Bayeux

Bayeux is perfectly positioned between the two American landing beaches to the west - Utah and Omaha (very original) and the three eastern British ( Gold and Sword) and Canadian (Juno) beaches.
We decided to head west today and our first stop was the only still intact German gun battery at Longues-sur-Mer. There is a command post and four reinforced pill boxes with 150mm long range artillery piece. Set back about 500m from the cliffs they had a range of 19.5 kms! However due to intense bombing by air and then sea they didn’t have much impact on DDay (6th June 1944) and they were taken by British troops on the 7th June. Awesome and horrific all at the same time - you find yourself admiring the engineering and then you remember what they were made for - death and destruction.
Next stop was Omaha Beach - the scene of terrible American casualties on the first day - a stretch of nearly 7km of open flat beach facing a small plateau of land before hills. The Germans had razed all the village buildings along the seaside and fortified it all with machine gun nests, cannon emplacements, barbed wire and mines, and three metre wide anti tank trenches. The first and second wave of infantry were cut to pieces mostly in the water and on the beach - the third wave finally breached the defences and turned the tide. By nightfall they had suffered 2400 deaths but had landed 34000 troops. I realised that this is the American equivalent to our Galliopi in terms of what it means to them - only they had Eisenhower and Montgomery in charge compared to us having Churchill!
Lastly - because you have to be selective as there are so many sites and museums - we went to a site of unprecedented daring and courage . La Pointe du Hoc is a high promontory between Omaha and Utah beaches that had six 150mm artillery pieces that could reach both of the American landing beaches and the landing craft. So it was aerial bombed five times in the lead up - see archival photo - and the Germans expected a land attack from the Allies. However an elite US group - The Rangers - trained on the Isle of Man to come in by boat, launch rocket propelled grappling hooks with rope and rope ladders onto the 35m cliffs and scale up and surprise attack. Great plan except the ropes got soaked by sea water and were too heavy to launch from the boats so had to be unloaded at the base and launched by which time the Germans saw them - so they are climbing up whilst be shot at. Amazingly they scaled the cliffs in ten minutes and then two days of combat ensured before they overran the German post - only 150m from the cliff! 135 Rangers died.
After all this we needed to relax a bit so we headed north to a harbour town to have a late lunch of some legendary Normandy oysters - magnificent and washed down with local cider which again is Normandy specialty.
Sorry for the essay but the whole experience was very profound and sad because once again we are witnessing the same in Ukraine because of another megalomaniac. Czytaj więcej