This is a small town near the Normandy Beeach Invasion sites, and is a center for tours of the invasion sites. In contrast to some other cities, Bayeux was not harmed during the invasion. Our guide said "Not even a window was broken." We took an all day tour of Omaha and Utah Beaches, the two American Beaches.
This is a German bunker, as it was when captured in 1944. The bunkers were positioned to fire parallel with the beach, instead of straight out to sea. This gave them a protected side against the sea and cross fire on advancing troops. They had many of them, but allied bombing and battle ship fire took many of them out. Luckily, the allied deception had worked, and the Nazi's held a lot of their troops back for the expected invasion further north at Calais. The German high command were convinced that the invasion would not take place at that time because of bad weather and other things, so they took time off to party at their summer retreats in Germany. There's a lot of information on the internet: athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_landings
Above is our tour group, with the leader on the left. Jeanie's not in the picture because she took it. This tour was given by http://www.overlordtour.com/, and was done with 6 passengers in a minivan. Good way to do it. We stayed at http://www.hotel-churchill.fr/en.php, and they said that 80% of their guests were Americans. Nice place to stay. In contrast to the earlier places we stayed, there were lots of American tourists here and in town.
I hope you can see the craters in this photo at Omaha Beach. The entire surface was pock marked with craters about 10-15 feet deep and about 20 feet across. They were made by incessant Allied bombing and shelling from off shore ships.
This is Point du Hoc, the site of the assault by US Army Rangers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointe_du_Hoc. This is a shear cliff, and was certainly a difficult task. I was in the US Army Corps of Engineers, and there was lots of Engineer work done on Omaha Beach. We thought Engineer work was hard, and we didn't have anybody shooting at us! Engineers were tasked with removing barbed wire, and there was plenty of that still there. When they finally took the point, the Germans had moved their guns, and so it wasn't the threat anticipated.
The thing that saved us was that the Germans made more mistakes than the Allies.
This is Omaha Beach Cemetery. It seems to go on forever. Lots of men from Minnesota and Wisconsin. None of my or Jeanie's family were in the invasion, but contributed in other areas.
This is Utah Beach. This is at low tide, but I think you can see the contrast with Omaha Beach. The terrane was much more gradual, and provided a much easier landing site. Things went as planned here, and casualties were light. Brig. General Teddy Roosevelt, JR. led this invasion, but was killed later. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Beach
This is the Airborne Museum at St. Mere Eglise, another very interesting place. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainte-Mère-Église.
