We chose Bayeux as our base in Normandy because it's very close to all the major D-Day sites.
We made our train reservations from Paris, planning to rent a car in Bayeux for a road trip through Normandy and Brittany. What we didn't realize was that Bayeux is a a small town with no car rental offices. Since our rail tickets were non-changeable, we had to travel to Bayeux, immediately hop on a train back to Caen, Uber to the Caen airport to pick up a car, then drive back to Bayeux to our hotel. And of course do the same in reverse to return the car a week later. Luckily, the train between Bayeux and Caen runs quite frequently.
We arrived in Normandy two weeks before the 80th anniversary of the landings, and all the towns in the area were decked out with French, American, British, and Canadian flags to honor the various allied forces that participated in the invasion. The windows of the local businesses were painted with signs welcoming the liberators.
Back in the day, many locals were a bit more ambivalent. Many, though happy for the end of the oppressive German occupation, were embittered by the scale of destruction caused by the allied forces. The cost to them was high: 20,000 dead and the towns of Caen and St. Lo pretty much completely destroyed.
The current invasion, of D-Day tourists, has a far more positive effect on the local economy and so is welcomed by all.
Bayeux was captured intact by Canadian troops, avoiding the carnage that enveloped the surrounding areas. It's a beautiful little town with a small river running through it.
The cathedral is in excellent condition, with the usual array of gargoyles and other whimsical sculptures. We didn't spend a lot of time there, and we missed the famous tapestry entirely.
Our first stop was Arromanches-les-Bains. The beach here, code named Gold, was assaulted by British troops on June 6, 1944. The beach is flanked by Juno Beach to the west, assigned to Canadian soldiers and Sword Beach to the east, attacked French forces.
One of the primary goals of the invasion was to establish a port that could handle the immense logistical demands of the allied armies. Since the ports in the area were considered essentially impregnable in the short term, allied planners came up with an unprecendented solution-- to create an artificial harbor off Gold Beach.
Creating this harbor quickly was an amazing engineering feat. Though it was only used for a few weeks until the port of Cherbourg was captured and repaired, it was critical to the success of the first days of the invasion, enabling the allies to offload thousands of reinforcements and armored vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies. Remains of the artificial harbor, code-named Mulberry, can still be seen on the beach and in the surrounding sea.
The museum at Arromanches has a wonderfully detailed set of models showing how the harbor was constructed. First prefabricated sections of breakwater were towed across the Channel.
Then docking facilities for supply freighters, antiaircraft defenses, and metal causeways connecting the docks to the beach were put in place.
An incredible piece of engineering and logistics.
The Normandy countryside is an idyllic pastorale of vivid green fields dotted with spring flowers and contented cows and happy sheep. It's hard to believe that this was once an intense war zone.
Our next stop was the German battery at Longues-sur-mer. The coastal guns here had a range of about ten miles and provided a formidable line of defense against invasion. They were heavily bombarded in the hours proceeding the landings from both the sea and air, but remained relatively unscathed.
In the end it took an assault by infantry to silence them.
Eighty years later, nature is reclaiming the concrete structures and an atmosphere of peace reigns.
It doesn't get much more peaceful than horses basking in the sun on the cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach.
Omaha Beach itself, scene of the most intense fighting on D-Day, is a picture of tranquility.
A far cry from the killing zone strewn with Czech hedgehogs that was the last sight for over 3,000 US troops.
No sign of the conflict remains.
The Omaha Beach museum has thousands of relics of that day pulled from the sea or dug from the sand.
The German battery of most concern to allied planners was sited on Pointe de Hoc, a 110-foot cliff with fields of fire completely cover Omaha Beach. An Army Ranger battalion was assigned to scale the cliffs and destroy the guns before they could be used against the waves of troops assaulting the beach.
The gun emplacements were heavily bombarded before the early morning assault. The landscape around the site is still pockmarked with huge shell craters created by the massive guns of the battleships and cruisers offshore.
The bombardment failed to dislodge the Germans, and the Rangers were forced to scale the cliffs in the face of heavy German fire. Though their rocket-propelled grapnels failed to work as promised, the Rangers managed to climb the cliffs and capture the gun positions, only to find that the guns themselves had been moved several days before.
Guns like this 88mm cannon. Originally designed as an antiaircraft weapon, it proved to be equally useful against infantry and armor. It was one of the most feared and effective pieces of artillery of the war.
After three days in Normandy, we were pretty D-Dayed and museumed out, but we had one last stop on our way to Brittany: Sainte-Mère-Église; the first town liberated in Normandy. Famously, when the 82nd Airborne dropped into and around the town in the early morning of June 6, paratrooper John Steele wound up with his parachute entangled on the roof of the church in full view of the German defenders. He played dead for a while, then finally worked himself loose, only to be captured. He later escaped and was able to rejoin his regiment.
His effigy still hangs from the church steeple in tribute.
In memory of the town's liberation by airborne troops, two stained glass windows were installed in the church after the war.
We recovered enough museum enthusiasm to visit the Airborne Museum in Sainte-Mère-Église, and we were glad we did. It's an excellent museum with a wealth of detail about the airborne phase of the invasion, including a large section on glider-borne troops.
By far the most sobering part of our visit to the D-Day landing sites was the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mar. It contains the graves of 9,388 Americans soldiers killed on D-Day and subsequent operations in Normandy.
It's a sad, but beautiful place. A reminder of the vast toll of human lives it took to defeat fascism last time.
I hope there's a lesson to be learned there.
P.
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