Thanks to painstaking repairs after World War II, many Normandy towns remain charming today.

Dear International Living Reader,

Sixty-two years ago, 156,000 Canadian, U.S., and UK soldiers stormed a 60-mile stretch of northern France. It was the largest seaborne invasion in history. Almost 10,000 Allied soldiers died trying to establish a foothold in France.

I made a similar approach by boat a few years ago, traveling from Rosslare, Ireland, to Cherbourg, France.

But there was one major difference. I was on a cushy ferry, with my own bed and several restaurants to choose from, not a tiny Higgins landing craft. And I wasn’t facing heavy German 88mm cannon and machine gun fire, mines, and Czech hedgehog defenses, as the allied soldiers were.

General Eisenhower, by the way, on more than one occasion credited Andrew Jackson Higgins, a New Orleans designer and manufacturer of the landing craft, as the "one man" who won the war for the allies.

Many of the Normandy towns were completely destroyed in the ensuing days of battle. But the French did an amazing thing: Although they didn’t have the manpower or the money to repair their once-beautiful buildings, they painstakingly made repairs in the original style anyway. The result, today, is that many of the 50-year-old buildings blend in with those that are centuries old. (An exception is the town of Brest, the western-most city in Brittany. This is the ugliest French city I’ve ever seen. Everything here was destroyed and rebuilt in a 1950s Soviet style.)

Most of the Normandy towns, for this reason, are still very charming, as the thousands of veterans who have made the pilgrimage to Normandy can attest.

Michael Palmer
For International Living