisible, which is exactly why a guide matters. On the sand at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer stands 'Les Braves', a monumental stainless-steel sculpture by the French artist Anilore Banon, commissioned for the 60th anniversary in 2004: three great wings — of hope, of freedom, of fraternity — rising from the beach in honour of the men who landed here.