France - Day 3

(Click on a picture to enlarge it!)

This morning we visited a botanical garden in Bayeux. Very nice actually. The weather was awesome and the air was crisp. This was Marjolein's favourite part of the day I think. Mine was yet to come ;-)

In the afternoon we went on a D-Day tour. It was a guided tour in a mini van with 5 other folks. With us came a young American couple, not very social for some reason, an older Australian couple from Perth, nice folks and an older gentleman from America as well. He was lucky enough not to have been sent to Europe to fight but he still wanted to see some sites.

The first site we got to was Pointe du Hoc. This is where American elite troops were sent up the cliffs to secure a German gun battery because the cannons there were a very big threat to the invasion fleet. This picture was taken from the calculation room. A German soldier was calculating the settings for the cannons on site which could sink a ship about 12km away.

They used to have the cannons stand in the open air when Germany was still master in the skies and there was no air threat. The cannons stood in these semi circles. However, as Germany weakened and the allied forces took control of the skies the need for more protection became greater and orders were given to build bunkers for the cannons.

And that is why these structures showed up in places.

A lot went wrong with this operation and it took them longer to secure the site. Once they did they also noticed that something wasn't right; the cannons were made of wood! Later on a few scouts accidentally ran in to the stored, unguarded cannons a few miles in land. The bunkers you see were so new that the concrete was still drying and the cannons were hidden for protection. The German's trick had worked though but their cannons did get destroyed by the scouts and this site was never a threat anymore.

This is what your bunker looks like after it gets shelled (bombed); blocks of concrete in a big hole. The whole site was like a moon-landscape with grass grown over it. Holes and rubble everywhere. It took heavy bombing and most holes were man-deep.

The next stop of the tour was Omaha beach. American troops landed here in the early morning of June 6th, 1944 under very heavy fire because the shelling earlier that was supposed to minimize the German resistance here was inaccurate and missed almost all targets.

The people on our tour. In the middle our guide. A young bloke who does this work 9 months a year, 6 days a week and then has 3 months off which he spends in Brasil. Sigh...

He was a good guide though, knew a lot about the landings and sites we visited.

It's hard to fathom that in the first few hours of the landings about 4000 soldiers died on this beach alone.

The allied forces also constructed an artificial harbour here, these were called "Mulberry" harbours. In this picture you see the remains of one such harbour. There is another Mulberry still complete but that was too far for the tour we were on...

Omaha beach on June 6th 1944.

Omaha beach on July 11th, 2011.

After the beach we visited the American cemetery. Very impressive.

The last stop was the gun battery of Longues sur mer. These guns were used in the movie "The longest day".

One lucky shot from a ship disabled this cannon. You can see that the left window is a little bigger at the bottom. That's because the shell entered the cannon there and exploded inside. It stayed silent after that.

The tour was impressive and educational. I only wished we would've had more time on our own. It was all a bit rushed.

In the evening we found this gem of a restaurant "La Fringale". Lovely place, good food, nice people.