A World In Pictures

                In the month of June in 1944, in the height of the second World War, the allies launched the largest seaborne invasion the world had ever seen, officially dubbed, operation D-Day. Over 156,000 allied troops landed onto the beaches of Normandy right underneath the barrels of hundreds of Germen machine guns. The battle that ensued, if it can be called that, resulted in the slaughter of thousands of men as the allies struggled in vain to get off the beach and push inland. In the end the allies were successful in establishing the beach head that would provide the gateway they needed into the heart of Nazi Europe, but the loss in human life they experienced was almost unbearable, with over 2,500 dead and over 10,000 casualties in total. So many people died, and so many families were broken apart that even today, every June, the world comes back together to remember those that were lost. This picture in particular shows the chilling loss not in raw statistics or numbers, but in outlines. Each outline on the beach represents a individual soldier who died during the battle, and overwhelms us with the sheer scale of the loss and horror that occurred on that day. It opens your eyes to what war really is, more so than any movie or textbook. The effect of actually seeing the dead with your own eyes strewn out for as far as the eye can see makes you only wonder, why? Why did so many have to die? But it also makes you hope. It makes you hope that people will learn from history and not strive to repeat it.