An oft used cliché is that ‘a picture paints a thousand words,’ but when it comes to this photograph from Normandy, France, shortly after the D-Day landings, I would disagree. To my mind this image, which is one of my favourites from Normandy in 1944, paints a lot more than a thousand words.
In June 2014, a photographer and I were driving around the D-Day coast in my Jeep and passed through Isigny-sur-Mer where a huge version of this photograph was displayed on a banner in a field. It may have been the very field in this photograph of a Jeep assembly line in Isigny-sur-Mer, a commune in the Calvados department and Normandy region of north-western France, during July 1944.
Isigny, situated in the fertile grassland known as the Baie des Veys, which constitutes the joint estuary of four rivers including the Vire, was more than 60% destroyed by bombardment on June 8, 1944. Charles de Gaulle paid the town’s inhabitants a visit on June 14, 1944 just eight days after the landings. It was subsequently almost entirely rebuilt so the town, in welcoming visitors, was perhaps understandably keen to mark its D-Day history with this photograph. As well as withstanding the bombardment, Isigny played its part in the…
