| NORMANDY, FRANCE August 26, Sunday I fell into bed Saturday night and about a half-hour later the phone beeped. I picked up the receiver. “Bonjour,” said a pleasant voice. She said something else in French. I dropped the receiver. In the next bed, Bob groaned. We got ourselves put together. I washed out some socks and undies and draped them around in the shower. It was then 7:30 and time for le petit déjeuner with the ninety others on the two buses traveling together for this trip. The other bus ran on its own schedule, so we only arrived at the same place together infrequently. I assume this was to cut down on the number of people at an attraction at one time. After breakfast we returned to our room to assemble ourselves for the 8:30 departure time of our bus. A counter, which we used as a desk, ran under the window of our room. We could see right out into the parking lot. Our bus was parked across the lane from our window, facing us. We didn't take the computer with us for these few days. It stayed back in Tostock. We had packed light for this trip. I sat down at the counter to write in my log. Out the window I could see Kevin the driver fooling around in an open bin at the side of the bus. It was quite misty and wet. We just figured to stay in the room until we saw the bus was loading, rather than sit around the lobby or stand around in front of the hotel. Passengers weren't allowed to come near the bus until invited. The driver from the other bus came over to Kevin, and they both opened the hood and fiddled around. Mike came out, talked to Kevin, and climbed on the bus. A fellow came out from the hotel, also stuck his head under the hood and into the bin, and went back inside. Departure time came and went. Mike got off the bus, but no one came out of the hotel to get on the bus. By 8:45, we knew something was wrong. I went out into the lobby. It was full of people waiting to board the bus. I could see out the glass doors that others were standing in the damp on the hotel front walk. I asked a lady what was up. She grinned. “Some of the fellows went drinking last night, and the relief driver got drunk. Mike told him that he could not drive today because of it. Apparently that made him mad, and he came out in the night and let some air out of a tire. Kevin found it this morning.” That was right! The relief driver had not been at the bus. I laughed all the way back to the room to tell Bob. He got a laugh out of it, then took out his book and settled in for the duration. The duration wasn't long, though. We boarded the bus in about another twenty minutes, and set out into the mists less than an hour late. When we got a chance, we asked Mike about it. He said the real problem was that the buses have a setup where air can be used from the system that raises and lowers the bus when passengers get on and off to inflate the tires in an emergency. But Kevin and others couldn't get the system to work. He finally got enough air in the tire to be safe. The young relief driver was nowhere to be seen. We figured he was hitch-hiking back to England. A ways down the road Kevin pulled into an Esso station to look for an air pump, or to have the station garage pump the tire up. None of us knew the word for compressed air in French, so he was on his own. He jumped out of the bus and trotted toward the building, then stopped short. It was closed. We watched him hunt around the building for a pump or a person. He jumped back up into the bus. “Blimey! It's Sunday. I guess the French don't work on Sunday.” He did find that one of their pumps took a card, so bought some gas. We were on our way again. We stopped at a couple of others places looking for air, but never did find any. The mists turned to serious fog. Mike wiped the side window with his hand to search for road signs to guide Kevin. We finally arrived at Merville Battery, a series of German gun casements and support bunkers set up to fire directly onto Sword Beach. It was disarmed in the early hours of D-Day by an incredible battalion of British paratroopers led by Lt. Col. Terence Otway. The whole battery had been preserved as a museum of the war. At first, when I stepped out of the ticket/gift shop, it looked like some big green humps in the fog. A signposted path led around the site, and there was interpretive signage along the way. I only got two photos because of the dense fog. We were there a long time, but not long enough. I didn't get all the signs read, or see the movie. Two of the gun casemates were set up as museums. One had dioramas and a video, all of which I did see. Another had a movie, which I missed. The other bunkers/casements on the site were stabilized to thirty years after the war, when the project was begun. I did