THE BATTLEFIELDS REVISITED

WHAT a sight met our eyes! As far as we could see, there were ships of all kinds and sizes, and above floated silvery big balloons. Big bombers were passing and repassing in the sky. What a noise everywhere and the smell of burning. Tanks and soldiers are on the road to Asnelles. Is it really true? We are liberated at last."

On June 6 it will be 25 years to the day that two elderly French spinsters, Anai's Georget and Blanche Cardon, wrote those words in their diary. It was Dday, and along the coast of Normandy, under gray, blustery skies, 156,000 Allied troops were hurling themselves against Hitler's Festung Europa, launching a thrust that would conclude on the Elbe River eleven months later and bring World War II to an end. Anai's Georget and Blanche Cardon have long since died, but the memories and memorials of that day in 1944 have not. On the beaches, in the cliffs and dunes and marshes beyond them, linger the grim reminders--rusted guns, brownish-black pillboxes, and endless rows of crosses. TIME Correspondent Benjamin Cate toured the battle areas, talked with the French who still live where so much blood was spilled, and last week sent this report:

At Omaha, the most arduous of the five D-day beaches assaulted (Utah, Juno, Sword and Gold were the others), the sand is a dirty golden color, and the tidal flats reach in for 100 yards to a series of bluffs covered with tamarisk, brambles and wild blackberries. In 1944 the bluffs were ablaze with German fire: in the first violent hours of the invasion, some 3,000 Americans were cut down as they waded in from their landing craft and clung desperately to the perilous band of beach.

Now, as then, it is cold and wet on Omaha. From the Channel, the north wind knifes in, and the beach is desolate except for the occasional lonely figure poking for shellfish. As the tide recedes, the ugly debris of war emerges: a black shape here, a jagged something there. The silence is awesome.

With the Boys. Leo Heroux, a Rhode Islander, first saw Omaha on June 6, 1944, as a 19-year-old G.I. with the 5th Special Engineer Brigade. Later that day, when the U.S. attack had punched inland, a friendly farmer gave him a drink of milk and Heroux met the man's pretty daughter. They were married after the war and returned to Normandy to live. Heroux has four children now and runs a driving school with his father-in-law. Every June 6, he closes his office and wanders down barren Omaha Beach to "walk over the sand and be with the boys who didn't make it."

Many of those who did not, lie in the American cemetery near Saint-Lau-rent-sur-Mer, its 9,386 gleaming white marble crosses and stars of David overlooking a part of the beach called "Easy Red" 25 years ago. There are also 19 smaller British and Canadian cemeteries in the invasion area, and at La Cambe, one of four German cemeteries, 21,500 rest, guarded by a giant dark cross and the sculptures of two grieving parents. All the cemeteries are meticulously maintained by their governments.

Utah, the other beach on which U.S. forces landed, is even bleaker than Omaha: a vast expanse of windswept dunes and scrub grass. To Mayor Michel de Vallavielle of nearby Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, the beach is an almost personal possession. "It remains the symbol of liberation," he says. On June 6, 1944, De Vallavielle was mistakenly shot and wounded by American paratroopers, but it did not affect his gratitude to the liberators. Over the years, he has built a small museum in a blockhouse and has seen to it that the original wooden markers naming local roads and paths after fallen American soldiers were replaced by neat cement bornes bearing the information. In the village's Cafe du 6 Juin, under crude murals depicting the invasion, the locals sit over their Calvados and chat about the debarquement as if it had happened yesterday.

Demolition Teams. Weathered German pillboxes, part of Hitler's supposedly impenetrable "Atlantic Wall," are everywhere. In Ver-sur-Mer, at one end of the beach promenade, tourists stroll past a blockhouse that now serves as a signal station for fishing boats. A few blockhouses elsewhere have been converted into homes, chicken coops and storage sheds. All along the coast, demolition teams still roam the countryside searching for unexploded ammunition; every so often, when a big enough haul is accumulated, it is blown up on Omaha after the tide has come in. At Arromanches-les-Bains, snuggled between yellowish cliffs, pony-drawn buggies roll along the beach to show tourists the town's main attraction: Port Winston, the Allies' huge artificial harbor of 115 ferro-concrete caissons, each weighing 6,000 tons. Through Winston the Allies funneled 2,500,000 troops, half a million vehicles and 4,000,000 tons of supplies in the eight months after Dday. Only 40 of the caissons jut above the water now, roosting places for seagulls and shadow sanctuaries for schools of fish. In July and August, vacationers swell the town's population of 340 to ten times that; the rest of the year Arromanches lives with memory. A few miles down the coast, at the Pointe du Hoc, a forbiddingly steep promontory scaled by American Rangers in a daring attack, bomb and shell craters and broken blockhouses testify to the fierceness of the battle.

There are abiding feuds among the coastal villages as to each one's role on Dday. Courseulles-sur-Mer claims that it, not Graye-sur-Mer, is the spot where George VI and Winston Churchill stepped ashore; the two villages are barely 50 meters apart. Sainte-Mere-Eglise and Benouville, both in drop zones for Allied paratroops, are still haggling over which was liberated first (Benouville was). To the thousands of tourists --mostly French--who come every year, the claims and counterclaims make little difference. They come and they look, silently, respectfully, moved by the monuments--visible and invisible --to what took place in Normandy 25 years ago.

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