July 20, 2009
Farewell to France
I’m writing this aboard the ferry watching the French coast recede as she churns out into the English Channel from Ouistreham. As it is after midnight after another eventful day Barbara has gone to bed, but ships underway have the opposite effect on me, I’m afraid. So here I sit in the lee of the after deck blogging while the loudspeakers crank out the latest Michael Jackson chart toppers from a quarter of a century ago. We sail from France to England with all-American music.
We bid sad adieu to our fabulous French landlady this morning. I don’t know if it’s true that French in general cook better than the average human, but she sure does! Her breakfasts were some expereince; different every day, save in their excellence: tarts, fruit pies, breads, and other glories. A nice change of pace from the English Breakfast.
Nothing wrong with the English Breakfast; it’s good and solid and filling, but intensely fried (eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, even the toast sometimes). Plus, the B&Bs figure that what tourists want is the authentic tourist expereice; so you can have anything you want for breakfast in England as long as it’s the English Breakfast. I’ve eaten more breakfast in the last month than in the previous decade. Probably just as well with all of the exercise we’ve been getting.
From our hotel in Bayeux we drove back to Colleville-sur-Mer to visit the American cemetary just above Omaha Beach. This cemetary is a consolidation of other American cemetaries. After the war the U.S. Government gave families the choice of repatriation or reburial in mass cemetaries for their solider-relatives killed in Europe, something no other country did (or could afford to do at that point probably).
More than half of the dead were returned to the U.S. The others were relocated from many temporary cemetaries facilities like that at Colleville-sur-Mer, which contains close to ten thousand graves. In my brief viewing I found dates of death from January 1944 to March 1945, neither of which could have occurred in the Normandy campaigns.
As at La Combe, the overwhelming majority are identifed, this time by name, rank, unit, home state, and date of death. They lie in a beautiful but sobering place. Exactly as the chapel bell tolled ten, a pair of military jets went ripping by in somber, if unknowing, homage. As Barbara observed, it’s a little difficult to enjoy the great natuaral beauty of Normandy’s beaches knowing what they cost.
After a too-brief hour at the cemetary, we began our dash to the east, with the rental car having to be back in Caen by 4pm. Our next destination was Gold Beach and the remains of the Mulberry artificial harbor at Arromanches. The town has a museum discussing the harbor. The place was a mob scene; bus tours and other humans stuffed into it like a rush-hour subway—our first really oppressive tourist experience. We took our lumps on that one, I’m afraid, because I really wanted to see it.
The artifical harbors were the genius part of the invasion. The Allies needed ports and the Germans knew it, so they defended the existing ports beyond the possibility of capture by seaborne attack. Solution: bring your own ports with you. The Allies created two of these artificial harbors, code named Mulberry, one for Gold Beach and one for Omaha. As Churchill wrote in his get-on-with-it memo: “Do not argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.”
This extraordinarily difficult engineering consisted of sinking ships and concrete cassions for breakwaters, then assembling prefabricated piers and causeways from the shore far enough out to serve deep-draft ships. Much of this material never even made it to France. Tugs towed the causeway sections across the channel at a maximum of three knots, losing about 40 percent of these sunk by rough seas in the channel.
The engineers overcame all these difficulties and within ten days of the beach landings the Mulberries were partially assembled and operational, just in time to be struck by the worst June channel storm of the century. The Omaha Mulberry was destroyed and the one at Gold badly damaged. The British repaired and completed it, however, and it remained the busiest port in Europe until the Allies rehabilitated Antwerp at the end of November 1944.
About 25 of 115 concrete cassions remain at Arromanches, along with the bases of two of the causeways. The museum has a good movie (c. 1950s) and a series of nice models to give life to these ghosts. I had the interesting experience of taking the models tour with a German tour group. I didn’t get too much out of the commentary because my German isn’t that good (and probably never was), but I’ve been impressed by the number of Germans we’ve encountered on our D-Day swing. I can’t imagine that it would make the sunniest of vacations for them.
