D-Day: The Five Normandy Beaches

Sixteen minutes after midnight on 6 June 1944 five gliders set down in the field beside the Bénouville bridge, as close as 43 metres to their objective. Major John Howard's men were through it inside ten minutes. The Café Gondrée, a coffeehouse on the west bank of the canal, sits in the first firefight of the invasion and claims — though not with certainty — to be the first French house freed. Thérèse Gondrée had been feeding British intelligence the defences around the bridge. Her café still trades, now as the Pegasus Bridge Café, and every 5 June paratroopers are toasted there at 11:16 pm.

Visitor guidance: The café is on the west bank of the Caen Canal at the north-west end of the Bénouville bridge; the original Pegasus Bridge itself stands in the museum at Ranville.

Utah was the westernmost of the five beaches, on the flat Cotentin Peninsula behind farmland the Germans had flooded so that only a few narrow causeways led off the sand. Paratroopers had been dropping since 01:30 to hold those roads. The first troops waded ashore at 06:30 and the currents set them about 2 km south of their intended zone. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. landed with them, scouted the ground himself and judged the accidental spot better: it faced one strongpoint instead of two. The 4th Infantry Division put 21,000 men ashore for 197 casualties.

Visitor guidance: The landing museum has stood on the beach itself since 1962; Utah Beach also carries monuments to the 4th and 90th Infantry Divisions and a Higgins boat.

Three companies of Rangers were to land at the foot of the cliffs and scale them with ropes, ladders and grapnels under fire, before the main landings; the 30-metre ladders came from the London Fire Brigade. They reached the foot of the cliff at 7:10 am with about half their strength. By 07:30 they were on top, and the concrete casemates were empty. Patrols found five of the six 155 mm guns nearby and wrecked their firing mechanisms with thermite grenades. Of the 225 who landed, 77 were killed and 152 wounded before relief came on 8 June.

Visitor guidance: The headland's memorial and museum stand among the original fortifications, with the bomb craters left in place around them.

Eight kilometres of coast between Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes and Vierville-sur-Mer, part of a 53-kilometre front held by the 12,020 men of the German 352nd Infantry Division. H-Hour was 06:30, after forty minutes of naval bombardment that did almost no damage to the beach defences. Ten landing craft foundered before they reached the shore. Colonel George Taylor, commander of the 16th RCT, came ashore at 08:15 and told the men around him that only the dead and the doomed were staying on the beach. The Americans took 2,400 casualties on 6 June and landed 34,000 troops. Up on the bluff, the American cemetery and memorial hold 9,389 dead.

Visitor guidance: The cemetery and memorial stand on a bluff overlooking the beach, and are kept by the American Battle Monuments Commission.

The British landed at Gold at 07:25, the central one of the five beaches. Ajax and Argonaut had already knocked out three of the four guns of the Longues-sur-Mer battery with direct hits at 06:20. Arromanches, in the middle of the landing zone, was deliberately spared the heaviest fighting so that a port could be put in fast. The first concrete caisson was sunk at dawn on 8 June 1944, and by 15 June a further 115 formed a five-mile arc off the town. The harbour was repaired after a storm, ran for ten months and handled up to 7,000 tons of stores a day.

Location precision: Gold's landing zone ran for several kilometres; the pin marks the village of Arromanches at its centre, where the Mulberry harbour was built.

Visitor guidance: Concrete blocks of the Mulberry harbour stand on the sand and further out at sea off Arromanches; a museum in the town covers both harbours.

Between Gold and Sword, the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division came ashore after a rough-weather delay that pushed the first wave to 07:35. The Royal Winnipeg Rifles and the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada took the worst of it in the opening minutes; the division lost 340 men killed, 574 wounded and 47 taken prisoner. Most of the coastal defences fell within two hours of the landing, and the Canadians' objectives were Carpiquet airfield and the Caen–Bayeux railway line by nightfall. Behind the sand, the Juno Beach Centre, inaugurated on 6 June 2003, marks the beach where 14,000 Canadians came ashore.

Location precision: Juno ran from Courseulles-sur-Mer to Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer; the pin marks the sand at Courseulles, in front of the Juno Beach Centre.

Visitor guidance: The Juno Beach Centre stands immediately behind the beach at Courseulles-sur-Mer, and the house facing the water at Bernières-sur-Mer is now called Canada House.

Sword, eight kilometres from Ouistreham to Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, was the easternmost of the five landing beaches. Before dawn, German torpedo boats sank the Norwegian destroyer Svenner off the shore. The first units set off at 07:25, amphibious tanks of the 13th/18th Hussars leading, and by 09:30 engineers had cleared seven of the eight exits from the sand. Commandos fought through the seaside town of Ouistreham at the far end of the zone; in the afternoon the 21st Panzer Division made the only major German counter-attack of the day. Behind Riva-Bella beach, the 17-metre fire-control tower now houses the Grand Bunker museum.

Visitor guidance: The tower stands directly behind Riva-Bella beach at Ouistreham; it is six levels high, listed as a monument historique since 1994, and now holds the Grand Bunker museum.