explore the whole of the site and climbed up to the top of one of the casemates. British soldiers did all the preservation and improvement of the site in memory of their comrades who had died in battle. We got back on the bus, drove down the lane apiece, and stopped again. This time the bus just pulled off the road near some cornfields. The fog had lifted and we could see the far views. Here it was that the paratroopers landed on the night of June 5, 1944, to take Merville and ensure the landing at Sword Beach. And here it was that we got another bonus view, thanks for Mike's enthusiasm for Operation Overlord. Across the lane from the bus was the Villa Bois de Monts. This was a farmhouse commandeered by Terence Ortway as his headquarters after the fall of Merville Battery. It was again a private home, and had been for years. But Mike had got to know the owners, and arranged with them to take his tour groups into their yard. We walked down a wooded drive into the side yard of a lovely home. We were on a ridge looking over a spread of pastures and meadows that went on for miles. These, Mike told us, were the “Fields of Caen.” He pointed out the city in the far distance. There was a shed in the yard from before the war. During the war, Mike said, body parts were stacked under the little roofs on each side of the shed until they could be buried. Whole bodies that could be identified were buried right there in the yard. They were later moved to military cemeteries except for one Private Wilkinson, still buried under a worn stone cross near the shed. There were names scratched on the wall of the shed from the men who worked there during the war. I did get a picture of the shed wall, of the shed itself, and Private Wilkinson's grave. As we walked up the drive back to the bus, we noticed a pile of rusted, twisted metal alongside. It had been a jeep, Mike said. Although the villa and grounds were mowed and immaculate, this had not been touched. It lay there through the years, a quiet reminder and memorial. We stopped for lunch at Port-en-Bessin, another beautiful town on the sea. Port-en-Bessin had a long basin lined with fishing boats. A wide walkway ran alongside it. Beyond the walkway on one side was beach, on the other side was the town. The sun had come out in its full glory. This time we chose a restaurant near the boat basin where we sat in the sun and enjoyed the harbor scene. While most wait staffs and merchants spoke some English in Arromanches, this was apparently a more local restaurant and no one spoke English. I did manage to refuse an apértif and order us a meal and wine in French, to my amazement and gratification. We had Assiette de fromages et salade with vin rosé. This was a selection of various Norman cheeses, for which they are famous, with a fluffy golden baguette and a small salad. Delicious! The paratroopers, in particular, were landed in the black of night to take out armories behind the beaches. To find each other, they used those little metal “crickets” that children play with. The various museums and gift shops sold these crickets, and folks on the bus bought them. On Saturday there was random clicking on the bus. By the time we left Merville Battery, the bus sounded like a field of locusts. Our afternoon started with Omaha Beach, the American front. We stopped at Bréville Ridge overlooking the beach, where there was a stone map of the five beaches of Operation Overlord. We gathered around the map and Mike gave us a lot of background and pulled together what we had seen so far. It really helped to have the visual aid of the map to see the geography of the area and our track through it. From there, we walked down a long staircase onto Omaha beach. Remember back in Cornwall, in Trebah, when Bob stood on the slip where American landing craft left England on the night of June 5 for Omaha Beach? He had made the full journey. He walked on Omaha Beach. It was, for him, a stirring moment. Mike made a point of the fact that he took our bus not just to the beach or to a memorial stone raised at the beach, but to the very point at which the invading troops came ashore. Bob knew, then, he was on the sand he revered. We traveled next to the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach. Over 8,000 soldiers are buried there. It is huge, and moving. I couldn't help crying as I walked those rows and rows of white headstones; crosses, stars of David, and other symbols. But there's nothing I can say about the ravages of was that hasn't already been said. We live with it. After some time spent in the cemetery, we went on to the town of Ste. Mère-Eglise, where U.S. paratroopers landed in the burning town. Story has it that one paratrooper got caught on the church spire, where he hung until rescued. I think in truth he got caught on an eave extension, and saved himself. Whatever. There was a dummy in a parachute hanging off the church roof eave when we got there. Mike didn't mention it, but I had heard the story and looked for it. The museum at Ste.