THE hallowed sands and bocage of Normandy were the destination for more than two dozen reservists on a D-Day pilgrimage.

Part-time sailors from Ceres Division, the Leeds-based subordinate unit of HMS Sherwood, joined their Nottingham comrades, plus counterparts from Eaglet, Calliope, Flying Fox and Officer Training Corps cadets from Leeds University on a weekend’s tour of the invasion beaches and environs.

Barely had the ferry from Portsmouth docked in Ouistreham than the 29-strong party was ashore and enjoying breakfast in the Pegasus Bridge café.

The neighbouring bridge was the first Allied success of June 6 1944, seized by British paratroopers in the small hours of that fateful Tuesday (the bridge itself no longer spans the Caen canal, but forms the centrepiece of a museum).

Suitably satiated and immersed in Normandy history, the battlefield tourists drove along the Calvados shore to Arromanches, site of Gold Beach in 1944 and today still the resting place of remnants of the Mulberry harbours which served the invading forces so well six decades ago.

Sunday began with all the party dressed in their finest at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery on the edge of Bayeux – the final resting place of 4,648 servicemen – where a wreath was laid and prayers were said in honour of the fallen. Few places better capture the sacrifices made by the men of 1944, not least thanks to the inscription: Nos a Gulielmo victi victoris patriam liberavimus – we, once conquered by William, have set free the conqueror’s fatherland.

From Bayeux it was a short coach ride to the foot of the Cotentin peninsula and the village of St Mère Église, scene of an American parachute drop on D-Day – and where a paratrooper was caught on the church spire and dangled precariously from it while his comrades secured the heart of the village.

Today, in his honour, a dummy is suspended from the church – although, as a café owner explained to the Brits, the dummy hangs from the wrong side of the tower… so tourists can take a better photograph of him.

A stone’s throw from St Mère Église lies Utah Beach, the next port of call for the reservists, then it was across the Vire estuary to Pointe du Hoc – where US Rangers stormed the cliffs only to find the gun emplacements at the top empty.

The (non-existent) guns of Pointe du Hoc were intended to defend the approaches to Omaha Beach, four miles to the east.

The American assault at ‘Bloody Omaha’ has been immortalised on celluloid in The Longest Day and, most vividly, in Saving Private Ryan, but for the sailors, the scale of the sacrifice truly hit home at the sprawling American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, which overlooks Omaha.

“Only at this moment did the price that the Americans paid in blood on D-Day start to really sink in,” said Ceres Division’s AB Andy Mitchell.

His colleague AB Shuttleworth agreed. “To visit Normandy is possibly the only way to take in the enormity of what was achieved over sixty years ago.