Draws for resorts

Usage examples of beaches.

Between them and along the French coastline lay five invasion beaches: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.

Through the predawn hours as paratroopers fought in the dark hedgerows of Normandy, the greatest armada the world had ever known began to assemble off those beaches—almost five thousand ships carrying more than two hundred thousand soldiers, sailors and coastguardmen.

He had pointed to the sands with his baton and said, “The war will be won or lost on the beaches.

Either way, he reasoned, the enemy soldiers would be decimated long before they reached the beaches.

In the sands, in bluffs, in gullies and pathways leading off the beaches, he ordered mines laid—all varieties, from the large pancake type, capable of blowing off a tank’s tracks, to the small S mine which when stepped on bounded into the air and exploded level with a man’s midriff.

At some places along the front, webs of piping ran out from concealed kerosene tanks to the grassy approaches leading off the beaches.

By morning an immense fleet of five thousand ships would stand off the invasion beaches of Normandy.

Fascinated, he watched German troops calmly working among the anti-invasion obstacles on the sandy beaches that stretched away on either side.

The first craft and the first men of the Allied forces were in position off the beaches of Normandy.

Twenty minutes before H Hour, the midget sub and her sister ship, the X20-- some twenty miles farther down the coast, opposite the little village of Le Hamel—would boldly come to the surface to act as navigational markers, clearly defining the extreme limits of the British-Canadian assault zone: three beaches that had been given the code names Sword, Juno and Gold.

By taking bearings on the lights of the midgets and their drifting dinghies, approaching ships would be able to pinpoint the exact positions of the three assault beaches.

All hell would break loose on those beaches by this time tomorrow, he thought.

Within these man-made harbors, freighters as large as Liberty ships could unload into barges ferrying back and forth to the beaches.

In position off the invasion beaches of Normandy, each harbor would be the size of the port of Dover.

First, all the services wanted long hours of daylight and good visibility—to identify the beaches, for the naval and air forces to spot their targets and to reduce the hazard of collision when five thousand ships began maneuvering almost side by side in the Bay of the Seine.