After this museum the race to the east continued, past Juno Beach, past Sword, to Pegasus Bridge at Benouville on the Caen Canal just south of Ouistreham and on the far left of the invasion beaches. Pegasus Bridge was the first bridge and souvineer shop (sorry, it was a house then—a cafe and souvineer shop now) captured by the Allies on D-Day, when airborne British commandos stormed them fifteen minutes after midnight.
The bridge over the canal now is a beefier postwar version of the original bridge of the same design, which now stands displayed on dry land at a museum nearby. We were out of rental car time at this point, so didn’t see the museum, but did visit the site where the commandos’ gliders landed. From there we had to dash back to Caen and explain my actions to the rental car folks. So my parking lot blunder cost us a visit to the Merville battery to the east of the Orne River, site of another famous British exploit. We just never made up the two hours that my accident lost us.
Once we’d returned the car and taken the bus to the ferry terminal (a petit operator drove that big boy wearing two-inch heels), we had about five hours to kill. So I left Barbara guarding the bags and went off in frustrated search of the D-Day highlights of Ouistreham. This town sits behind Sword Beach at the extreme left of the invasion. I went looking for markers in general, but specifically some icons of Lord Lovat (of Fraser), our exceedingly distant relation, and the British commandos who landed there and moved inland to relieve the glider troops holding Pegasus Bridge.
Four or five miles of hiking produced only a monument to No. 4 Commando, the only French unit landed on D-Day. But it was a nice walk. The town of Ouistreham makes its living as a seaside resort rather than the landings. I passed a campground, an amusement park, a casino, beach cabanas, and streets lined with lovely homes. But no monuments, no Allied flags, and not much in the way of liberation souvineers from which most of these little towns make their livings.
So, back to the ferry terminal, and a nice, last dinner in France (fish soup for me, mussels for Barbara, and desert crepes for everybody) before boarding the ferry. It’s now just after 2am. The lights of France have just faded astern. We’re about a third of the way into a calm crossing on a beautiful warm summer evening. So, on to other things.
July 19, 2009
Three Hundred Yards
So this morning at breakfast our French landlady asked us if we’d made it to Cherbourg. Yes we had. What had we seen? When we told her that we’d just shot a few pictures, then dashed south, a wave of amalgamated confusion and disgust passed across her face. Where were we headed today, she wondered. We told her we intended to start with St. Lo, which we hadn’t been able to reach yesterday due to my accident. Another wave washed over her at this news. She doesn’t see much to recommend St. Lo, apparently, but I’m glad we went.
This once we visited a town on its Normandy anniversary. Sixty-five years ago this day, 19 July, St. Lo was captured by the Americans, a fact that had been officially celebrated yesterday, the true anniversary being a Sunday. This was not a happy liberation as of Bayeux. St. Lo was a strategic crossroads and everybody knew it. The town, almost completely destroyed, was dubbed “The Capital of Ruins.”
It has been rebuilt beautifully since, of course, but a few reminders remain. The most poignant of these is the cathedral, with it’s front blown off and not rebuilt. The two towers stand largely intact, but the arch between is gone, leaving a plain interior block wall as the building’s facade.
On a happier note, and in conjunction with the town’s anniversary celebration, we visited an encampment of “American” GIs. These folks had an impressive array of equipment to go along with their tents and uniforms: four Sherman tanks, several duce-and-a-half trucks, numerous jeeps, and miscellaneous smaller equipment.
The GIs, all men far too young to have been involved with the equipment when new, spoke impeccable French, this because they were French. Barbara got a kick out of that, and I certainly admired their dedication to restoring all of this equipment, although to a state much too pristine to be realistic. I also suspect that, once the tourists were out of sight, they flatbedded the tanks. I can’t imagine city officials permitting the boys to drive them around town.
