Vierville-sur-Mer

Most visitors reach Vierville by driving down the D-1 draw to the sand, never realising they have just descended the single most contested exit on Omaha Beach. The village itself is small and quiet, a cluster of stone houses and a church on the bluff. But the shallow valley that carries the road to the sea was, on the morning of 6 June 1944, a bottleneck the American army had to force open at almost any cost, and the ground still holds the evidence.

Why the draw mattered

The bluffs of Omaha Beach rise steep and continuous, broken only in a few places by natural draws where a road could climb. The Vierville draw, coded D-1, was the westernmost and among the most heavily fortified. German engineers had blocked it with two concrete antitank walls, backed by a seawall, wire, and beach obstacles, and covered it from the heights with the strongpoints known as WN 71 and WN 72, bristling with an 88mm gun, smaller antitank pieces, machine guns and mortars. Anything moving on the flat, open sand below Dog Green sector was in a killing zone.

The morning of 6 June

The assault here fell to the 116th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Infantry Division, a Virginia National Guard outfit that carried the nickname "Stonewallers" and, in Company A, a large contingent of young men from the small town of Bedford, Virginia. Alongside them came Rangers: Company C of the 2nd Ranger Battalion and, later, the 5th Ranger Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Max Schneider.

The first wave landed at low tide without effective smoke or armour and was cut down almost at once. Leading companies lost the greater part of their strength in the opening minutes, and Bedford would go on to suffer proportionally the heaviest D-Day losses of any American community. For a time the survivors could do little but shelter at the seawall.

The turn came from leadership on the sand. Brigadier General Norman "Dutch" Cota and Colonel Charles Canham moved among the pinned-down men and drove them up the bluff off the beach rather than straight into the draw. It was here that Cota's exhortation to Schneider's men became the Rangers' enduring motto, "Rangers, lead the way." Small groups scaled the heights, worked into Vierville from behind, and cleared the strongpoints. The draw itself, choked by its antitank walls, was not opened to vehicles until engineers blew the concrete apart late in the afternoon, hours after the first men had landed.

What to see today

The obvious landmark is the National Guard Memorial, at the foot of the bluff on the Boulevard de Cauvigny where the road meets the beach. It is built directly on top of a German casemate of strongpoint WN 72, one of the few places on Omaha where the massive concrete gun position still stands intact. Walk inside the U-shaped monument to read the inscriptions on its inner walls; nearby stands the "Ever Forward" marker to the 116th and the 29th Division. Look closely and you can still make out the embrasure of the casemate and the neighbouring double-firing bunker that once raked the sand in both directions.

Stand with your back to the memorial and the geography explains itself: the flat beach, the bluff rising behind you, and the narrow draw climbing to the village, exactly the trap the first wave walked into. Toward the D-Day Omaha Museum you can find surviving "Whale" bridge sections from Mulberry A, the American artificial harbour assembled off this coast and wrecked in the great storm of mid-June 1944, then abandoned. At low tide, remnants of that harbour still break the surface offshore. In the village above, the modest church and its surroundings served as the site of one of the first temporary cemeteries, where the dead were gathered within days of the landing.

Practical notes

The village sits on the coast road, and the draw itself carries the lane down to the sea beside the National Guard Memorial, where there is a car park at the seafront. It is a narrow descent, tight for anything large in summer, and the easier option is often to leave the car in the village above and walk down. The beach and the memorials are open access and free at any hour.

Half an hour to an hour is enough unless you walk out along the sand, which is worth doing at low water: from the tideline the height of the bluff and the width of the crossing register in a way they never do from the road. Come at low tide if you can, both for that and for the harbour remains offshore.

The seafront and the ground around the memorial are level and paved, and the sand is firm and flat at low water, so a wheelchair or pushchair manages the foot of the draw; the monument sits on top of a casemate and is reached by steps, and the paths up the bluff are steep and uneven. From here it is a few minutes west to Pointe du Hoc and a similar run east to Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer and the Normandy American Cemetery on the bluff above the beach.