Normandy

With the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings having just passed, there has obviously been a lot of news recently about the events of that day and the days that followed. Our visit to Normandy was just a few weeks before the anniversary. We had a fantastic time in the area - it is really beautiful - and learned a lot of details about the history, mostly through a fabulous full-day tour, which we would highly recommend for anyone visiting.

I consider myself to be pretty knowledgeable about WWII history, but I learned a lot from the tour and related museums so, this will be kind of a combined history lesson (hopefully not too boring) and review of our visit.

One of the first things we learned is that the area where the Allied troops landed in 1944 is known as hedgerow country because property is divided by rows of hedges (and sometimes trees) that have been there for centuries. This was a big problem for the Allies because it turned out that the American Sherman tanks (the primary tank of the invasion force) could not go through most of the hedgerows.

(Nice tank, but it couldn't really do the job).

Fortunately, US Sergeant Curtis G. Cullen came up with the idea to use the metal "jacks" (actually known as Czech Hedgehogs), which the Nazis had used to make landing on the beaches more difficult, to create giant hedge-cutters to be added to the front of the tanks. With the "Cullen hedge cutters," the modified tanks, known as Rhino tanks, were able to regain some of their mobility in the area.

(Monument at Utah Beach showing a landing craft and Czech Hedgehog).

Another of our early stops was in the village of St. Mere Eglise. On the night before the landing, US airborne troops were supposed to land outside St. Mere Eglise and secure the village, because it sat in an important strategic position along the then-only paved road toward Cherbourg (a port that was one of the ultimate targets of the Normandy campaign). Unfortunately, some of the airborne troops landed in the middle of the village where (and yes, this actually happened) the entire village was out fighting a house fire on the very edge of the church square in the center of town. One US paratrooper got caught on the church, as is memorialized even to this day (notice the white parachute with attached soldier on the roof of the church):

Ok, so here is where history mixes a bit with Hollywood. What is depicted on the church today actually represents what happened in the 1961 movie The Longest Day. In reality, paratrooper John Steel did get caught on the church, but much lower down (also, his parachute would not have been highly-visible white, but camouflage). He remained hanging while playing dead for two hours before being taken prisoner by German soldiers.

Inside the Church, there is an interesting stained-glass window dedicated to the troops that arrived on D-Day, especially the US paratroopers:

There also is a fantastic museum dedicated to the airborne troops, which includes one of the gliders that landed in Normandy on D-Day. This was another fact that I did not know about the history of the Normandy landings. While about 13,000 US airborne troops jumped into Normandy just after midnight on June 6, 1944, another 4,000 followed in gliders. In addition to being incredibly flimsy, the gliders were very small. I couldn't even stand up straight in the tallest part of the one on display in the museum:

After St. Mere Eglise, we went to visit the two American landing beaches (Utah and Omaha). At Utah, there are a number of monuments to the troops, along with the first kilometer marker of the Liberty Highway, which follows the route of some of the Allied troops who landed on D-Day and runs 1,146 kilometers (with a market each kilometer along the route) to the end in Bastogne, Belgium.

Interestingly, we learned that the assault on Utah Beach was a complete success. With only 197 allied  wounded (including only 16 killed), the beach was taken within one hour of the landing, and by the end of the first day, the troops from Utah Beach had penetrated six miles inland. Of course, such relatively easy success does not make for good cinema, so all the movies (including, most famously, Saving Private Ryan) show the landing at Omaha Beach, which was the most difficult of the five landing beaches to secure.

This is Omaha Beach today:

As you can see, the beach is very wide, and there are cliffs just off the edge of the beach. On the morning of June 6, 1944, a naval bombardment was supposed to soften up the target by destroying the German bunkers, including machine guns and 88 mm anti-tank guns that were set up to be able to strafe the beach. Unfortunately, the naval bombardment at Omaha substantially missed its targets, and the result was what you see in movies, with the initial wave of troops having almost no chance. Worse, the Allied strategy was to land at low tide to avoid the Czech hedgehogs and other obstacles that would have been hidden at high tide (and thus a danger to the landing craft), but they landed as the tide was beginning to increase, forcing US troops to move inland or drown.

Our next to last stop was Pointe Du Hoc, a promontory with 100-foot cliffs situated between Utah and Omaha beaches. On D-Day, army rangers landed on the narrow beach at the base of the cliffs and climbed up under fire using nothing but rope and grappling hooks:

This is a very interesting site for several reasons. First, the site has been left roughly as it was found, which means there are giant impact craters from both ship-based guns, and bombs dropped from airplanes all around. At one point, there is an impact crater right next to a concrete German bunker with no damage to the bunker itself! In addition, there are a number of bunkers that you can go in:
 
Finally it is interesting because we learned that the anti-ship guns that were the target of the attack on Pointe Du Hoc were not found there on D-Day, but had already been moved inland. In fact, some historians now believe that this attack was not only unnecessary, but also contrary to orders. Of course, I doubt they will remove the monument to the US Army Rangers that is there:

Our final stop was the US Military Cemetery where we were unable to walk among the graves because of the then-upcoming anniversary (got to keep the grass green for the big-mucky mucks), but we were able to see the daily lowering of the flags ceremony:

This brings me to one of the most interesting things I learned on our tour: there is a German military cemetery in Normandy. Actually, this should not be surprising; German troops who died in World War II were often buried in the countries where they died, but I had never thought about it before. It was interesting to see (and feel) the difference between the US cemetery and the German one, which we visited early in the day.

And that was our organized tour of the D-Day sites in Normandy. Of course, our tour focused on the US sites. There were three other beaches (Gold, Juno and Sword) that were attacked by British and Canadian troops (and where British and Canadian tourists generally go), and we did go on our own to a small town called Arromanches-Les-Bains, which is on Gold Beach, the day after our tour:

In the picture of Shana and me, you can see some "junk" in the water behind us, which is remnants from the invasion. There is actually quite a lot of that at Gold Beach where the Allies built a temporary port that was used to bring a huge amount of heavy equipment into Normandy after the beachheads were established. Apparently it was a truly impressive feat of engineering, but we were a bit surprised to see that so much stuff has just been left in the sea off Normandy for the past 75 years!

Overall, we had a great time in Normandy. In fact, Shana and I would very much like to return and spend more time in the many little villages along the coast, along with Caen, the larger city in the area. So, if any of our readers are planning a trip to Normandy, definitely let us know.

Au revoir,

Jeff and Shana