D-Day All Day: Pegasus Bridge & Omaha Beach

by Steve Ray on June 5, 2019

This was the most remarkable day.  On our ride to the battlefront our pilgrim Glenn Juday gave us an excellent overview of the whole operation of the assault on the beaches of Normandy. He is quite the historian! We started out at Pegasus Bridge where the British landed in gliders to set the whole stage for D-Day. We had Mass at the glorious Church of Saint Stephen (Saints Etienne) with the tomb of William the Conqueror where our organist Matthew Johnson played for us.

Then we spent time in the World War II  Museum in Caen which was a center of the fighting following D-Day. An excellent Normandy lunch with their fresh cider. Then to Omaha Beach to visit the Normandy American Cemetery.  You can’t prepare for this experience. We then drove along the beach and saw the memorial and imagined our military men coming ashore and climbing up the cliffs in the hills. It was very moving and stunning. What they did was unimaginable and incredible.

We had Marilyn Walton, who is an author and a World War II historian, tell us the story of her father who is shut down and all of his crew were killed. She told us many stories and it made our a ride back to the Château very short. A great dinner and a better early.