On the night of June 5-6, 1944, Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion force under the overall command of General Eisenhower, set sail from southern England for the Calvados coast. Convinced by the failure of the 1942 raid on Dieppe that the French channel ports were too well defended, they made for the beaches north and west of Caen. The Americans landed in the western sector at Utah (on the Cotentin peninsula) and Omaha beaches. British troops went ashore at Gold, Canadians at Juno, and Anglo-French commandos on the eastern end, Sword. A beachhead was established at Arromanches-les-Bains, where a Mulberry B artificial port was swiftly assembled to receive 9,000 tons of equipment daily; some four million tons of materials, 500,000 vehicles and more than two million men were put ashore here in the following three months.

The battle for Normandy lasted until late August, at a cost of 100,000 soldiers’ lives, many thousands of civilian casualties and some 200,000 buildings destroyed or damaged. Most of the small seaside towns caught in Overlord’s initial stages – Courseulles, Arromanches, Tour-en-Bessin – have evolved into lively summer resorts, but the beaches’ wartime code names have stuck and in addition to a plethora of municipal and private war museums (the best one is at Caen, click here), you can still see the remains of the Mulberry B harbour at Arromanches-les-Bains; the shattered German battery and shell-scarred cliff at Pointe du Hoc overlooking Omaha beach; and several dozen poignant and immaculately tended war cemeteries. The main British cemeteries are at Bayeux, Banneville-la-Campagne and Ranville; the American at Colleville-Saint-Laurent, behind Omaha Beach. The largest is the German cemetery at La Cambe, where 21,000 soldiers are buried.