Normandy: landing beaches and battlefields WWII part I - Utah beach and Sainte-mère-eglise

Everyone has a few special places he has to visit at a certain point in his life. For me the D-day landing beaches and battlefields of Normandy were always on top of that list. Why? Because when you live in a free country like Belgium, you have to be grateful to those brave young lads who sacrificed their own lives in their fight for our freedom.

We started the day at Utah Beach, one of the five sectors of the Allied invasion of German-occupied France in the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944 (D-Day), during World War II.

This beach looks so peaceful and desolated that its hard to imagine what kind of battles took place over there on D-day.

We took a stroll on the beach, and continued to our next stop Sainte-Mère-Eglise.

This village stood right in the middle of route N13, which the Germans would have most likely used on any significant counterattack on the troops landing on Utah and Omaha Beaches. In the early morning of 6 June 1944 mixed units of the U.S. 82nd Airborne and U.S. 101st Airborne Divisions occupied the town in Mission Boston, giving it the claim to be one of the first towns liberated in the invasion.

We bought us some tickets for the Airborne museum, which was very interesting for kids and adults.

The main attraction of this village is the story of John Steele of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment , whose parachute caught on the spire of the town church. He hung there limply for two hours, pretending to be dead, before the Germans took him prisoner. Steele later escaped from the Germans and rejoined his division.

source: http://www.airborne-museum.org/nl/terug-in-de-tijd/portretten/john-m-steele/