Normandy Overrun by Allied Landings

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Robert Zaretsky, D-Day, From Below; How did WWII’s pivotal moment look when it was your village being overrun?  Boston Globe, June 1, 2014 (in the section Ideas).
www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/0 ... 5qaNKueO/story.html
(“On D-day, American firepower took 3,000 French civilian lives, as many as the Americans lost to German firepower at Omaha Beach. By the time Normandy was fully liberated, more than 20,000 civilians had died, most of them victims of the Allied bombings that pummeled the region’s cities and towns)

Note:
(a) “History writing has always hummed with tension between two perspectives: one from above, the other from below. * * * This division goes back as far as the founders of the historical profession, Herodotus and Thucydides, whose respective accounts documented Athens’s wars from the ground and in the big picture in the 5th century BC.
(i) Herodotus
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
(c 484–425 BC)
(ii) Thucydides
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides
(c 460 – c 395 BC)
(iii) Regarding Athens’s wars, see Athens
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens

Quote: “Athens had by this time become a significant naval power with a large fleet, and helped the rebellion of the Ionian cities against Persian rule. In the ensuing Greco-Persian Wars [499-449 BC] Athens, together with Sparta, led the coalition of Greek states that repelled the Persians, defeating them decisively at Marathon in 490 BC, and crucially at Salamis in 480 BC. The decades that followed became known as the Golden Age of Athenian democracy, during which time Athens became the leading city of Ancient Greece, with its cultural achievements laying the foundations of Western civilization. The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished in Athens during this time, as did the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates, and the philosopher Socrates.

(i) Normandy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy
(from Old French Normanz, plural of Normand, originally from the word for "northman" in several Scandinavian languages)
(ii) Normandy: “literally ‘region settled by Vikings;’ from Normand (see Norman)”
Norman (n): “c.1200, ‘one of the mixed Scandinavian-Frankish people who conquered England in 1066,’ from Old French Normanz, plural of Normand, Normant, literally ‘North man,’ from a Scandinavian word meaning ‘northman’ (see Norse), in reference to the Scandinavian people who overran and occupied Normandy 10c. Later meaning ‘one of the Norman French who conquered England in 1066.’"
Online Etymology Dictionary, undated
www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=Normandy

(b) “Consider the case of St-Lô, a strategically important city that American military planners expected to capture the first day. In fact, the GIs, struggling against a landscape of hedgerows as formidable as the entrenched German forces, needed several days of bloody combat to reach their objective.”

Saint-Lô
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Lô\
(The name "Saint-Lô", known since the 8th century, originates from Saint Laud, bishop of Coutances in 525–565, who had a residence here)
(c) “The view from the ground, like that of 18-year-old city native Jean Roger, was quite different. As he recounts in an interview with historians from the University of Caen, Roger heard a deep rumble in the sky on the morning of June 6. Looking out his apartment window, he glimpsed seemingly endless rows of bombers.“

Normandy landings
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_landings
(Allied infantry and armoured divisions began landing on the coast of France starting at 06:30)

(d) books mentioned in this article:
(i) William Hitchcock, Professor of History, University of Virginia, undated
history.virginia.edu/user/333
(The Bitter Road to Freedom; A new history of the liberation of Europe. The Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2008)
(ii) Stephen E Ambrose, D-Day: June 6, 1944; The Climactic Battle of World War II. Simon & Schuster, 1994.
(iii) Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do; Sex and the American GI in World War II France. University of Chicago Press, 2013. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo14166482.html
(iv) Mary Louise Roberts, D-Day Through French Eyes; Normandy 1944. University of Chicago Press, 2014.  
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo17964328.html

(e) Caen
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caen
(William the Conqueror was buried there)

* William the Conqueror
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_I_of_England
(1028-1087; King of England 1066-1087; section 9 Death and aftermath)

(f) “Roberts ends her new book with French recollections of dinners and rituals, including the celebrated ‘trou Normand’—tossing down a glass of Calvados in one gulp—with which Normans thanked their liberators.”
(i) Calvados (brandy)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvados_(brandy)
(section 6 Tasting: Calvados is the basis of the tradition of le trou Normand, or "the Norman hole")
(ii) French English dictionary
(A) trou (noun masculine): "hole"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trou
(B) normand (adj masculine): “Norman (related to Normandy)”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/normand

(g) A sketch of Normandy map shows Normandy surrounds Bay of the Seine, where the river Seine empties. See seine
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seine