Europe trip part 37

Saturday 20 October

 We are now into the last two weeks of our trip. Today we are headed for the northwest of France, a long drive to the small city of Caen, which is in Normandy. This area was famous for many fierce battles in WWII, as the Allies invaded this part of France to push the German forces back out of France.

Many NZ troops and those from around the world all helped with this effort, so we want to learn a bit more about what happened over the next few days. When we arrived, we got a map from the apartment and walked into the middle of the town which wasn’t that far away. We visited the tourist office and got some advice about what we should do over the next two days. So we had a plan!

Later we walked into St Pierre’s church over the road from the tourist office. The church looked a bit black and dirty on the outside but they are restoring and cleaning it. The inside of the church was quite nice – we thought a mass might be about to start shortly as the priest was there, but we were tired so we headed back to the apartment as it was late and it had been a long day.

 Sunday 21 October

 Most of our weather on this trip has been very nice but today was cloudy and cool with the chance for a bit of rain. So, we decided to drive to the nearby beach village of Arromanches-les-Bains which wasn’t too far away. After we parked, we went to the museum which told us about D-Day which happened on 6 June 1944.

 This was a very famous day in war history because the Allies (soldiers from Britain, ANZAC’s, Canada, USA, and France) invaded France to try and win it back from Nazi Germany. First, they distracted the Germans with tin foil (fake bombs) and dummy parachutists in order to move most of the Germans up north away from where the real attack was going to happen. The soldiers landed at 5 beaches at 5.30 in the morning to surprise the Germans. The Americans landed at two beaches – Omaha and Utah.

 The British and Commonwealth soldiers landed at two beaches, Sword and Gold, and Canadians landed at Juno Beach. In all, 156,000 troops landed on the French beaches that day. The US soldiers had 23,000 landing at Utah Beach and 34,000 at Omaha Beach, plus there were 15,500 airborne troops that came down on parachutes. The fighting was very brutal. For example, at Omaha Beach the Americans lost 2400 soldiers on that one day alone and the Germans lost 1200 men. There was also a heavy loss of life at Utah Beach. We spent time in the museum watching two videos of the battle. I learned that the Allies knew they would not again try to invade an existing port along the French coast as they were so heavily defended by the Germans.

So, they had to work out how to land on a beach that didn’t have a port, so that they could get all their equipment and troops onto shore. To do this, they cleverly built a temporary port in England over many months before D Day and once they had towed it all the way across the English Channel, they started to put it together on the beaches. They sent over hundreds of engineers to piece it together and it was designed to float and go up and down with the tides. It was a very clever invention. After the museum we walked up the hill to the viewpoint where they had a separate museum with a cinema that had a 360 degree film of the battle which went for 20 minutes.

It was very interesting to watch as a lot of what we had learnt was in it. On D Day all the 5 invasions got to shore and won the beaches. This was the beginning of the progression inland to begin to push the Nazi’s back out of France. Some towns were captured quickly but Caen, where we stayed, was heavily manned by Germans and the Allies took 8 weeks to capture it. Caen was only 30km from the beaches! The video showed us that at least three quarters of Caen was completely destroyed, but some of the old buildings survived.

 It was a long day but I learned a lot and found it very interesting but also very sad to see how many people lost their lives in the battle of Normandy. We had dinner at an Italian restaurant and I had pizza – surprise, surprise!