A Memorial to Remember June 6, 1944
9,000 Fallen Soldiers Etched into the Sand on Normandy Beach
Photos and text courtesy of Jim McCann
A large percentage of our country doesn’t know of or care about Normandy. This year, a British artist, accompanied by numerous volunteers, took to the beaches of Normandy with rakes and stencils in hand to etch 9,000 silhouettes representing fallen soldiers into the sand.
Titled “The Fallen 9000”, the piece is meant as a stark visual reminder of those who died during the D-Day beach landings at Arromanches on June 6th, 1944 during WWII. It is hard for us, who have never had such an experience, to imagine charging off those landing craft under heavy artillery, mortar and machine gun fire, with men falling all around you. They were indeed the greatest generation. The original team consisted of 60 volunteers, but as word spread nearly 500 additional local residents arrived to help with the temporary installation that lasted only a few hours before being washed away by the tide.
