Pointe du Hoc, Cricqueville-en-Bessin

Pointe du Hoc is a clifftop battlefield preserved exactly as it appeared after the D-Day assault on June 6, 1944. On that morning, 225 US Army Rangers from the 2nd Ranger Battalion scaled these 30-meter cliffs under heavy German fire to neutralize artillery positions threatening Utah and Omaha beaches. The landscape remains scarred by massive bomb craters from the 1,500 tons of Allied ordnance dropped before the assault, with German bunkers and concrete casemates still bearing bullet holes.