The poppies were pale with dust

An account of D-Day, June 6, 1944, by Time magazine (June 19, 1944 edition):

"It was at 5:35 a.m. that morning that the Allied armada had begun to pour its fire onto the French coast, where brightly colored German ack-ack was streaking the morning sky. ... On the beach itself were great tripods of steel rails, braced steel fences, all of them ingeniously mined. The demolition units went to work clearing paths while German shells fell among them and German machine gunners hidden in tunnels and six-foot-thick concrete pillboxes raked them."

"[Later in] the fair fields where the tide had rolled, the ground was littered with the debris of battle—tanks, jeeps, rifles, ration tins, bulldozers, first-aid kits, canteens. Everywhere lay the dead—weltering in the waves along the shore, lying heaped in ditches, sprawling on the beaches. Here and there in trees hung the shattered body of a paratrooper. In field hospitals, the wounded lay. The smell of ether mingled with the smell of earth."

"The Normandy poppies were pale with dust. The Normandy sky was heavy with smoke. Land and sky rumbled and trembled with battle."