05-23 The Beaches of Normandy

Our purpose of coming to a city you've probably never heard of in France, Bayeux, was to take an all day tour of World War II sites around the Normandy beaches called The Band of Brothers Tour. It's a reference to a 10 part HBO series on WWII.

We walked the 1/2 mile into town from our hotel to our pickup spot and waited for our 9 passenger tour van to arrive.

5 min before the tour was to start our guide, Sean from Great Britain, arrived and we all got in the van and headed off for the beach.

In 1944 there were 4 huge guns pointed at the ocean at our 1st stop. We dropped bombs on them to try and knock them out before D-Day, June 6th, 1944. We managed to disable two of them the morning of the assault using guns from cruisers off shore. Two of the guns had not been removed by salvagers and that made it cool to actually see them still there after all these years at Longues-sur-Mer Battery.

You've heard and probably seen in movies the horrors of taking Omaha Beach, our next stop. When you are down on the beach it is a long way from the ocean to the cliffs. There is NO shelter except those anti-boat things that look like "X"s made of iron and the piles of dead soldiers. It is easy to see why there were so many casualties.

After hearing the stories of mistakes (landing on the wrong beach) or miscalculations made on the landings (jumping into the water with 75 lbs of gear resulting in drownings) I think it was our sheer numbers (160,000 men landed in Normandy that day) and resolve (our excellent plan that resulted in only 4,400 deaths, less than 3%) that finally won the day.

Time after time during the tour we heard "the plan was to....but we ended up doing this because of the error".

The American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, financed by us, is beautiful in every way. There is no order to who is buried where so as to not give importance to one individual. Relatives were put together when possible. Inscriptions all list the same information; name, rank, state, date of death. Their GI serial number is on the bottom of the cross. The crosses are cleaned regularly and look so. I wish there was a way to keep the peace without all this death.

Our tour group was politely changing seats each time we got back into the van so that everyone would have a chance to look out the front window as we drove to the next destination.

Karen and I were in the front seat as we headed toward lunch and I coyly asked Sean if we would be heading through Isigny sur Mer. He said we might and asked why I wanted to know. I told him we were Disney fans and that Roy Disney had once searched for his ancestors here in Normandy and that he stood by the Isigny sign. We'd like to do the same. I mentioned the Disney name came from the town name. Our guide Sean then proceeded to tell the whole van the story of the Disney family being there and then moving to England and then Ireland and then to America. He explained that the town name Isigny became the family name Disney "and now you know the rest of the story." He knew more than most Disney enthusiasts! He said it was the first time in 8 years of doing the tour that anyone had asked to stop there for the picture.

Our lunch stop was at one of the places made famous in the movie, The Longest Day, called Sainte-Mere-Englise. It was here that paratroopers landed behind enemy lines to try and take positions the Germans held and to disable more huge guns pointing toward the ships.

Pointe du Hoc is famous and is portrayed in scenes in the Longest Day when the soldiers try and scale the sheer wall of rock with the ocean at their heels. Above them the Germans throw grenades and shoot machine guns at them. The ropes get wet and now they weigh more and so the grappling hooks don't make it to the top. They improvise and do something. Being there you get the sense of the difficulty of the task and you ask yourself if you could manage to make those decisions under those conditions. Men rise to the occasion. We've seen it time after time. They did here.

We got to climb down into a pill box cement structure and look out the slot to see how the Germans could clearly see our ships coming.

They could shoot nine miles down the beach or out to sea. We saw the craters made by the bombs we dropped here to try and disable them. Pat volunteered to go down the biggest one to give us a sense of how deep it really is.

After that we went to a church where we heard about the two young paratroopers who set up a first aid station here treating American, French and German wounded. One of them had been back to visit the city several years in a row this century.

Next we visited the farm where they disabled the four big guns there that were supposed to be defending the beach but they were upgrading their mounts so the guns were hidden in a hedgerow. We heard how 12 men confused the Germans and then disabled all four guns. The story was told in the HBO series, Band pf Brothers

Next was Utah Beach. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., President Roosevelt's 56 year old son led the charge that took this beach. We walked on the beach and you could see how far they had to come on this beach. They didn't, however, have the cliffs to deal with and the German defenses were very weak along this stretch of beach.

Then it was back to our starting point in Bayeux. We had dinner just across the bridge from the meeting point. We invited a lady we had met and talked with that morning to have dinner with us. She took the British tour so she saw Juno, Sword and Gold Beaches. We compared stories and then heard about her vacation trip. She is from Sydney, Australia and on a 6 month trip. Only 6 weeks of it are paid. First she traveled to really cheap countries. Now she was in France and then going to England where she once worked in a castle.