A strange sight greets the many visitors to the sleepy French hamlet of Sainte-Mere-Eglise in Normandy -- a forlorn figure dangling from an old-fashioned white parachute caught on the steeple of the village church.
The figure is not, as may first appear, a hapless parachutist blown off-course, but is actually a model -- a memorial of sorts, one of hundreds that dot this particular corner of rural France, a place where the hand of history has left its mark.
The dangling model, decked out in full uniform, represents US private John Steele, who in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, was one of hundreds of US soldiers parachuted deep behind enemy lines to pave the way for the D-Day landings.
Steele's parachute snagged on the church steeple. Unable to free himself, the soldier played dead for hours in order to avoid the attentions of German gunners in the church tower.
Only when daylight came was he cut down by enemy troops and imprisoned. His story -- later immortalized in the 1962 film The Longest Day -- is just one of countless tales to emerge from that fateful day six decades ago -- one of the most significant military operations in history and the turning point of World War II.
For many of the thousands of visitors and veterans who flock to Normandy yearly to swop such tales, to relive and to reflect, Sainte-Mere-Eglise and its curious memorial is the beginning of the story of D-Day.
As the years pass however, the numbers of visitors who can remember the day itself dwindles. Eventually, no more D-Day veterans will visit the village.
"This will probably be the last year that we can celebrate one of the `big'
anniversaries together with the veterans," says mayor Marc Lefevre wistfully, amid preparations for the 60th anniversary of the landings.
"Already the 80-year-olds are frail, and easily tired," he adds. "We see from year to year that more and more family members are coming."
In the village museum dedicated to the airborne landings, 57-year-old Franck aids his 80-year-old veteran father. The two have made the journey from Pennsylvania and are in Europe for two weeks. It is Franck's first time here.
"I'm trying to experience this unbelievable adventure with him ... to get some kind of impression of what he went through back then," he says.
Bill Coleman, also 80, was one of those who made the landing on Omaha Beach -- and survived. Thousands of his US and British colleagues, many as young as 18, weren't so lucky.
To this day, nobody knows exactly how many died on Omaha beach as heavily laden, under constant machine-gun fire, and whipped by wind and waves, thousands of Allied troops struggled from the landing vessels onto solid ground.
"The beach was just littered with bodies," says Coleman today. "Sometimes you would just run over them without touching the sand."
German bunkers situated on high escarpments overlooking the beach gave gunners a free line of sight to the sands below. Slaughter ensued, before the allies gained the upper hand, with many mown down before they even left the landing vessels. Casualty rates at other landing points not overlooked by high ground -- Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword beaches -- were lower.
Today the carnage of that day, the blood spilled and lives lost on Omaha beach, is but a memory. A page in the history books. A display in the museum. On the beach itself, red plaques denote points of interest. Visitors wander about, stopping to read, stooping to remember.
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