Week 3 – Thursday 18th July – Arromanches-Les_Bains

Another big day today – only one place to visit, but a couple of things to do.  The D-Day beaches from East to West go – Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword.  Arromanches is to the West of Gold, so between the American and the British beaches.  Arromanches was the site of one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the war, designed by an Engineer called Major Alan Beckett. 

The Allies needed to get access to a port, but the Germans held them all, and they were all heavily fortified.  The idea was developed of building a port in the UK and towing it to Normandy – a distance of 100 miles over seas.  Now remember that this was a complete port, to be built in a matter of days – Dover had taken 7 years to build.  To do that, the Brits had to build a 5 mile sea wall in 70 metre lengths, 6 storeys high.  They had to build docks for ships of various sizes and tonnages to moor up to, those docks had to be far enough out in the harbour to be deep enough for the ships, and they needed access roads to get the trucks off the docks onto land. 

The sea wall was built, and then sunk around the South Coast of Britain, so the Germans wouldn’t be able to see it from the air.  The access roads were built and supported on floating pontoons, so that they woud go up and down with the tide.

When D-Day started, and the beaches were secure, the job began to build the harbour.  The submerged sea walls had to be refloated, and towed – 4 tugs per section  - over the hundred miles of sea to Arromanches, the same with the access roads to the docks – all 13 kms of them.  On the journey over, they lost 40% of these road.  When construction at Arromanches was to start, 60 old warships were sunk to build a protective wall so that the work could carry on with some protection.  Then the sea wall had to be put in place.  This was sunk out in the bay, so that only the tops of it were still visible to create the sea wall, then the docks, then the access roads.  Within 10 days, they had a functioning port.  Two of these were built, one at Arromanches, one at Omaha Beach.  Then disaster struck.  The Normandy Coast was hit by the worst summer storm it had seen in 60 years.  The Omaha Beach harbour was destroyed, but Arromanches survived, but with damage.

Anyway, they got the port fixed and working, and although they only expected it to be used for 3 months it was infact used for 8 months because of the destruction the Germans did to the ports as they were run out of town.  Of the 8 months, the port unloaded over 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tonnes of supplies.  It is still upheld as one of the best examples of Military Engineering.

Today, there are still about two dozen of the 215 sections of the sea wall still in place and visible, as well as the floating pontoons that supported the access roads, and one of the dock sections.  The remainder of the sea wall was re-floated in 1944 and taken to Holland to form the basis of some of the dykes they were building.  The Museum D’embarquement commemorates the port, the ingenuity that went into creating it, and the dedication that was required to build it – there was a war going on just off the beach at the time, remember.

When we went through the museum, there was a boy’s school group there at the same time – intermediate age, I guess, and they were getting a guided tour of the working of how the port worked, which we were lucky enough to be able to listen in on.  We heard one of the teachers saying that this was the 7^th year they had run this trip.  The kids certainly seemed to be enjoying it, and were very attentive during the presentation, and then at the movie that we saw afterwards.

The other attraction at Arromanches is a 360 degree movie – you’ve got 9 screen that completely enclose the audience.  The audience stands so that they are able to look around at what is going on on the different screens.  It sounds like it would be impossible to watch, but it is actually done very well, so you never miss out on anything.  This was a very professional presentation, made by the director of a French TV series call Apocalypse which is about WWII.  This is probably the best thing we’ve seen on the whole trip.  The movie started with just one screen showing Hitler in full flight addressing one of his rallies, and progressed through the development of WWI, the German take over of various countries, the Allies offensives in Italy, then the D-Day landing, the 100 day Normandy war, all the way through to De Gaulle saluting the Allied soldiers as they did their liberation parade up the Champs Elysee – stirring stuff.  It finished with shots of Arramanches and France today  in colour to show what things were like now.

Dinner was a picnic  in the campground from cold cuts of meat and salmon, a terrine, cheese, bread and wine – a good end to the day.