Back to the somber after the encampment fun, as we drove to the German military cemetary at Le Combe, just behind and slightly to the west of Omaha beach. This site is well visited, I’m a little surprised to report, though largely by people from the Allied countries judging from the wreaths. The grounds were subdued and without military fanfare for obvious reasons.
There are two burials to a site, but, again to my surprise, the great majority of the burials are identified. You’ll run into “ein Deutche soldaten” or “zwei Deutche soldaten,” but Barbara (who visited the museum) reports that captured Germans assigned to the burial detail were surprised and pleased that, under the circumstances, the Americans made identifiying German dead a priority, rather than resorting to interment in mass graves. Birth and death dates are usually indicated, and it’s usually kids; 18- to 22-year-olds dragged under by their parents’ political mistakes.
From Le Combe we drove to the little seaside hamlet of St-Laurent-sur-Mer, which sits at the center of Omaha Beach. I had timed our arrival for low tide, as had the Allies. They wanted the lowest tide to expose the Germans’ beach obstacles, but that choice presented another terrible problem. At low tide the distance from the water’s edge to the protection of the seawall is about three hundred yards. Omaha is another sandy, gently sloping, beautiful beach—leaving those three hundred completely exposed to fire from the bluffs overlooking the beach. Hence the carnage.
The planners apparently realized that this beach might be a handful, but decided they could not risk the entire invasion by leaving the long gap between Utah and Gold beaches unforced. Omar Bradley, commanding the American sector, considered withdrawing from Omaha in the late morning, about the same time that the soldiers there rallied and carried the bloodiest beach of the invasion.
We worked our way west to the end of the beach at Vierville-sur-Mer. Along the way we examined several German battries ingeniously sited to fire down the beaches while being almost completely shielded from fire from the sea. We also visited an extensively excavated German bunker and gun system at Grandcamp-Maisy, which was very well interepreted, as well as the famous gun emplacements at Point du Hoc.
The last sits is a high bluff above the sea between Omaha and Utah beaches, giving guns placed there the ability to disrupt either. It is a much larger site than I had understood it to be, and is still scarred by ferocious Allied attempts to pulverize it from air and sea before sending in U.S. Rangers to capture it first thing on the morning of June 6. Point du Hoc is a moonscape of giant shell crators, some twenty feet deep. Visting kids treated these as a playground, but it must have been terrifying to have been on the receiving end of all of that attention.
Having worked our way west to Grandcamp-Maisy, we returned east at the end of the day to the opposite end of Omaha Beach, hoping to visit the American military cemetary at Colleville-sur-Mer in the last hours of daylight. Upon arriving at 6:30pm, we discovered that it closed at 6pm (back to that problem), and so will have to start the day with it tomorrow after departing Bayeux.
July 18, 2009
Our First Mishap
Our first mishap today—though only serious in the time we lost and entirely self-inflicted—threw a crescent wrench into our plans. But first some fun stuff. We started our first day of exploring the Norman countryside (a Saturday) by stopping at the farmers’ market set up across the street from our hotel. You would have loved it Mark; every produce from crabs to carrots to cantalopes (and pigs’ heads too!), as well as craft goods of all kinds.
We purchased some portable lunch of local apple juice, some nice creamy goat cheese, and a cantaloupe that we had the guy section (not having a knife ourselves), then headed for Cherbourg. Because I’ve always wanted to see it; that’s why. Not because of its connections to the Normandy campaign, but because of its connections to maritime history.
Cherbourg is the best harbor on the northern French cost, and as such became the natural port of call for ocean liners to and from North America. This particularly after British liners shifted their operations from Liverpool to Southhampton to be nearer to London. Ports of call ran Southhampton, Cherbourg, and Cobh (then Queenstown), Ireland, westbound. French liners did the first two in reverse, and German liners did them in some combination after departing Hamburg or Bremen. (French liners home ported at Le Harve, a less satisfactory port but closer to Paris, after it installed a breakwater in the 1920s.)
