Five beaches
The coast of 6 June.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Scale52
Intensity84
Duration18
Tech shift58
Political impact78
Cultural memory92
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Quick answers
Are the scores a ranking of nations or armies?
No. Scores are browsing aids inside an era-bounded atlas — not live league tables of countries.
How many died on 6 June?
Allied dead on D-Day are usually given in the thousands (often about 4,000+ killed, with wider casualty figures higher). German and French civilian deaths add more. Campaign totals are much larger.
Why Normandy, not Calais?
Calais was closer and more obvious -- hence Fortitude. Normandy offered space and a deception payoff.
What was Omaha?
The US beach under the highest bluffs, where the first waves took the worst punishment. It is not the whole of D-Day.
Who commanded?
Eisenhower (SHAEF), Montgomery (ground), Bradley (US First Army), Ramsay (navy), Leigh-Mallory (air) -- a coalition staff.
Did D-Day win the war?
It opened a Western Front that Germany could not resource beside the east. The war still had eleven months and a Soviet drive from the other side.
Five beaches on one map; then the bocage; then Falaise. Three maps, not one sand photo.
Colleville's rows are a map of US counties.
Maps
Airborne drops
Flanks.
Bocage / Caen
June-July.
Cobra-Falaise
Breakout.
Cemetery belt
Memory map.
Portrayals
The Longest Day
1962 ensemble icon.
Saving Private Ryan
1998 Omaha.
Band of Brothers (Carentan etc.)
A later serial pilgrimage.
Juno Beach Centre
Canadian corrective.
Caen Memorial
A fuller French frame.
Churchill's memoirs
The British prose canon.
Rituals
6 June ceremonies
Heads of state on the sand.
School battlefield tours
A civic rite in the UK/US/CA.
Veteran (now rare) returns
A closing ritual.
Sayings
The English sacred beach should not erase French rubble or Soviet June 1944.
Korean readers: this is the amphibious ancestor story, not a peninsula story -- until Inchon.