World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF FRANCE: Those Who Fought

The Normandy poppies were pale with dust. The Normandy sky was heavy with smoke. Land and sky rumbled and trembled with battle.

On the Beaches. In the fair fields where the tide had rolled, the ground was littered with the debris of battle— tanks, jeeps, rifles, ration tins, bulldozers, first-aid kits, canteens. Everywhere lay the dead—weltering in the waves along the shore, lying heaped in ditches, sprawling on the beaches. Here & there in trees hung the shattered body of a paratrooper. In field hospitals, the wounded lay. The smell of ether mingled with the smell of earth. Probably no...