Originally our plan was to catch the Queen Mary 2 at Cherbourg at the end of our grand tour, but the cost was prohibitive. Instead, we looked over the town, docks, and breakwaters from the vantage of the castle on the cliff, shot a few pictures, then dashed south toward Utah Beach and the start of our invasion tour.
We worked our way from north to south along Utah Beach, arriving at the main Utah Beach museum at Ste-Marie-du- Mont. We were less interested in the museum (having filled up on D-Day museum in Bayeux yesterday) than in the monuments. We accidentally found the Coast Guard memorial, and also found memorialized a particular ship, USS Corry (DD-463). This vessel has some personal resonance. A former Mohawk shipmate of mine, Jack Wright, a navy chief bosun’s mate with forty years of service, was sunk aboard Corry when she struck a mine off Utah Beach on D-Day.
It was at the end of this visit that I struck a mine of sorts. Through inattentiveness, I hit a rock pulling out of the parking lot at a couple of miles an hour. No serious damage, but it broke the front of the plastic underbody splash guard. This we discovered a few miles later when front of the guard dropped onto the road and began making grinding noises.
We tried to limp to the nearest town, Carantan, after I wedged the guard back into the frame, but that temporary repair eventually failed and we were marooned about a half mile from the town. So into town Barbara and I walked together through the lovely Norman mid-summer afternoon (sixty degrees, raining, twenty-five-mile-an-hour winds). By great fortune about the first place we encountered was a hardware store (“Michigan”!?). So we bought some duct tape and walked back.
In my best Red Green style, I was going to duct tape the guard to the frame, but that didn’t work (no place to tape it to, really), so that meant removing the splash guard entirely. That meant another one-mile trudge through the rain back to Michigan’s for a crescent wrench with which to do so. That cunning plan finally worked, but by the time I’d talked (cursed actually) the splash guard into coming loose we’d lost two and a half hours. Our chance to visit both Ste-Mere-Eglise and St. Lo that day was gone, so we chose the former.
Ste-Mere-Eglise was the first town captured in the American sector, occupied by paratroopers before dawn on 6 June as part of the airborne plan to cut road and rail connections to Cherbourg and control the area behind Utah Beach. The town has an airborne museum—complete with Waco glider and Dakota cargo plane (the military DC-3)—that we visited for an hour before it closed. More memorably, however, the town has a famous church that got caught in the middle of the fighting and since has received two stained glass windows honoring the airborne soldiers who dropped into the town.
You war movie buffs will remember this church as the one that Hollywood paratrooper Red Buttons dropped onto in “The Longest Day.” For once history happened as in the movies. The real hapless guy’s name was John Steele, who hung from a corner spire for two hours playing dead (he had no other option, he was way up there) before being cut down and taken prisoner by the Germans. In the chaos of the battle he managed to escape and rejoin the Americans, despite having been shot in the foot while suspended.
Steele not only survived the battle, but recovered quickly enough to jump into Holland that September. After the war he became something of a mascot to Ste-Mere-Eglise, to which he returned several times before his death in 1969. Two blocks down from the church is the Hotel du John Steele, and all summer long a parachute and dummy hangs from the appropriate spire.
Steele and his commemoration personify D-Day and its legacies for the little Norman towns in the path of Overlord. Most of them suffered a terrifying and destructive week or two, but have been making money in carload lots off the invasion ever since. So if you and yours survived the ordeal, having the Allies drop by and smash your town has been a good deal. Beaucoup ironical.
After visiting the museum and the church, we had dinner in the town before heading back to Bayeux. Along the way we stopped briefly in the fading day (9:30pm or so) to visit the downtown square at Carentan, the city whose capture linked the Omaha and Utah beachheads on 12 June. There I saw and photographed some buildings that I think might have been used in the “Band of Brothers” television series about the exploits of E Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. I’ll have to compare images when I get home.
