70th Anniversary of D-Day

The inscription "D-DAY" rendered as a stylised landing craft and an artillery gun. Above the gun the dates 1944–2014 and the words "70e anniversaire du débarquement" (70th anniversary of the landings). The distinctive boot prints of the American, British, and Canadian soldiers are being washed away by a wave, slowly disappearing into the sand. Into the wave are engraved words from Verlaine, which served as the code signal for the start of the landings: "les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne blessent mon coeur d'une langueur monotone".

D-Day, on 6 June 1944, was the largest amphibious landing operation in military history. Under the codename "Operation Overlord", American, British, Canadian and other Allied forces landed on five stretches of the Normandy coast — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. On the first day alone, around 156,000 soldiers landed on the Normandy coast; preparations included months of deception operations, massed air raids and the coordinated deployment of thousands of ships. The German defences along the so-called Atlantic Wall proved a significant obstacle but could not prevent the landing. The beachhead the Allies expanded in Normandy over the following weeks formed the basis for the liberation of France and other Western European countries until the war's end in 1945.

France commemorates the anniversary of the Normandy landings with particular regularity, since the event took place on French soil and is directly linked to the liberation of the country from German occupation. Normandy, with its memorials, military cemeteries and museums — above all the Mémorial de Caen and the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer — is regarded as a central site of remembrance for the Second World War in Europe. For the 70th anniversary of D-Day in 2014, heads of state and government from around the world came to Normandy; France issued a 2-euro commemorative coin for the occasion, underscoring the significance of this date for Europe's collective memory.