AUSTIN, Texas — When Texas geologist Earle McBride visited Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, in 1988, four decades after D-Day, the visible remnants of the Allied forces’ invasion there had long ago vanished.
But he and a colleague would later discover the history of the June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy’s beaches — which marked a turning point in World War II — lingered in the sand in the form of tiny pieces of shrapnel only visible under a microscope.
It wasn’t a discovery that McBride and colleague Dane Picard of Utah set out to make during their tourist visit to Omaha Beach, where U.S. forces suffered their greatest casualties in the assault against heavily fortified German defenses.
“We didn’t think about, ‘Hey, there should be shrapnel here,’ ” said McBride, 80, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas who retired in 2005 but still goes to his office every day to study rocks. But they put a bit of sand in a bag and took it home.
McBride didn’t fully analyze the sample for more than two decades. Finally, in retirement, he took a closer look. He found grains of rusted iron and small spherical iron and glass beads, which he and Picard believe were formed by munitions explosions in the air and sand.
“It’s a detective story,” McBride said. “Sand has an exciting history.”
He said it’s not surprising shrapnel was left on the beach, but rather that it remained there decades later.
