Seventy years ago, roughly 45,000 American and allied infantry stormed the sands at Omaha Beach, Normandy, France. It was part of the largest coordinated maritime invasion in history, and involved a pair of US battleships, three cruisers, a dozen destroyers, and more than a hundred other warships. Three thousand US and allied soldiers died.
Today, Omaha is eerily quiet. It’s gently lapping waves and sweeping bluffs has made the site of D-Day’s bloodiest, most iconic battle into a drone hobbyist’s playground. And that’s cool. What isn’t cool is how most of the returns you’ll get after searching “Omaha Beach, Normandy, drone fpv” on YouTube are cut to god awful, cringey dubstep. If you’re responsible for choosing that sort of score to color hallowed ground, seriously, what are you thinking?
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From this face-palmy slate of hits I did manage to mine out the above drone video of Omaha Beach, shot by Josh Welsh. It strikes the right tone by forgoing a soundtrack altogether. It’s completely silent.
Image: US Army – US National Archives
OK, so it doesn’t quite compare to this aerial view of Omaha shot on June 6, 1944. But Welsh’s four-minute flyover does give a unique perspective on the sheer scope of the amphibious landings, and how the sands of time have (or haven’t) healed all wounds.
You can almost see the ghosts of that bygone era, a time when warfare, for better or worse, wasn’t yet streamlined into Google Glass-equipped data-driven soldiers traversing so-called networked battlefields and calling in help from drones. It was just thousands of young men running up a beach as part of a massive plan to gain an Allied foothold in Europe, one that helped turn the tide of the war. Even 70 years on and through the eye of a drone, that history is easily felt.
