Day 3 - Thursday, May 15, 2014

For the two American beaches (Omaha & Utah), we elected to take a tour, via Overlord Tours. Overlord was the code name for the D-Day invasion. Our tour guide Colin, was an Irishman who grew up in England, but has lived in France the last 10 years.

We took us to the northern end of Omaha beach, where is was high tide, and the bech was maybe 20-30 yards to the water. In reality, the Allies attacked at dawn, in low-tide, which meant they had about 300-400 yards of beach to traverse before the got to a rock shingle which vehicles couldn’t cross, followed by a flooded ditch area, then steep hills with massive German emplacements which ship fire couldn’t take out, due to massive concrete encasements.

After seeing the beach, we travelled to the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, which holds over 9,500 Americans who lost their lives during the Normandy campaign.

I was able to locate two Medal of Honor winners, Jimmie Monteith & Frank Peregory.

Monteith died on D-Day on Omaha Beach, after traversing the beach multiple times to encourage troops, as well as after personally leading tanks through minefields multiple times.

Frenk Peregory died 8 days after D-Day, and received his Medal of Honor for entering a German emplacement by himself with 3 grenades and a bayonet. Fifteen minutes later, he came out having killed 8 Germans and having captured 40 prisoners.

A picture of the spot where he captured the prisoners. We also visited the most dangerous spot of Omaha Beach, where the first troops to land suffered 90% casualties.

I found the tour to be very insightful. The prior day had been museums with facts and information, while the tour was filled with personal stories of individuals and their efforts to overcome obstacles to achieve their goals.