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La Pointe du Hoc is a preserved battle field. The battle took place before D-day, and if it hadn't ended the way it did, D-day wouldn't have happened. The land was turned over to the US government and has been left the way it was the day the battle ended. The story itself is incredible - reading the giant plaque that contains all the details left me speechless. I wouldn't want to spoil it for people considering visiting, so I won't mention any of the story here. Suffice to say that when you see the place, you believe the story. This is one of the places in Normandy where you're liable to hear several people speaking English to each other. Sometimes veterans come visit here as well. Words can't really describe how unique this place is. For Americans it is otherworldly. For most young French people it is as well, for that matter. Seeing this many giant craters made by explosions, left behind 60 years ago, is simply something most young people born in first world countries have never seen before. The result is almost overwhelming on the senses. In one of the pictures below the ground looks like the ocean frozen in time, with wave swells and troughs frozen into the landscape. Others say the scene resembles what you'd expect the moon must look like, saving that grass has long since begun to grow throughout the craters all over the battlefield. That aspect in particular intrigued me. The battle field is preserved, the rubble and craters remain behind, yet it's not exactly as it was left, because the initial layer of earth that was peeled back has since been recovered. It reminds me of how skin grows back when a scrape heals. And the craters and fallen bunkers are scars left behind. For me the whole place was a sort of allegorical painting, first created by man, and then added to by nature. It reminds me that, given time, all wounds can be healed, but that the memory of those wounds persists much longer. Perhaps the healing of physical wounds is only superficial, like the thin layer of grass here, and as long as the memory remains the psychological effects are far more important. And of course, that's the point of this place. The scars are left intact so that as generations of visitors pass through here, the memories will never fade from the minds of humanity. Here are a couple of pictures of some of the craters and bunkers left behind. I don't want to put up too much, because once you've seen a million post-cards of the grand canyon, it's not quite as enlightening when you finally see it in the third dimension. The debris of an artillery bunker. Off in the distance you can see one of these bunkers fully intact. A site where a long-range cannon used to sit. Inside a bunker. There was no electricity or lighting, so it was pitch black inside. The flash of the camera lit up the walls. I assume ammunition must have been stored down here.