Pointe du Hoc

Pointe du Hoc is a clifftop promontory projecting into the English Channel on the Calvados coast of Normandy, situated between Omaha Beach to the east and Utah Beach to the west. On the morning of 6 June 1944, 225 US Army Rangers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion scaled the 30-metre cliffs using ropes and ladders under withering machine-gun fire, tasked with destroying a German battery of large-calibre guns. The guns had already been moved inland, but the Rangers held the position against repeated counter-attacks for two days; 135 of the 225 men were killed or wounded. The site has been preserved exactly as it was left in 1944. German concrete gun casements, observation bunkers, and command posts remain where they stood, now tilting at odd angles from thousands of Allied naval and aerial shells. The entire landscape is pocked with enormous craters — some four or five metres deep — from pre-invasion bombardment. A concrete German observation bunker at the cliff's edge can be entered through its blast doors, offering views through gun slits to the sea below. A granite monument in the shape of a Ranger dagger marks the exact clifftop point scaled in 1944. The site is administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission and is entirely free of charge. The cratered, lunar-like landscape is unlike anywhere else in Normandy and requires sturdy footwear to navigate safely. The combination of preserved battlefield topography, intact bunkers, and clifftop position makes Pointe du Hoc one of the most viscerally affecting D-Day sites on the entire coast.