American D-Day Sites Full-Day Tour from Bayeux

Sainte-Mère-Église: the heart of the airborne drop zone

The day starts about 45 minutes from Bayeux in Sainte-Mère-Église, a market village at the base of the Cotentin peninsula. In the night of 5 to 6 June 1944 thousands of American paratroopers dropped around it to secure the roads behind Utah Beach, and by dawn the village had been taken, making it one of the very first places liberated in France.

Your guide tells the story in the square beside the medieval church, where one paratrooper famously caught his parachute on the bell tower; a figure of a paratrooper still hangs there today in his memory. Inside, stained-glass windows depict the airborne troops. You have about an hour and a half here, with time to look around the square and, if you wish, the airborne museum nearby (entry not included).

Utah Beach: the westernmost landing beach

Utah Beach is a long, flat stretch of sand backed by dunes on the east coast of the Cotentin peninsula, the westernmost of the five D-Day beaches. American troops landed here at dawn on 6 June 1944; strong currents carried the first waves south of their planned sector, onto a stretch with lighter defences, and by the end of the day more than 20,000 men and their vehicles were ashore with relatively light losses compared with Omaha.

You spend almost two hours at Utah Beach with your guide, walking along the dunes past monuments and German bunkers and looking out over the shore where the landing craft came in. The Utah Beach museum stands right on the dunes for those who want to see the landing craft and equipment (entry not included). Utah Beach is often quieter than Omaha, which makes it a calm and evocative place to reflect.

Pointe du Hoc: the Rangers' cliff

Pointe du Hoc is a headland halfway between Utah and Omaha beaches, the highest point on this stretch of coast. The Germans built a heavy gun battery here as part of the Atlantic Wall because it overlooked both beaches. On 6 June 1944 a battalion of US Army Rangers climbed the 30-metre cliffs with ropes and ladders under fire, found that the guns had been moved inland, tracked them down and disabled them.

Today the clifftop is a striking landscape of grass-covered bomb craters and shattered concrete bunkers, crowned by a granite monument and offering a magnificent view over the English Channel. You spend about an hour here. Renovation works may close Pointe du Hoc during part of 2026 and 2027; on those days your guide replaces it with another major D-Day site, such as the Longues-sur-Mer Battery with its original guns.

Omaha Beach: the deadliest beach of D-Day

Omaha Beach is about eight kilometres of sand between Vierville-sur-Mer and Colleville-sur-Mer, overlooked by steep bluffs that the Germans had fortified with strongpoints covering every exit. The landings here on the morning of 6 June 1944 met the fiercest resistance of the day, and for hours the outcome hung in the balance until small groups worked their way up the bluffs.

With about an hour and a half here, you have time to walk on the beach, see the stainless-steel sculpture that honours the soldiers and hear how the battle unfolded sector by sector. Many people book an Omaha Beach tour above all for this moment: standing on the open sand and looking up at the bluffs makes the courage of that morning very real.

Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial

The tour ends on the bluff above Omaha Beach at the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. Spread over about 70 hectares, it holds the graves of more than 9,000 American servicemen and women. The rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David on immaculate lawns, framed by the sea, leave a lasting impression on every visitor.

You have about an hour to walk among the graves, see the semicircular memorial with its bronze statue and battle maps, the chapel and the garden of the missing, and visit the visitor centre with its personal stories. It is the right place to pay your respects at the end of a long day before the drive of about 30 minutes back to central Bayeux.