Guided Tour of Normandy D-Day Beaches Day Trip from Paris with transport

Overview

A thirteen-hour day from Paris to the Normandy landing beaches with an official guide: Pointe du Hoc, Omaha, the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, Juno, and free time at Arromanches.

What to expect

• A seven o'clock departure from central Paris by air-conditioned coach.
• Around three hours on the road each way, through the Normandy countryside.
• Pointe du Hoc, on the clifftop, with the ground still cratered.
• Omaha Beach, walked, with the German positions explained from where they stood.
• The American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer: the memorial, the chapel, the aligned headstones.
• Arromanches, with time to eat and to look at what is still in the water.
• Juno Beach and its cemetery, for the Canadian sector.

They could not capture a port, so they brought one

The raid on Dieppe in 1942 settled an argument. Taking a working harbour from the Germans, intact, was not going to happen — the defences were concentrated exactly there.

Without a port, an invasion could not be supplied past its first week. So the answer was to build two harbours in Britain, in pieces, in secret, and tow them across the Channel behind the landings.

The scale of it is hard to hold. Concrete caissons the size of small apartment blocks, some weighing several thousand tonnes, floated across and sunk in position to make breakwaters. Floating roadways on pontoons, designed to rise and fall with a tide that here can move a very long way. Old ships deliberately scuttled in lines to break the sea.

One survived and one did not

Two were assembled, one off Omaha and one off Arromanches. Within a fortnight of the landings a storm blew for three days and destroyed the Omaha harbour outright.

The Arromanches one held. It worked for roughly ten months and put ashore something in the order of two million men, half a million vehicles and millions of tonnes of stores — the supply line that made the rest of the campaign possible.

It is still there

This is why the Arromanches stop is not simply lunch. The caissons are visible in the bay at low water, spread out in a great arc, and they are not a monument anyone built afterwards. They are the harbour, left where it was moored in 1944.

Practical honesty about the day

Parts of Pointe du Hoc have been subject to access restrictions — the cliff is unstable and sections are closed when work requires it. If that applies on your date your guide will adjust the visit on the ground.

Lunch is not included; the free time at Arromanches is when you buy it.

Thirteen hours with roughly six of them on a coach is a long day. It is the only honest way to see four sites spread across fifty kilometres of coast and be back in Paris the same night.