Contemporary view of Easy Red Sector, Omaha Beach, via The Omaha Beach Project.
A closer view of the line of bluffs overlooking Easy Red, via The Omaha Beach Project.

Below are the slides from a Powerpoint I made for my Dad to show him the details of where he landed on Omaha Beach on 15 June 1944, but moreso regarding the route he took off the beach.

The general area is what was designated Easy Red Sector and the route taken is known today to many historians as “Spalding’s Draw.” The name is derived from U.S. 1st Division 2nd Lt. John Spalding, who had landed with 32 men of E Company, 16th Infantry Regiment, at H-Hour nine days earlier, right on target between two German strongpoints – WN62 and WN64. The rest of the regiment’s boat teams assigned to the sector, however, ended up several hundred yards further east, essentially right into the teeth of the German defenses at Exit E-3. Spalding quickly identified a ravine beyond the dunes between the strongpoints and the more obvious draws leading to the villages of St. Laurent-sur-Mer (Exit E-1) and Colleville-sur-Mer (Exit E-3). He led the remnants of his 32-man boat team across a mined stretch of marshy ground, into the ravine, and up to the top of the 100-foot bluffs overlooking the beach. It was via this same route that my Dad reached a same field atop the bluffs, where he dug a foxhole and spent his first night in Normandy.

Right-click and select “View image in new tab” to view a larger view of each page of the presentation below.

A rare view of the “Roman Ruins” that Lawrence recalls marking the general vicinity of where he made his ascent up the bluffs on Omaha Beach’s Easy Red Sector on 15 June 1944.
The mouse pointer on the image is pointing directly at the Roman Ruins. The route Lawrence took the top of the bluffs was mostly inside the line of trees on the rising slope to the left of the ruins. He spent his first night in France in a foxhole in the open field above the aforementioned line of trees.
The stretch of Easy Red between E-1 and E-3 draws, with “Breakthrough Alley’s” diagonal course rising up the bluff visible behind the beached LCI 553 (center). Taken just after D-Day, a wrecked bulldozer (center foreground) and other wreckage has yet to be removed. German obstacles have been cleared and at least one substantial gap opened through the embankment leading to what the Germans called the “high
beach,” which was generally a strip of marshland (albeit heavily mined) in this area.
Wreckage on the beach pushed up onto the shingle (the swath of tideborne stones)
in the vicinity of the Roman Ruins sometime after D-Day.
The general area of the shingle bank depicted in the preceding photo, 2006. The site of the Roman Ruins, long gone,
would be visible by looking camera-right over the line of beach grass and west down the line of the beach.
The view from about halfway up the bluff, more or less tracing the route Lawrence took. The concrete structure at the top center of the photo is an observation deck on the grounds of the Normandy American Cemetery. Photo taken 2006.
The view from the observation deck at the top of the bluffs, 2006. The Roman Ruins and the path taken by Lawrence were in the general vicinity of the break in the shingle and dunes (a light-colored indentation in the top left-hand corner of the photo with a faint figure visible on the dirt track crossing the marshy area just beyond the dunes).

Postscript: The observation deck is extremely close to the spot where Capt. Joseph Dawson, also of The Big Red One, took out a German machine gun nest early on D-Day morning. So, between the isolated actions of Spalding, Dawson, and their small bands of waterlogged infantrymen in this general area (to become known as “Breakthrough Alley” in subsequent years), the first hole in Hitler’s fabled Atlantic Wall was made … not by a massive charge of thousands of troops with support from naval gunfire, fighter aircraft, and armor, but by a handful of tired, seasick, and under-supplied GIs acting on their own initiative with the success or failure of the invasion hanging in the balance – although there was no way for them to know that. The actions of these two bands of dogfaces in a small pocket of the almost four miles of beach were the purest examples of how small unit actions often prove decisive in dictating the outcome of a larger battle, indeed an entire operation as complex as Overlord.