Around D Day: The Longest Blog

There were lots of festivities associated with the D Day landings, so we visited several of the nearest towns to sample some. First up: Courseuilles, in the Canadian sector of the landings. Here we saw a highland pipe band; in fact, a French pipe band, but they looked the part and played all the expected Scottish airs.

In every event there were numerous enthusiasts dressed in WW2 uniforms with period vehicles, mainly jeeps, some motorbikes,lorries and a few ambulances. Here’s a selection.

I guess this next tiny motorbike was used by the infantry!

An information board proclaimed that a staggering  639,245 jeeps were produced during WW2. It seems that a good number have survived and are this week driving around Normandy.

It was also great to see several proud veterans wearing their medals. 

There aren’t many left, and fewer still who are fit enough to make the anniversary journey; some, too, for whom revisiting the battle site is too painful. This memorial, one of many, brings home the scale of the losses. The names of the fallen are written on all sides, several to each line. There are many more pillars out of camera shot. And these are just the Canadians. 

The memorial in the town centre announces that General De Gaulle came ashore here on 14^th June and declared the liberation of France. It reads like he’d seen the Germans off single-handed.

!30,000 men landed on these beaches on the first day, and a further 29,000 paratroops inland. But it was no push-over. The Allies faced well armed Germans in well prepared defences. This gun battery at Longues is the best preserved, and was able to pepper the landing armadas of both the British and Canadian sectors.

It was claimed that the battery was put out of action by the Royal Navy early on D Day, but three of the four gun emplacements are intact. The remaining damaged gun looks like it took a direct hit, but the true story is perhaps more interesting. All four guns were captured by the Devonshire Regiment on 7^th June and passed to the RAF who set up a temporary airfield on the flat ground adjacent. The RAF sited an anti-aircraft gun on the roof of one gun emplacement, storing the ammunition in the area provided within the emplacement. Somehow the ammunition exploded, wrecking the massive concrete structure and the gun- presumably destroying the RAF’s own gun as well. So RAF 1, Royal Navy 0.

No port was planned for capture on D Day or immediately after so  the British had pre-constructed a temporary floating harbour system called Mulberry. They started towing parts across on the afternoon of D Day itself. There were two separate harbours: one for the Americans and the other for UK/Canadian use, and both were fully operational by 19^th June.

At this point, the worst storm for 40 years struck and the American harbour was destroyed. Fortunately the British/Canadian one was more protected and survived to provide port facilities for a further 8 months, landing 2½ million men, 500,000 vehicles and 4 million tonnes of supplies.

The harbour used 10 miles of floating roadways anchored by sunken concrete caissons and jetties. The remains are still much in evidence at the town of Arromanches. This just a small part of it.

A better idea of the scale of the harbour system can be appreciated from a long shot. The dots are all the size of the picture above and would have been joined by the 10 miles of floating road.

There are many museums along the whole coast but the biggest, the Overlord Museum,  is in the American sector. This contains a narrative of the invasion and many items of equipment and vehicles. Some look so innocent like this dust-bin lid which is actually a German pancake mine. 5 million mines of various types were in place along Hitler’s Atlantic Wall coastline together with tank and vehicle obstacles.

Of course the tanks were the most impressive. This American Sherman tank was being driven into the museum from outside. Glad it had good brakes or my writing might be falling a little flat!

 You wouldn’t guess that this lightweight German transport was in fact a modified VW Beetle.

The D Day anniversary celebrations are certainly about having a good time, but the serious side is keeping alive the memory of all those young men who sacrificed their lives. We have all benefited from the defeat of Hitler’s tyranny and should take a moment sometimes- and why not on D Day?- to be grateful to those who died so that we might now have such comfortable lives.