Travel: Normandy, 72 years after D-Day

All of this happened 72 years ago but France has certainly not forgotten. It’s not just the cemeteries, the beautifully maintained final resting places of thousands of servicemen, but also the many memorials, statues, plaques and museums dedicated to the campaign. As Antony Beevor put it in the 2014 edition of his magisterial book, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy: “One might have expected interest to diminish with the passage of time and the death of participants, yet there are more museums in Normandy and more visitors than ever before.”

D-Day is remembered, too, in everything from T-shirts and fridge magnets to postcards and DVDs. In Bayeux, which was held by the Germans until the Allies evicted them, a shop sells bullet casings used in the invasion. In the small resort of Arromanches, you can stil see the rusting remains of the artificial Mulberry harbour, which played a key role in allowing supplies and equipment to be taken into Normandy in the wake of the invasion.

The remains are overlooked by the splendid, informative Musee du Debarquement, which opened exactly 10 years after D-Day, makig it the first museum to be built in honour of the campaign. The museum says the Arromanches harbour was fully operational by the beginning of July and proved its worth during General Montgomery’s large-scale offensive against Caen later that month. During the harbour’s busiest week more than 18,000 tonnes of goods were unloaded each day.

A hundred yards or so away, you can rest your hand on the Atlantic Wall, the fortification line built by the Germans.

This is one of the things about Normandy. The story of that campaign is all around you. If you’ve dipped into the extensive literature about Operation Overlord, or Operation Neptune, or the entire campaign, and want to get an idea of what actually happened that long-ago summer, there is nothing to rival spending time here, wandering the streets, driving around the countryside, reading the plaques, and visiting the museums and beaches. Organised D-Day tours can also be booked.

Early on June 6, 1944, some 150,000 Allied troops crossed the Channel from England to begin assaults on five Normandy beaches, code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Sword and Juno. As President Obama put it two years ago, on the 70th anniversary: “More than 150,000 souls set off towards this tiny sliver of sand upon which hung more than the fate of a war, but the course of human history.”

They were preceded by airborne assaults involving troops from Britain and the US. Today, at Benouville, you can walk across the Caen Canal’s Pegasus bridge, which was taken by British soldiers under the command of Major John Howard of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Plaques mark the spot, and you can even see a German gun emplacement. (The original bridge now stands at the Memorial Pegasus museum.) The Pegasus Cafe, just across the bridge, says of itself that it was “the first house in France to be liberated during the last hour of June 5, 1944.”

The five beaches were all taken by the seaborne assault forces. Omaha was the bloodiest of them all, and has become known as D-Day’s killing ground. Some 2,500 American soldiers died here; countless others were maimed. “Thousands of paratroopers had dropped into the wrong landing sites; thousands of rounds bit into flesh and sand,” Obama said of Omaha in 2014. “Entire companies’ worth of men fell in minutes. Hell’s Beach had earned its name.”

Omaha would of course be depicted, brutally but realistically, in the opening battle scene of Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.

You can walk across the beaches today and they are as tranquil as you’d expect any beach to be: on one of them, a handful of windsurfers are having fun. Children frolic in the waves. It’s difficult, though, not to try to visualise what went on here 72 years ago – the death, the fear, the chaos and the sacrifice. Beevor writes about family groups standing on the bluff above Omaha and having their imaginations gripped: “You cannot help but try to put yourself in the place of the Allied soldiers coming ashore in their landing craft under heavy fire, sick with fear and thrown around by the waves. Others try to share the feelings of a German defender in one of the positions nearby, as they first caught sight of the vast invasion armada in the grey dawn.”

One D-Day site worth looking at is at Pointe du Hoc, which stands between Omaha and Utah. US Army Rangers were tasked with scaling this perpendicular cliff some 10 storeys high and taking out a German gun battery. A smartphone app with text, audio and video guides you around this poignant location. As it says, “The crater-pocked landscape before you bears witness to fierce Allied air and naval bombardment.” You can examine a German observation bunker and a reinforced concrete anti-aircraft bunker, designed by the Luftwaffe, which became the Rangers’ command post, medical aid station and morgue. The Rangers paid a heavy price for their heroics but played a key role in the success of the landings.

