"MALTOT, France — What is left over, 75 years after the fighting ended, comes down to this: pockmarked leather fragments from a dead German soldier’s shoe scattered by his shallow battlefield grave. The field of brown dirt in Maltot, France, cleared for a planned housing development, is quiet, like the surrounding wheat fields that saw fierce fighting during the Normandy invasion of 1944. Nearby, the villages are now bustling with American visitors in mock World War II driving imitation vintage jeeps and playing at soldier in these days surrounding the 75th D-Day anniversary. President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron of France, and assorted other dignitaries, arrive for commemorations on Thursday. France is engaged in an effort to preserve the memory of the days of bloody struggle in a more concrete way. For the past 10 years, a cadre of archaeologists and field researchers unique in Europe has been digging up, documenting and cataloging the physical remains of the Battle of Normandy — bodies, bunkers, weapons — in what has become known as the “Archaeology of D-Day.” American soldiers left behind their signatures carved into trees and in the concrete of the artificial ports they created; bored German soldiers painted lascivious pictures of fräulein on the walls of bunkers and underground passageways. French civilians hid out in disused underground quarries to escape the intense Allied bombing around Caen, leaving behind thousands of objects including medicine vials, broken dolls, crockery and coins minted by the collaborationist Vichy regime. All of it is now being recorded by the archaeologists. The researchers are attempting to catalog every structure left behind by the Germans — and there were over 3,500 of them — before they disappear into the sea or are covered by vegetation." www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/world/europe/d-day-normandy-commemoration.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&fbclid=IwAR2u-wOcgbVoBejQhAnLrPU7ubcR_LFQ8ixxbebO8ODghG1Oii-GgSF3Lpo
I am in Normandy at the moment. The "archeology of D-Day" project has a very nice information display set up at the Longues-sur-Mer battery. To nitpick, as for those so-called "imitation vintage jeeps", I can say that most are in fact solely "vintage jeeps" and some are quite nicely restored. There is a staggering amount of WW2 vehicles here for the anniversary -- everything from Cushman airborne scooters, to BMW R75s, to jeeps, to Shermans.
