Photos: Normandy
The next stop on our whistle tour of France was Normandy, the site of the landing during D-day, and a somber memorial towards when we actually faced off against Nazis.
After several days in Paris, too much food, and amazing wine, we picked up our rental car, with its primitive GPS built in, and hit the road. Destination: Normandy.
We took a modest hotel near the water and Omaha beach and set out to see the sights.
If you’ve read any of the history of WWII and D-Day in particular, you are aware that it was a massive landing of force, and to accomplish this, in the face of Nazi cannon fire, they built a floating pier, and used that to offload materiel to support the invasion to kick all that Nazi ass. This is one of the remaining floating “temporary” pontoons that were used. Of course, there needed to be some interconnecting infrastructure, so these lightweight, yet strong “bridge” segments provided transportation paths to get trucks, jeeps, artillery and supplies to support the push into Nazi occupied territory:
One of the American innovations was the Sherman Tank. This was a fairly lightweight, highly maneuverable mobile artillery that really wasn’t as bad ass as the German Leopard and Tiger tanks, but they were rolling off the assembly plants in Michigan in numbers that made them a swarm, and part of the overall strategy to defeat those Nazis. Of course, there is an exemplar in Normandy:
(When I was a wee lad, I really wanted to drive one of these. I must have built a dozen models of this growing up).
Of course, there are also remnants of the fortifications that the Nazi’s littered the coastline with, like this:
That is an 88mm beast of a cannon! And you can get inside some of the bunkers. Imagine being a Kraut bastard, where all your sigint was telling you that Calais was where the invasion was going to land (better natural landing site) and you see the mass of Allied boats coming in:
This is the view from a bunker. If you were a Nazi prick with your field glasses, you get this wide view, so you know you are fucked without backup, and while the Nazi’s did kill a lot of the landing force, the day went to the Allied Forces.
Musical Interlude:
One thing that was striking as we were walking around these sights was that there was still remnants of the battle. In this picture you can see the divots left by inbound artillery, as the Allies were pounding the German emplacements without mercy:
Side note: We visited in September, after the summer tourist season, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. The density of visitors in the summer is insane the locals told us.
One more view of this residual damage:
Yeah, we pounded the shit out of those Nazi fuckwads.
After bumming around the site of the landing, we trekked to the Memorial Cemetery. I have to be brutally honest, I was very teary eyed seeing the endless rows of crosses (and more than a few Stars of David) memorializing the fallen. It is almost as sobering as when I took the S-Bahn to Dachau from Munich. Even now, when I am thinking back to this, I am getting a bit emotional.
I am just going to share this one picture, as an exemplar. If you visit, I am 100% positive that it will affect you profoundly. A lot of young men gave all to eliminate the Nazi threat. And it really fucking pisses me off to see Republicans and MAGA twatwaffles play footsie with modern reincarnations of Nazi ideology.
Of course, there are also memorials to the fallen Germans, and in a way it was also somber (but different). Look, the brunt of the fighting was done by young men in their late teens and early 20’s, swept up in the moment, so to be fair we trekked there too:
A local told us that this memorial is also as important, to remember that evil was part of the tapestry of the European history, and we need to remember that as well. To be honest, I am not sure what to think.
This is the marker of a German soldier, who died on the battleground at the ripe old age of 19. Such a waste.
After our time in Normandy, we hit the road to Loire valley, and en route there were ample cool things to see, like this garden grounds of a Chateau:
But that will be for the next installment!
True Joie de Vivre!
You also have to add in The Royal Ulster Rifles, the only regiment to have one battalion arrive by glider with 6th Airborne and the second battalion arrive on Sword Beach with the 3rd Division.
the German battery that is frozen in place was punched out by the 6-inch guns of the light cruiser HMS Ajax. In 1939, she helped bring to book the German pocket battleship Graf Spee at the Battle of the River Plate off Uruguay.
You can read more about her in the article I wrote for WW2 History magazine, which is on the Military History web page.
The British only allowed 30 or so war correspondents in the invasion, none in the first wave. The Americans allowed more than 130, many in the first wave, including the legendary Robert Capa, who took the iconic photographs of Omaha Beach.
So Americans think that they invaded Normandy all by themselves.
Nobody remembers the British 50th and 3rd Infantry Divisions, or the 79th Armoured Division, or the 6th Airborne Division. Or the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division, which made the deepest penetration on D-Day.
But I do.