We are the world

American D-Day veterans are crying foul over a French initiative, approved last month by President Nicolas Sarkozy, to construct over one hundred 525-feet wind turbines just off the Normandy landing grounds.

Gérard Lecornu, president of the Port Winston Churchill Association of Arromanches, says the giant structures, expected to be built seven miles offshore, will be visible from the Normandy battleground beaches of Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.

“Three million tourists come from the world over to the landing beaches. The first thing they do is look at the line of horizon from where the landings came,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “D-Day is in our collective memory. To touch this is a very grave attack on that memory.”American veterans are weighing in with opposition and dismay. Bob Sales, the only survivor from his landing craft on D-Day, and Omaha beach veteran Bob Slaughter told The Daily Caller that the beaches are “sacred ground” and expressed their strong opposition to the building of the turbines.

Hal Baumgarten, who was wounded five times on Omaha beach, added that he considers the beaches a “shrine” to those who died and said that constructing windmills off the coast would be a “desecration.”

I’ve spent a lot of time along that coast and I’m not particularly happy with the idea that a bunch of wind turbines will mar the view. But seriously. France lost around 600,000 people in WWII, over half of them civilians. There were battles everwhere, which are honored and memorialized in every village throughout Normandy and the rest of the country. They spend a hell of a lot more time remembering that war than we do — it’s in their every day lives.