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 heroes, Norma Cota showed a fearlessness that, all these years later, still resonates in the American soul. 

 

Only 400 yards from WN73 – an easy shot for a German machine gun spitting a thousand bullets every  minute — Cota walked among the troops, urging them to get up and go forward.

 

He found someone with a bangalore torpedo to blow a hole in the barbed wire. He urged troops through the gap, across the road and up the slope of the hill, where he saw a slight gap. 

 

And when the first soldier through the gap was shot dead, Cota went forward himself, and others followed. You can see the gap where he broke through in this ridge to the right, just above the house.

Now, my first trip to Normandy on April 13, and when you see the beach and the German fortifications, it’s astounding anyone survived. 

 

But the bravery and determination that Americans showed that day sticks with you. 

 

We hired a guide to take us around the D-Day beaches and she recalled how she once had a June 6 veteran on her tour. 

On Omaha Beach, he started crying when he saw children playing on the beach.

 

“This is why we came in ‘44,” he told her. “We wanted the next generations to enjoy their freedom.”

 

My goodness.