Saturday, June 11, 2011
Omaha Beach - 67 Years Later
"I couldn't be happier if we had the kind of world in which people in my profession were permanently out of job." ~ Dwight Eisenhower
Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,
I'm sitting in a hotel in Gay Paree, France as I write this. Four days ago I read this post in one of Ann's and my favorite blogs. Towards the bottom of that link is another link to an essay entitled: First Wave at Omaha Beach.
If you could not stomach the opening scenes of "Saving Private Ryan"
then I recommend that you not read the essay.
Yesterday, we flew from
Indianapolis to Paris. The arrival routes you directly over the
landing beaches of D-Day and Omaha Beach in particular. Having
just read those essays, I was somewhat awestruck to be flying over the
scene. I did remember to take a few snaps that I will share
later.
To orient you, here are two maps:
I stole that last map from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_Beach
Here are the poor pictures that I
took. In all them we are flying east towards Paris. We flew
directly over the beaches.
In this first picture, we are due south of Cherbourg and looking directly at the landing beaches. Omaha Beach is closest.
I have flown into Paris fairly
often in my career. The weather in Europe is often bad and this
was really the first time it was clear enough to see these
beaches. I lack the skills to convey the awe I felt as we flew
down the beaches at 35,000'.
On that note, I remain,
Dad / Geoff
(PS, I originally posted this in 2011. I took it down because it violated FedEx's policy, but what the heck now? )
