Colleville-sur-Mer American cemetery

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The Normandy American Cemetery, which was inaugurated in 1956, lies at the heart of a vast seventy-hectare site granted to the United States by the French Government.

Overlooking Omaha Beach, it contains 9,386 white marble crosses or stars of David arranged in impeccable rows. A father and son lie side by side, as do some thirty-three pairs of brothers. 307 headstones simply bear the words “Known but to God”.

The graves belong not only to the soldiers who fell on Omaha Beach on June 6^th 1944, but also to service personnel who were killed elsewhere in Normandy and were initially buried in temporary cemeteries such as the one at Sainte-Mère-Eglise. Several years after the war, their bodies were exhumed and transferred to the symbolic site of Omaha.

Conception et réalisation