Tourist Guide to Normandy

 I have always wanted to visit Normandy, but doesn't everyone? Why would anyone not want to see where the largest amphibious invasion in history took place? Doesn't everyone who saw Saving Private Ryan want to see where private Ryan landed? Another reason for me was that an old friend, the father of a high school classmate, told me that he actually walked ashore in Normandy on the day after D-day -- when men were still jumping straight into the ocean. He said that the water was really cold.

In early September of 2021, I was able to spend five days in Normandy. 

The best way to get to Normandy is to take the train from Paris. Public transportation in France, at least compared to the United States, is excellent.  

You could get off the train in the larger city of Caen, but I recommend traveling for twenty minutes more to Bayeux which is closer to the beaches. Bayeux is small enough that you can walk around but still there are plenty of amenities. When I arrived, I walked directly from the train station to my accommodation in the center of town. What could be easier than that?

Bayeux has, as you can see, a road around it. That was the first ring-road in France. The Americans built it after they realized that they couldn't move their heavy equipment through the narrow streets of Bayeux. Bayeux was, by the way, the first liberated village in France and totally escaped the ferocious bombing and fighting that engulfed other French cities.

 It was evening when I arrived. As soon as I dropped my bags, I took a walk around town.

A working mill with a restaurant inside.

The brother of William the Conquerer consecrated this cathedral in central Bayeux in 1070. The Normans, led by William, later taught the English, after William showed them who is the boss, how to build churches similar to this one.

Besides the cathedral, there are three fascinating museums in the town.  You should buy a pass that covers all three. The cathedral is free.

1. The Bayeux Tapestry is a 70-meter by about 2/3 of a meter embroidered cloth that tells the story of William the Conqueror. You can think of it as one long comic strip with a scene from William's life in every panel.   

Basically, the way the French tell it, William conquered England and then civilized it. Yes, it's true. Before William got there the English were pretty miserable and clueless. They needed the French to teach them how to live. Has anything changed in a thousand years?

Museum #2 is the MAHB, which sounds suspiciously like the MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, but it is actually the local art museum that is amazingly good for a city of fewer than 15,000 people. The museum convinced me that Normandy is a center of world civilization. Here is an example to prove it:

Chantilly lace and a pretty face
And a ponytail hangin' down
A wiggle in her walk and a giggle in her talk, Lord
Make the world go 'round, 'round, 'round
-- The Big Bopper

Yes, friends, the best Chantilly lace was hand-made in Bayeux.

Finally, #3, there is the Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy. It tries to cover every angle of the invasion. The next time the United States invades a country, the generals should visit this museum first and learn the #1 rule for a successful invasion: the local people want you to invade them. Yes, go see what it takes: guns, men, vehicles, food, sanitation, medical, dead-body disposal, re-supply, communications, and more that I can think of and you can't imagine until you go there. 

Outside the museum are two tanks.

A sign near to this tank reads: 

"This is an American "M10 Tank Destroyer", a vehicle specially designed by the American army in 1942 in order to complement and reinforce its Armoured units with anti-tank battalions (Heavy Tank Destroyer Battalions). The British gave it the nicknames "Achilles", "Wolverine" or "Slugger".

The M1O model was based on the M4 Sherman tank and can be recognized by its hull sloping at an angle of 40° to protect the crew from deflected shells and by its pentagonal open-topped turret. However, on the battlefields of Normandy, the crews themselves often installed protection for the turret, as this observation post, sometimes equipped with a machine gun, left them extremely exposed. These makeshift forms of protection ranged from simply rigging up tent canvas against bad weather to installing a sheet of armor plating against various projectiles.

With a rate of fire of 10 rounds per minute, its gun was able to pierce armor 120mm thick at 900 meters."

"This British flame-throwing tank is a "Crocodile" Mark VII which was a variant on the "Churchill" tank Provided to the British 79th Armoured Division, it was one of the many specialized forms of tank developed for the D-Day Landings of 6 June 1944 and christened "Hobart's Funnies" after the military engineer Major-General Percy Hobart who commanded the division.

Designed to support infantry at the pace of marching troops, the tank was a remarkable assault weapon. Despite its relatively weak gun, armor that was too heavy for its inefficient engine, and frequent breakdowns, this lumbering armored vehicle acquired a terrifying reputation, feared by the enemy for the infernal power of its flame-thrower.

The flame-thrower was mounted in the position of the original machine gun and could project a jet of flame, propelled by compressed nitrogen, almost 110 meters long in less than 2 seconds.

It was supplied by a lightly armored (14mm) trailer which could be jettisoned if absolutely necessary and which carried 1,800 liters of inflammable liquid. It could produce as many as 80 successive jets of flame. Although Winston Churchill said of the Crocodile "This tank has even more faults than I", the tank continued its service in the British army until 1952."

Inside the war museums of Normandy are many displays like this one -- designed to show how the war was fought without being realistic enough to give anyone nightmares. If a museum showed the true horror of war, no one would visit it.

To me, these statistics capture the scale of both the operation and the horror.

Meanwhile, the town is jammed with restaurants, bars, coffee shops, hotels etc. The party never stops.

I spent one day at the beaches. To get there most people join an organized tour or rent a car; I rented a bicycle and used Google maps to find my way there. The roads are a complete maze so I would have been hopeless without Mr. Google showing me the way. 

There is another of the many D-day museums near Omaha beach, but if you've seen the museum in town, you can skip it and go directly to the American Cemetery. 

The cemetery overlooks the beaches and is, as you will see, immaculately maintained. 

The American Cemetery is located in the lower middle of the map, just above the beach.

View of Omaha Beach from the American Cemetery.

Omaha Beach, the only beach I visited, is where the Americans landed and where most D-day casualties occurred.

How do they cut the grass so evenly?

A tour group pauses at the end of the reflecting pool.

From the cemetery, I rode down the beach. 

The pictures below begin from the west end of the beach. 

In the lower right of the picture below, from Google Earth, is a blue dot that marks a German bunker I visited.

In the picture below, in the middle left of center, I'm looking up at the same German bunker.

It was an easy walk up to the bunker that is built into the hillside.

The bunker.

As you see, from the bunker is a view of the entire beach.

Much of the beach is now, as it was before the war, a popular place to swim in spite of the strong currents.

I waded into the water in the above picture, in the shadow of a monument, and indeed, as my friend had told me, it was really cold.

In the middle of the beach is a memorial. Behind this is a lovely restaurant where I stopped for lunch.

One thing that surprised me is that most of the beach is not like the Gettysburg Battlefield or any of the other sites of large battles in the United States. France has seen too many wars and too many battles to make every battle scene into a huge national park. In parts of the beach are vacation homes.

At the far end of the beach is another bunker. This one happens to be along what became the main route for Americans to move men and equipment inland. Because the man I knew worked in supply, it is likely that he landed somewhere in this area and walked up this road.

A sign on the road down from the bunker shows the road when it was being used for supplies.

I parked my rented bicycle outside the bunker that the Germans built to block what they reasoned would be the route inland for any likely invaders. This bunker became an early headquarters for allied operations, nevertheless inside was still the ruins of a gun

One of the German soldiers in a bunker commented later that he was shocked to see the water turn red with blood from his bullets.

This tour guide will end with another summary of D-day. 

I leave you to ponder the horror of war.