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Joe Steinbring

Sainte-Marie-du-Mont

A gap in the dunes with marram grass and an old post, the wide wet beach and gray sea beyond.
Utah Beach through the dunes, at low tide.2006 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring
Static offline map showing Sainte-Marie-du-Mont in France with a location pin.

Utah Beach, the westernmost of the D-Day beaches, runs along the coast of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. I saw it in the summer of 2006, on the same college trip to Normandy that took me to Sainte-Mère-Église and La Cambe. American troops came ashore here on June 6, 1944, and today the Utah Beach museum stands in the dunes where they landed, among a Sherman tank, landing craft, and memorials to the units that fought here. It was a gray, wet day, and the tide was far out.

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  • An American Sherman tank with a white star on the grass, steel anti-tank obstacles behind it.

    A Sherman tank by the dunes at Utah Beach.

    2006 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

  • A battered concrete bunker roof in the sand, between grassy dunes and a wooden fence.

    A German bunker, half-buried in the dunes.

    2006 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

  • The rusted hull of an American amphibious vehicle, a red granite obelisk and flagpoles behind it.

    A landing vehicle and a memorial obelisk under the Allied flags.

    2006 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

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