“In the preparation for the June invasion, British and American geologists studied nearly one million aerial photographs of the Normandy shores, scouring the images for the ideal landing site…The Permian-Triassic metamorphic rocks found inland at Normandy turn into the medium-grained sands the invasion planners needed to literally support the landing.”
The Rant Foundry Presents: A Special D-Day 75th Anniversary Edition
By JF Dowsett
The June 6, 1944 Allied invasion of France – known as D-Day – was a turning point in the European theater of the Second World War. Upon landing on a 50-mile stretch of Normandy coastline, 150,000 American, Canadian and British soldiers faced the Atlantic Wall, a complex defensive system of fortifications, bunkers, minefields and trenches. Between 1942 and 1944, Nazi Germany had reinforced her European coastal flanks, stationing thousands of troops along the way.
Tschechenigel (Czech hedgehog) at Pas de Calais (image via bunkervliegtuigarcheo.com)
Nearly 10,000 men died that day.
In 1988, American scientists Earle F. McBride and M. Dane Picard visited the infamous Omaha Beach section of the Normandy coast and sampled the sands for microscopic analysis. As they were to write later, “there is more to the legacy than just the memorials: The sand at…
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