Pointe du Hoc
Interesting facts
- First Sergeant Leonard Lomell and Sergeant Jack Kuhn found the missing guns hidden under camouflage in an apple orchard, aimed toward Utah Beach.
- Lomell disabled the guns with thermite grenades and smashed their sights using his Thompson submachine gun wrapped in his field jacket.
- The six guns were captured French 155 mm GPF cannon, a design from the First World War.
- The battleship USS Texas and the destroyers USS Satterlee and HMS Talybont were among the ships that shelled the clifftop.
- Shortly before D-Day, Rudder relieved the officer first chosen to lead the assault, Major Cleveland Lytle, and went ashore with the Rangers himself.
- The granite pylon of the Ranger memorial, shaped like a commando dagger, stands on top of a German bunker and was erected by the French in 1960.
- France formally transferred the site to the American Battle Monuments Commission on 11 January 1979.
- Reagan's 1984 speech, written by Peggy Noonan, addressed 62 surviving veterans of the battle sitting in front of him.
- The speech's famous title phrase echoed The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn's book about the Brooklyn Dodgers.
- For the 75th anniversary in 2019, soldiers of the 75th Ranger Regiment re-enacted the climb up the cliff.
Why it is worth it
Pointe du Hoc is a blunt headland of the Calvados coast in Normandy, ending in a sheer cliff about 35 metres high above the English Channel, some 6.5 km west of the centre of Omaha Beach. It is a place where the landscape itself tells the story. The grassy top is still pitted with deep bomb craters, and between them lie the broken concrete casemates, gun pits and an observation bunker that the German army built into the Atlantic Wall in 1943 and 1944. Walking among them, with the sea below and the long beaches curving away on either side, gives a sense of the scale of D-Day that no museum model can.
The Germans had placed a battery of six French-made 155 mm guns here, able to reach both Omaha and Utah beaches, and in spring 1944 began enclosing them in heavy casemates. Allied planners assigned the position to the US Army Rangers under Lieutenant Colonel James Earl Rudder. On the morning of 6 June 1944, after losing boats to heavy seas and a navigation error, three companies of the 2nd Ranger Battalion reached the foot of the cliff about 40 minutes late and climbed it under fire with rocket-fired grapnels, ropes and extension ladders borrowed from the London Fire Brigade, while warships shelled the top.
On the summit they found the casemates empty: the guns had been moved inland. Patrols soon located five of them in a lane nearby and disabled them with thermite grenades. The costliest part of the battle came afterwards, as the isolated Rangers held a shrinking perimeter against German counter-attacks for two days until relieved on 8 June. Of roughly 225 men who landed, only about 90 were still able to fight at the end.
Since 1979 the 13-hectare site has been cared for by the American Battle Monuments Commission, and a memorial to the Rangers stands on the point. President Reagan gave a speech here at the fortieth anniversary commemorations in 1984. The headland is also a good spot for watching seabirds passing along the coast. Visit quietly: this is both a landscape of great beauty and a battlefield.
Getting there
The site lies on the coast between Omaha and Utah beaches. The city of Saint-Lô is about 32 km away; Caen Carpiquet Airport (CFR) is about 46 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
La Pointe du Hoc is a promontory with a 35-metre (110 ft) cliff overlooking the English Channel on the northwestern coast of Normandy in the Calvados department, France.
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