John reporting again. It's Monday evening and we've wrapped the first of two days immersion in D-Day history, one of the prime reasons Normandy made it on our itinerary. (I should note the kids were given the choice of Normandy or Provence, and picked Normandy!)
A quick note about our dinner last night. We've had pretty reasonable success finding places that had at least something Ben & Alexa would eat, which has included a few chicken nugget and pizza meals. (Actually, our lunch Sunday was in a delightful little neighborhood pizzeria in Pontorson, near Mont St. Michel.) But last night we went to a place Michelle had been eying since our cab ride to the hotel Saturday - La Boucherie, which looks to be part of a chain. La Boucherie means "The Butchery" and as the name implies, red meat was their specialty. But the kicker is the mascot - a cow, of course. Cow lamps, cow clocks, cartoon cows throughout the decor. Michelle was a happy camper, and everyone had food they really enjoyed.
It would be immodest of me to gloat about our ability to handle the French menus while the table full of New Jersians, part of a group of 35 who are staying at our hotel for three nights as part of a bicycle tour, had to go ask for the English version. Fodor's & Rick Steves phrasebooks, don't visit France without them. :) (And mentioning to the waiter or waitress that "Nous parles une petit peu Francais" salted with routine politenesses seems to earn us a fair bit of goodwill.)
Anyway, back to today and our sojourn, which was primarily spent in the British sector.
Hold up your left hand, palm toward your face, with the thumb extended up. That's more or less the shape of the invasion sector. Where we're staying in Bayeux is pretty close to the pad just inside your index finger. It was liberated pretty quickly by the British, late on June 6th or early June 7th, which is why so many medieval structures remain. Caen, located right about the first joint of your middle finger, was another D-Day or D+1 objective for the British, but it took them a month to capture it for a variety of reasons (two panzer divisions being nearby didn't help) and it was flattened, so pretty much everything there is new. And one of the newest things there is the "Caen Peace Memorial".
This is a really innovative and excellent war museum in many ways, though I have some quibbles with it. After taking one through the end of WWI and the rise of Fascism, it takes you through the course of the war. Things are pretty easy to follow up until the fall of France, but after a short (and well-handled) section on Vichy and collaboration, it opens up to the rest of the war. That section is still high-quality but hard to follow, as there's no clear organization to it - odd juxtapositions like a section about a British doctor, part of a sanitation & hygiene unit next to a display of weaponry. But almost everything is in trilingual form somehow - French, English & German. There's a lot of audio-visual stuff and there's a definite emphasis on how people of all types got by. As Michelle put it, it balances the desire for peace and the horror and suffering brought on by any war against the need to stand up to truly evil regimes such as the Axis of WWII.
The museum shows a couple of movies which take you through D-Day itself (which cribbed a lot of footage from The Longest Day intermixed with actual battlefield film), followed immediately by one that covers the roughly 100 days from D-Day to the full liberation of France. Both are well-done, though Michelle found it hard to stay awake in the first one and I spotted some glitches in the CGI sections that display the progress of the front (US 401st Airborne? Huh what?)
After lunch in the rather nice cafeteria we descended to the lowest level, which is a former German command bunker from the war. It's been refitted as an excellent museum showcasing the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, and others who while not winners of the Prize who have worked for peace. As crowded as the main museum upstairs was, we had this section to ourselves and didn't encounter anyone else until we were heading back up to depart.
Our next stop kicked off the actual battlefield tour at Pegasus Bridge and the British Airborne Museum & Memorial. (Using the hand-map, move up to the middle of the joint-crease of your index finger.) This was the first objective seized by the Allies a few minutes after midnight on D-Day, with British glider troops landing in a coupe-de-main attack scant yards from the bridge, capturing it intact. The museum is relatively new and on its grounds is the original bridge, moved there when it needed replacing. I know quite a bit about the action here from my wargame playtesting days, and showed Ben where some of the early fighting took place as the Ox & Bucks fought off the Germans in the lonely pre-dawn hours. We had a quick snack at the Cafe Gondre, still run by Madame Gondre who was a child living within on D-Day - still as formidable as ever from what my old ASL pals Perry & Brian told me. (Ham & Jam were the code words for the two bridges in the area, and after both were seized the British radio operator continuously sent the message "Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam" to let command know they had succeeded.)
We stayed in the British Airborne sector a bit longer and visited the Merville Battery. (Center of the pad of your index finger.) This site has four original bunkers which on D-Day held 100mm guns and could have rained fire down on Sword Beach, the easternmost beach, and on the ships offshore. 600 British paratroopers were assigned to attack it, but they were badly scattered and when the time came to actually attack, only 150 men with a small fraction of their equipment had assembled. The paras cleared the mines on their bellies by hand, used their own bodies as bridges across the barbed wire, and took the battery in 20 minutes of hard fighting - but took over 50% casualties in the process. The site is almost pristine, with all four bunkers still present and a nice walking path with explanations through the site.
Back west across the Orne River (the crease of your index finger) for a driving tour of the British beaches. Today, these towns are fairly built-up as beach resorts and overall quite pretty. There are museums and memorials scattered along the length. Moving westward, the middle part of your index finger would be Sword beach; the first part, Juno Beach, the Canadian sector; then the side of your knuckle is Gold Beach, with the town of Arromanches just inside your knuckle. Here the Allies did something really remarkable - they built an artificial harbor through which they poured several hundred thousand men and huge amounts of vehicles and equipment. You can see the remnants of that harbor (called a Mulberry) above, and a good look down the British beaches.
After a small gap, along the section between the base of your thumb and your knuckle lies Omaha Beach, where we ended today's tour. We didn't make it down to the beach itself, but did get to the American Cemetery & Memorial (the one shown in Saving Private Ryan) about a half-hour before it closed. Even the normally ebullient Ben was strongly affected by the sight of row upon row upon row of crosses (with the occasional Star of David). We were able to spend a few minutes on a viewing platform overlooking the Coleville Draw and part of the beach itself before being literally escorted out (along with a number of other visitors, including a trio of what I believe were Buddhist monks!) by the security guards as it was 15 minutes after closing time.
I had a few minutes alone overlooking the beach while Michelle & the kids were hunting for a restroom after we arrived, and looking down that draw with a trained soldier's eye, I marveled at the sheer guts and tenacity of the men who clawed their way across the sand and up the draw and hillside under murderous fire.
Tomorrow we have a guided tour of the thumb - the American Airborne sector & Utah Beach.
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