When War Was the Answer

Terrible yet inspiring traces of D-Day remain in the Normandy landscape.

On a bluff above the sand and a half-mile from the ocean’s edge at low tide, which was the condition when the first Allied soldiers left their landing craft, a round circle of concrete five feet in diameter provides a collar for a hole in the ground. On the morning of June 6, 1944, the hole was Widerstandsnest (nest of resistance) 62, a German machine-gun emplacement.

Hein Severloh had been in it since shortly after midnight, by which time...