Link: http://www.normandy1944.info/
Given the 60th anniversary of D-Day has just occurred, I suggest you might like to look at this website. It is the story of the D-Day landings, told through the words of those who took part.
The website contains a fantastic collection of World War II first-hand accounts from those who took part in the D-Day landings. In fact there are over 250 individual accounts, each one telling a harrowing story of what it is like to fight in modern warfare. The stories are particularly poignant when one considers that thousands of those who landed on the beaches on D-Day were only boys. The memories of what they saw remained with them always. This from Anthony Leone, who was at Omaha Beach: “My comrades and I stood in the midst of blood and gore as the agonizing screams of humans pinned in the flaming wreckage of trucks off our lowered ramp echoed throughout the corridors of eternity. I shall hear their screams for the rest of my life.” Most of the accounts are by Americans, though there are a few British and Commonwealth accounts, and even one or two from French Resistance fighters. The site also contains several hundred photographs of Allied soldiers in Europe in 1944–45 and the civilians they liberated. Like the stories, many of these images are very moving: soldiers with young children, and civilians going about their daily business in bomb-blasted towns and surrounded by death and immense human misery.
Another part of the site lists the cemeteries that contain the remains of those killed in the Normandy fighting. These include the Le Cambe German cemetery, where 21,222 German soldiers are buried. This is the site’s description of Le Cambe:
In a clearing dotted with trees and Maltese crosses in groups of five, more than 21,222 men are buried here beneath small slabs. The fallen German soldiers from the Normandy campaign were scattered all over Normandy, many of them buried in isolated graves or small cemeteries. More than 12,000 German soldiers were moved from 1400 smaller locations to this cemetery in La Cambe. Since September 1961, more than 700 bodies of fallen soldiers have been found on the battlefields of Normandy and buried here.