Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial

Pay tribute to the over 9,000 American troops who died in Europe during World War II.

When the first settlers arrived on the Kansas prairie in September 1877, there was no town waiting for them. No houses, no trees, no shade. Just tall grass stretching to the horizon.

Many families spent their first winter living in dugouts, holes carved into the ground and roofed with sod. Some looked at the empty plains and turned around.

Those who stayed built Nicodemus, the oldest surviving town founded by Black settlers west of the Mississippi River.

The town started with a plan. Rev. W.H. Smith, a Black minister, joined W.R. Hill, a white land developer, and five other Black men to form the Nicodemus Town Company in April 1877.

They printed flyers and visited churches in Kentucky, inviting formerly enslaved families to move west. Kansas was appealing because it had been a free state, home to the abolitionist John Brown.

The flyers promised more than the land could deliver. But the settlers who pushed through made it work.

By the mid-1880s, Nicodemus had about 700 residents. It had two newspapers, three general stores, three churches, a bank, and an ice cream parlor.

Then the town needed a railroad, and it never came. Town leaders invested $16,000 trying to lure three different rail companies, and all three laid their tracks somewhere else.

Businesses moved south to be near the trains. People followed, and Nicodemus began to empty.

It never died completely. Families stayed on, and one of them raised a football star.

Veryl Switzer was born in Nicodemus in 1932. He was an All-American at Kansas State, and in 1954 the Green Bay Packers picked him fourth overall in the NFL draft.

He played two seasons for the Packers, served in the Air Force, and later came home to farm the land his family had held for generations.

Congress made Nicodemus a National Historic Site in 1996. Descendants of the original settlers still live here.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was the only general to land with the first wave on D-Day. He died of a heart attack five weeks later, and he's buried here on the bluff above the beaches.

Next to him lies his younger brother Quentin, a pilot shot down in 1918 during World War I. The family had Quentin's body moved from another cemetery in 1955 so the brothers could rest side by side.

The cemetery sits on 172 acres above Omaha Beach in Colleville-sur-Mer, France. It's the final resting place for American soldiers who died during the Battle of Normandy, code-named Operation Overlord.

That operation began on June 6, 1944, when Allied troops landed on five beaches to begin freeing France from German occupation. Omaha was the bloodiest of the five.

Two days after the landing, the Army set up a temporary burial ground nearby. After the war, ten temporary cemeteries in the region were combined into this one.

Families were given a choice. About 60 percent asked for their loved ones to be brought home, and the rest chose to leave them in France.

France gave the land to the United States forever. The cemetery was dedicated on July 18, 1956.

Today it holds 9,388 graves, marked by white marble crosses and Stars of David in perfect rows. Among them are 307 soldiers whose names were never known and 45 sets of brothers.

Two of those brothers, Preston and Robert Niland, inspired the film Saving Private Ryan. The opening and closing scenes were filmed here.

Behind the graves, the Walls of the Missing list 1,557 names of men whose bodies were never found. When one is later identified, a bronze rosette is placed beside the name.

Stand at the overlook and look down on Omaha Beach, where the soldiers buried behind you came ashore. Walk the rows and read the home states carved on the crosses, from every corner of the country. Stay for the flag-lowering ceremony at closing time, when "Taps" plays across the field.