WWII tour - Day 2

Here are pictures from Utah and Omaha beach. Everyone knows what happened here. I won't explain too much because if I did this blog would be never ending. Before the war, these beaches were resort areas. They look beautiful now, but it's hard to imagine what these men saw here. Here are pictures of gliders, which didn't work very well and these men, with hardly any training, had to jump from them. The covering on these gliders is just material and they had to fly from England to France in these. On the high ground of the beaches, we walked through bunkers of the German armies. There are huge craters left that are about 6 feet deep now but if you were to see them when they first got bombed, the craters were 8 feet deeper than what we see today. You can still see the tops of cement which were the top walls to the tunnels the German's built. You can walk all around here, which is kind of dangerous, but very interesting to see. The church pictures here have an interesting story. Two men, who were medics, chose this church to set up a hospital where they cared for the wounded and decided they would treat anyone who came in, even the Germans. Because they were treating two Germans, the church was left alone from any attacks. However, one mortar shot through the roof and landed on the ground, where there is still a crack today. Luckily it was a dudd. The medic's equipment landed in a war zone away from where they landed and so they treated all these men using what they could, even using silk from parachutes. I believe they said, out of the 81 men they treated, they only lost two. There are still a few benches where you can still see spots of blood dripping down them that they couldn't wash up. Apparently, the whole floor was a sea of blood, but they fit 81 men in the tiny 11th century church and the people of Normandy bought a glass window dedicated to these two medics for what they did.