Home >> Europe >> France >> D-Day Beaches & Bayeux & Caen
 


D-Day Beaches & Bayeux & Caen, France

For Remembrance Day, we visited the D-Day Beaches in Normandy. This is the memorial to the parachutists who landed near Sainte Mère-Église. One of them got stuck on the church steeple and the locals risked their lives to give him a proper burial.

For Remembrance Day, we visited the D-Day Beaches in Normandy. This is the memorial to the parachutists who landed near Sainte Mère-Église. One of them got stuck on the church steeple and the locals risked their lives to give him a proper burial.
Utah Beach was the site of one of the American landings. This is one of the tanks that were used.
The beach.
Further down the coast, at the Pointe du Hoc was the most difficult landing. 225 specially trained US Rangers scaled the 30m cliffs and took the key German position. They then held it until help arrived 2 days later for the 90 survivors.
The coast. You can see how high the cliffs are.
The ground is littered with craters.
Looking back to the bunker at the tip of the Pointe. It's barely above the ground. We have no idea how they managed to attack it, let alone capture it.
The American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, near Omaha Beach. The cemetery is so large it would take an aerial photo to capture it all. Nearly 10,000 American soldiers are buried there.


At one end of the cemetery stands this memorial. The statue is called the "American Youth Rising from the Waves". The inscription around the top of the memorial reads, "This embattled shore portal of freedom is forever hallowed by the ideals the valor and the sacrifices of our fellow countrymen."
On a lighter note, apparently Clio's are quite popular in France. One of the three is ours...
Next we headed into Bayeux to see the famous tapestry.
It's actually a 70m long embroidery which tells the events that lead up to the Battle of Hastings and William becoming William the Conqueror.
One of the scenes. We were surprised by how rich the colours were, and how wide it was.
The Cathedrale Notre-Dame.

Sunday we visited the Memorial de Caen. It's a museum which relates the events which lead up to the D-Day landing, and has a memorial to the Canadian and American soldiers in the gardens behind it. The British are currently building a memorial. More Canadians were actually killed liberating Caen than on D-day itself.
Part of the Canadian Memorial Garden. The Latin inscription is a Virgil quote meaning "Nothing shall ever blot you from the memory of time".
Next we visited the Canadian War Cemetery at Bény-Sur-Mer-Reviers. The cemetery is in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by farms.





On June 6, 1944 Canadian forces landed on Juno Beach.
The only memorial to the D-Day landing.
Further west along the coast, beside their landing site at Gold Beach, the British forces build Port Mulberry in one day, using retired ships and 600,000 tons of concrete. It served as a base for Allied supplies during the Battle of Normandy. It was originally built to last 18 months, but the ruins can still be seen.
A Normandy house - we saw lots of houses and farms built out of stone and organized around courtyards with walls surrounding them.
On the way home.