The Fallen 9000: The D-Day Sand Memorial on Arromanches Beach, Normandy

On 21 September 2013, International Day of Peace, the beach at Arromanches in Normandy filled with 9,000 human silhouettes. British artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss called the work The Fallen 9000. Each figure stood for a civilian, an Allied soldier or a German soldier who died during the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944. A few hours later the tide came in and washed every one of them away.

Thousands of silhouettes drawn on the sand at Arromanches for The Fallen 9000 — The Fallen 9000, a temporary commemorative artwork on 21 September 2013.

How The Fallen 9000 was made

Wardley and Moss work as the beach-art team Sand In Your Eye. They arrived at low tide with an original crew of about 60 volunteers, armed with rakes and stencils. Each stencil was pressed into the wet sand, and the rakes marked the outline of a body lying on the beach. As word spread through the area, nearly 500 local people came down to help, and the field of figures grew across the sand.

The work was planned around the tide. The volunteers had only the hours of low water to complete it, and the sea then erased it, as the artists intended. The silhouettes were not grouped by nationality. Civilians, Allied troops and Germans lay side by side, all marked in the same way.

Rows of human outlines raked into wet sand on the Normandy beach

Volunteers creating human outlines across the beach at Arromanches — The Fallen 9000, a temporary commemorative artwork on 21 September 2013.

Arromanches and Gold Beach on D-Day

Arromanches-les-Bains is a small seaside town in Calvados, about 12 km northeast of Bayeux, with a population of just over 400. On 6 June 1944 it lay on Gold Beach, one of the five Allied landing beaches. British forces came ashore along this stretch of coast.

In the days after the landings, the Allies built one of the two Mulberry harbours here, an artificial port of floating roadways and sunken concrete caissons. Through it, troops, vehicles and supplies were landed for the push inland. Its remains still stand in the sea and on the sand, and they are visible from the beach and the clifftops above the town.

Visiting Arromanches today

Arromanches is one of the best places to begin a tour of the D-Day beaches:

Musée du Débarquement (D-Day Museum): opened in 1954 on the seafront and tells the story of Operation Overlord and the Mulberry harbour, with models and views straight out to the caissons.
Arromanches 360: a circular 360-degree cinema above the town.
The beach at low tide: walk out towards the old harbour sections, keeping an eye on the incoming tide.

Bayeux, home to a large Commonwealth war cemetery, is a short drive inland. Visit in early June for the D-Day commemorations, or in spring or autumn for quieter beaches.

Aerial view of the silhouettes spreading along the shoreline

Close view of stencilled figures on the sand of Arromanches

Beach art that disappears with the tide

A stone memorial is built to last. The Fallen 9000 was made to vanish, and that loss is the point. The artists wanted people to see the scale of the dead one figure at a time, then watch the sea take them all. The photographs taken from the cliffs and the air are the only lasting record.

Our Budapest sculpture story looks at another temporary work that lives on through its photographs. Andres Amador, Jim Denevan and Simon Beck also draw on sand and snow at a vast scale, and their work is linked below.