June 2024 was, by most accounts, the last D-Day anniversary that will be marked by the men who were actually there. That fact alone has changed Normandy — not just for one summer of ceremonies, but for how the region tells its story going forward. If you’re planning a visit now, you’re not seeing the…
France holds some of the richest, most moving WWII museums in the world — and not just in Normandy. From the beaches where the Allies landed to the Alsace villages that changed hands more than once, the country’s museums do a remarkable job of turning history into something you can walk through. Whether you’re planning…
Normandy doesn’t require a £200-a-day guided coach tour to visit properly. With your own car (or the right combination of trains, buses, and taxis), a good map, and three days, you can follow the D-Day story from the American paratrooper drop zones at Sainte-Mère-Église to the British and Canadian landing beaches near Bayeux — at…
In September 1944, more than 34,000 Allied airborne troops dropped into the occupied Netherlands in the largest airborne operation the world had ever seen. The plan — Operation Market Garden — was audacious: seize a corridor of bridges from the Belgian border to the Rhine at Arnhem, and open a route into Germany that could…
If you’re planning a trip to the D-Day beaches, there’s one decision that will shape your whole visit: where to base yourself. And for most first-time visitors, the answer is Bayeux. This small cathedral town sits just ten minutes’ drive from the coast, escaped the war almost untouched, and is ringed by the finest collection…
Few places in Normandy stop you in your tracks quite like the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. You arrive through pine trees and manicured paths, and then the view opens up: nearly ten thousand white marble headstones in perfect rows, set on a bluff directly above Omaha Beach — the very sand where so many of…
Standing on Omaha Beach at low tide, with the bluffs rising behind you and the vast, flat sand stretching towards the sea, is one of those travel moments that stays with you for life. But Normandy’s D-Day sites are spread across a sixty-mile stretch of coastline, and the story they tell is complex. This is…
Omaha Beach gets the films, the photographs, and most of the visitors. But D-Day was fought across five beaches spanning fifty miles of Normandy coastline, and the other four — Utah, Sword, Gold, and Juno — each tell a story you simply won’t find at Omaha. American paratroopers dropping into flooded marshland behind Utah. British…
Stand on the clifftop at Pointe du Hoc on a quiet morning and it’s hard to believe anyone thought this could be done. The cliffs drop 30 metres — roughly the height of a ten-storey building — straight into the English Channel. The rock is sheer, crumbling in places, and in June 1944 it was…
On the morning of 6 June 1944, American soldiers from the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions waded ashore at a four-mile stretch of French coastline codenamed Omaha. They were met with withering fire from heavily fortified German positions on the bluffs above. By the end of that day, more than 2,000 American troops had been…