Vierville Draw - Normandy and D-Day
Vierville-su-mer is a quaint village on the coast of France, where the beaches are wide and have a lovely orange hue. A hotel there dates from the 1920s and a road angles down from the village and then runs parallel to the beach for a couple of miles, dotted by vacation homes. But above that hotel, carved into the hill, is a concrete bunker that hints of what happened here on June 6, 1944. Brig. Gen. Norm Cota was watching from offshore and knew the whole plan had gone wrong. He didn’t know American aircraft had totally missed the beach in the bombing run, or that Navy guns couldn’t find the well-hidden bunkers like WN73. But he could see the slaughter, the terrified troops flattened on the beach, the Sherman tanks on fire. Norm Cota was 51 years old that day, with a wife and two children. But he decided to board a landing craft anyway and see for himself and becoming, by far, the most senior office on the beach. And on a day full of h...