Even filled with grass and wildflowers, the craters remain so deep and wide that you can still sense the blasts of bombs that carved them 79 years ago.
At the pockmarked entrance of an old German bunker, you can almost feel the rattle of machine-gun fire. Peering over the 100-foot-cliff to the ocean below, you see clearly how exposed the young American men were as they climbed up grappling ropes early that morning of June 6, 1944.
Of all the D-Day sites, none quite conveys the horror and heroism of that pivotal moment during World War II as the Pointe du Hoc.
But it is disappearing, fast. The Nazi defense and lookout point between two landing beaches in Normandy, which American Rangers conquered, suffered another three landslides this spring. Inspections revealed that waves had chewed a cavity more than two and half yards deep into their base.
“There is absolutely no doubt we are going to lose more of our cliff,” said Scott Desjardins, the American Battle Monuments Commission’s superintendent of the site that receives an estimated 900,000 visitors annually. “We know we are not going to fight Mother Nature. What’s frightening now, is the speed at which it is happening.”
Climate change and erosion are eating at the French coasts, raising gnawing questions about property rights, safety and sustainable development. But along the northern ribbon of beaches and cliffs in Normandy, where 150,000 Allied soldiers landed to confront machine guns and fascism, history, memory and even identity are at risk too.
When the sites are gone, how will France recount to itself, and the rest of the world, the impact of that moment? Alternatively, at what cost should they be saved?
“If I don’t have the site, I lose the history of what happened here,” said Mr. Desjardins, looking down at frothy waves pounding into the cliffs. “You may as well stay at home on the couch and read a book.”
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