Pointe du Hoc

Omaha Beach was the most difficult and bloody of all the beaches of the D-Day landings. On the Western edge of Omaha Beach was Pointe du Hoc, a point where the land juts into the ocean in the form of high cliffs. These cliffs were a perfect place for long range guns to cover both Omaha Beach (to the East) and Utah Beach (to the West). All the intelligence at the time said that the Germans had placed such guns here. A crack group of US Army Rangers were given the mission to climb the cliffs and capture these guns.
At the top of the cliffs, on Pointe du Hoc, today you can still see the scars from 1944. The landscape is cratered like the moon with depressions from the bombs from planes and shells from naval guns. Grass grows in the craters today, and 60 years of erosion have done little to hide the scars.
In the end, the rangers fought to the top of the cliffs (at great cost) only to find that the guns had been removed. I guess intelligence was difficulty in wars then as in wars now. The gun emplacements still remain, as empty today as they were on June 6, 1944. But there is no sense of futility. You can only admire those men, or more truthfully boys, who fought their way up those cliffs on that day.

Today, you can still meet the men who took part the landing. They come to the beaches and the cliffs around Normandy. They are old now. Very old. Each year, there are fewer and fewer I suppose. On that day in 1944, they were the same age as my boy Jake. I look at those cliffs and I can't belive it. I can't imagine the heart it would take in a person so young to do such a thing.