Photo Shoot: The Long Days of June
The long days of June have arrived, along with daylight for 15 hours for the entire month.
“The Longest Day,” history buffs will remember, is a book written by Cornelius Ryan in 1959 chronicling the D-Day invasion in Normandy on June 6, 1944.
One of the veteran’s stories told in the book was Cape Cod’s own Robert Murphy. Murphy was a member of the 82nd Airborne lift into Normandy and the first guy on the ground. There is a street named in his honor in Saint Mere Eglise, the town where he landed in Normandy.
Murphy, from South Dennis, died in 2008 at the age of 83. For the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings back in 1994, the Times sent reporter Brian Lantz and I across the Atlantic to chronicle the visit from Murphy and other Cape veterans for the historic observance.
June 5, 1994 there was a parade and day-long ceremonies hosted in Saint Mere Eglise back when even the press were treated as heroes. The beaches of Normandy are a mirror image of the outer beach on Cape Cod. We look east from dune cliffs in June watching the sunrise; they look west as the sun sets over the battleground beaches of Normandy.
After a long day of festivities, the media was loaded into U.S. Army Chinook helicopters for an over flight of the battleground beaches. The twin-bladed helicopters have a back hatch that opens, providing a panoramic view.
The English Channel was filled with military ships and even Queen Elizabeth’s royal yacht. The tide was out, exposing steel turrets still sticking out of the sand designed to slow the invading Allied forces. German pill box artillery positions looked down atop the cliffs.
The sun was setting as our aerial motorcade flew north at the water’s edge, only several hundred feet above the sea. It was so serene it was hard to imagine the horror that played out below five decades earlier.
Ever since that flight 28 years ago, I have never quite seen a sunset like that. But as the sun lingers long on the horizon these June evenings, I never miss the chance to pause, make a photograph and appreciate the view. Something many on those Normandy beaches long ago never got the chance to see after June 6, 1944.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Photo Shoot: Cape sunsets remind photographer of D-Day visit