Above Omaha beach stands the sombre yet hugely impressive Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial at Colleville-sur-Mer. There are more than 9,000 graves here across 172 acres. Many of the marble Latin crosses carry no names, merely the inscription: “Here rests in honored glory a Comrade in Arms known but to God.” This is where, in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, the now elderly Ryan pays an emotional tribute to Captain John H Miller, the man who saved him. There is a Ryan buried here, as it turns out: Andrew Ryan, from New York, a 1st Lieutenant in a US bomber squadron, who was killed in September 1943. Other headstones carry names that sound vaguely Scottish: First Lieutenant John H MacLean, from Georgia, who died on July 21, 1944, and 2nd Lieutenant McKinnon Cameron, from Michigan, who died on April 20, 1944.

At the Bayeux war cemetery I see a group of British veterans, some in wheelchairs, paying their respects to their fallen colleagues. These men have not forgotten either.

Bayeux was the first French town of importance to be liberated, and the war cemetery, with 4,144 Commonwealth burials, is the largest Commonwealth cemetery of the Second World War in France. It also houses 500 war graves of other nationalities, most of them German.

Apart from Samuel Cross and Edward Muircroft, there are many other Scottish names, and Scottish regiments, in the Commonwealth part of the cemetery. I see several Latin crosses commemorating soldiers from the Gordon Highlanders, among them Sergeant Harry Widdop, who died on July 1, 1944, aged 30, and Lance-Corporal Reginald Burton, who met his end aged 37 just over a month later, on August 4. The two newest pages in the visitors’ book on the site contains the signature of visitors from Hungary, Spain, Coatbridge, North Wales, Michigan, Bolivia and Quebec. Under the column headed Observations, many just write: “RIP.”

Just a few minutes’ walk from Bayeux cemetery, the Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy is fascinating, with a thoughtfully presented collection of pictures, documents, weapons and equipment. In Bayeux you can also walk down a street named after Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, who on June 14, 1944 made an emotional visit to the town and made key speeches then and two days later.

The small town of Villers-Bocage suffered terribly during the Normandy campaign. Today it is a charming place, with nice shops and a weekly market where you can buy cheese, flowers, clothes and even live chickens. There’s little to recall the events of 1944 apart from a plaque that marks the placing, in 1948, of the first stone in the reconstruction of Villers-Bocage, destroyed by battle tanks and bombardments between June 13 and August 5.

At Caen, which was largely destroyed by aerial bombardment in 1944, the Memorial de Caen is a quite stunning attraction, a museum and war memorial commemorating the Second World War and the Battle for Caen, which cleverly places 1939-1945 in context by covering the events from the First World War onwards. Its countless exhibits include a German Enigma machine.

Outside the Caen museum is a 7.5m-high statue honouring Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York’s Times Square on V-J Day 1945. In 2014 French feminists demanded its removal on the grounds that it depicted a sexual assault, in response to which the French authorities installed a plaque which explains the nurse’s identity.

Of course, it’s not all about the war when you come to Normandy. This is a diverse and picturesque part of France, with some of the country’s finest Gothic masterpieces. The many attractions include Caen, Saint-Lo, Argentan, Deauville (home to an annual American Film Festival), Rouen, the sea resort of Trouville, beautiful Honfleur and Mont-St-Michel, with its medieval walled city, crowned by a great Gothic abbey.

Bayeux itself is famous for its 900-year-old tapestry (all 70 metres of it, with the narrative explained via an audio guide) and its astonishing Notre Dame cathedral, which essentially dates from the 13th century. My guidebook says: “Normandy architecture is incomparably forceful. The beautiful stones, the richness of the countryside, give rise to veritable masterpieces.” And they do.