Low dunes, a wide grey-gold beach and a sky that seems to go on forever: the westernmost of the D-Day landing beaches looks peaceful today. On 6 June 1944, troops of the US 4th Infantry Division came ashore here, on the eastern coast of the Cotentin peninsula, after paratroopers had dropped inland during the night. A current pushed the first landing craft south of their intended sector, onto a less defended stretch of sand, and Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., walking the beach with a cane, decided to start the war from right there. Casualties at Utah were far lower than at Omaha, a few kilometres to the east.
The beach is part of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, and the Utah Beach museum stands on the site of a German bunker, with landing craft, vehicles and a B-26 bomber inside. Memorials line the dunes. Inland, Sainte-Mère-Église was one of the first towns liberated, and it is famous for the paratrooper whose parachute caught on the church tower; a dummy still hangs there today. Across the bay to the east, the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc and the beaches of Omaha are visible on clear days.
The landscape behind the beach is the marsh of the Cotentin, flat and wet, crossed by causeways that were bitterly fought over in 1944 because the Germans had flooded the fields around them. The riding is easy and atmospheric: narrow lanes between hedgerows, small stone villages and long straight roads across the marshes. Wind off the Channel can be strong and it rains often, but the light after a shower is beautiful. Traffic peaks in June around the anniversary, when vintage jeeps and re-enactors fill the roads.
Fuel is limited near the beach; Carentan, fifteen kilometres away, is the reliable option, and Sainte-Mère-Église has shops and cafés. Normandy food is all about dairy and apples: butter and cream from Isigny, camembert, cider and calvados, the apple brandy. Seafood is excellent along the coast, from oysters to mussels. Take time on the beach itself, walk to the waterline and look back at the dunes. It is a short distance, but it was a long way for the men who crossed it.