-Mère-Eglise was in two buildings, and it was excellent. It's not that it was big. In fact, both buildings were rather small. It was that it had equipment and settings from Operation Overlord we hadn't seen anywhere else, like a Horsa glider. I really didn't quite perceive how a glider could carry the number of men that it did. After I saw one, I understood. The body of the glider was very boxy, not particularly aerodynamic, but efficient as a carrier. Between Omaha Beach and Utah Beach there were some cliffs called Pointe-du-Hoc. There, too, German gunneries had to be taken out to protect the invasion. In the dark of the night soldiers scaled the cliffs with rope ladders and got the job done. We pulled into a very crowded parking lot there to see the cliffs. Again, it was amazing that these batteries were taken against huge odds. The element of surprise aided the successes. Just past Point du Hoc Kevin hit the brakes, hard, to avoid a car pulling out from behind high hedges. The toilet tank sloshed over. Something hit my foot. It was a woman's purse from two seats back. The smell from the toilet was horrendous. Some fifteen minutes later Bob looked down at the aisle. A child's shoe lay there. He passed it back. We were at this point running almost two hours late. It started at Merville Battery, when Mike said to be back at the bus at 12:00. It was more like 12:15 that everyone was on the bus and ready to go. Nothing was said. At each point Mike set a time to meet, but people were always late, sometimes including Mike himself. I think it was that he set times to catch up to the schedule, but didn't really want to cut our experiences short because of the problems with the bus. Kevin took the brunt of the stress and work. He had no relief driver. I'm sure he spent the time that we were sight-seeing working on that tire. Mike filled the relief driver job of handing out drinks and snacks during the ride, as well as keeping up him commentary. For some reason Kevin was not able to fill up at the first station, so we had to stop for gas again. We tourists, though, were having a great time. There was laughter on the bus against a background of clicking crickets. Everyone seemed truly interested in the films and commentary, and asked Mike a lot of questions. It had clouded up and grown chilly by the time we reached Utah Beach, the last American assault landing beach. We walked briefly on the beach. By then the museum was closed, but their outside displays were effective! Coiled rolls of barbed wire surrounded a section of dune grass beside the museum building. Scattered over the grass were “spiders,” large many-legged irons put underwater to snag ship props and rip open smaller boats. It was just a glimpse of what the invading soldier had to face on the D-Day beaches. There were some tall stone slab memorials at Utah Beach, near the museum. We walked to them and read their texts. One was to the memory of those who fell in Operation Overlord; one was to the memory of fallen comrades in an engineering corps. And one, a slab of polished golden granite, read the same text on one side in French and on the other side in English: This monument was erected by The United States of America in humble tribute to its sons who lost their lives in the liberation of these beaches. June 6, 1944 |
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TOUR GUIDE
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| Page 1
Leaving Home |
Page 2
Scotland |
| Page 3
Isle of Mull, Scotland Durham, England |
Page 4
Durham, England Holy Island, Wales |
| Page 5
Holy Island, Wales Manchester, England Warwick, England |
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Warwick, England Stratford-upon-Avon, England |
| Page 7
Blenheim Palace, England |
Page 8
Bury St. Edmunds, England London, England |
| Page 9
Newquay, England |
Page 10
Newquay, England |
| Page 11
Newquay, England |
Page 12
Newquay, England |
| Page 13
Newlyn, England |
Page 14
Penzance, England |
| Page 15
Bath, England |
Page 16
Bath, England |
| Page 17
Bath, England |
Page 18
Bath, England Canterbury, England |
| Page 19
Canterbury, England |
Page 20
Tostock, England Sites in Norfolk, England |
| Page 21
Along the North Sea Bury St. Edmunds |
Page 22
France |
| Page 23
France |
Page 24
Back to England Cambridge, England |
| Page 25
Tostock, England Bury St. Edmunds |
Page 26
London, England Goodbye to Great Britain |
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