D-Day Landing Reenactment,

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The gunfire is loud and the battle action long and inspiring, proving the discipline and endurance of our armed forces then, and these authentically outfitted re-enactors now.

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CONNEAUT OHIO -- The German soldier is rolling down the hill, another is falling – dead – down the hill, the smoke is clearing, the gunfire dissipating. 'Wounded' and 'dead' are scattered along the 250 yards of beach and incline where Army Rangers and the Big Red One have taken the hill. The Wehrmacht gives up this beach, these guns, this hill representing the enormous undertaking 69 years ago on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.

Allied re-enactors rush from Higgins boats to the sand and gunfire, then work their way past the beach obstacles to braving enemy fire and explosions. The long, flat beach has little defilade, barb wire, land mines, Teller mine-topped Belgian gates and steel beach obstacles to slow down landing forces ahead of the rock shingle below the German fortifications on the bluff. The Ohio beachhead is eerily similar to what the GIs faced landing at Omaha Beach where the landing force of 40,000 suffered 2,200 casualties, mostly in the first hour.

Here, the thousand or so re-enactors rise from positions as victor and vanquished, shake hands, pose for group pictures while thousands and thousands of spectators – most of them too young to remember World War II at all, applaud the living history lesson before their eyes at D-Day Conneaut at Lake Erie, Conneaut Township Park, Ohio.

The Germans had taken four years to build the concrete reinforced bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. At the end of the day on June 6, 1944, about 175,000 American, Canadian and British troops had landed on Normandy breaching enemy defenses at a cost of nearly 5,000 casualties. The day was won but the war in Europe would last nearly another year.

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