South of D-Day beaches, another slaughter is remembered

In this photo taken on Tuesday, June 4, 2019, Gerard and Paulette Gondouin show photos at their home in in Fel, France. The couple, teenagers in 1944, were forever scarred by witnessing the destruction unleashed by Canadian, British, American, Polish and French forces that squeezed and bombarded the encircled Germans near Chambois and its surrounding villages, cutting off their routes of escape during World War II. D-Day marked only the beginning of the Allied struggle to wrest Europe from the Nazis. A commemoration Tuesday served as a reminder of this, in the shadow of bigger D-Day 75th anniversary commemorations. (AP Photo/John Leicester)

In this photo taken on Tuesday, June 4, 2019, poppies grow in a field near Chambois, France. The field oversees the valley known as the 'corridor of death' where tens of thousands of World War II German troops were trapped, killed, injured and captured in Aug. 1944. D-Day marked only the beginning of the Allied struggle to wrest Europe from the Nazis. A commemoration Tuesday served as a reminder of this, in the shadow of bigger D-Day 75th anniversary commemorations. (AP Photo/John Leicester)

CHAMBOIS, France – D-Day marked only the beginning of the Allied struggle to wrest Europe from the Nazis.

A commemoration Tuesday served as a reminder of this, in the village of Chambois, south of the Normandy beaches where Allies landed 75 years ago this week.

It took many more weeks of fighting to bring the Battle of Normandy to a decisive and bloody conclusion, around the ruins of Chambois and surrounding villages. Tens of thousands of German soldiers became trapped in a noose of Allied armor and fire.

In the spring that followed the battle, the grass grew especially thick and green, fertilized by thousands of corpses that had been plowed into mass graves. Soldiers nicknamed the wide, open plain "the Corridor of Death."

Its surviving witnesses are still haunted by the memory.