Week 3 – Wednesday 17th July – Sainte Mere Eglise, Utah Beach

A big day today, with us heading to firstly Sainte Mere Eglise, one the first towns to be liberated by allied troops (US Para troop Division) on D-Day 1944.  The town itself claims to be the first, but we’ve read of other towns also claiming to be the first, so we’re sticking with one of the first.  The town is on the N13, the main route on the Normandy Peninsular, so it was imperative that the Allies got control of this route before the landings started to thwart any German counter-offensives.  The spire on the town’s church is also the spire that para trooper John Steele got his parachute caught on, and had to play dead for two hours before he was captured by the Germans.  Fortunately for him, he escaped, survived the war, and made a number of returns to France, always to a warm welcome.  To this day, a mannequin (him) hangs on the side of the church, with the parachute caught over the steeple.

Beside the church is the airborne museum, which commemorates the airborn assault the allies launched on the Germans.  It is a fantastic museum, and we learned so much about the German Occupation and how the allies got their invasion going.  In doing this tour, we’ve learned a lot more of the detail of the wars and how and where they were conducted.  Up until now, all I’ve really known is that the war was in Europe and went from 1939 until 1945, so I assumed that it was all going on, all over the place, all of that time.  With this trip, we’ve learned that in fact the Germans invaded and became an occupying force in many countries, and that the Allies ran specific offensives against parts of the German lines. 

After the Germans occupied France, but couldn’t defeat Britain, they spent several years building the Atlantic Wall, along the coast of Norway, Holland, Belgium and France – 700 miles, I think.   This was a massive undertaking (But what else are you going to do when you’ve got a bunch of soldiers sitting around getting bored, and a local population that you can do with what you will), and involved a series of pill boxes, gun emplacements, and beach barricades.  It was built by Rommel, and he firmly believed that if the Germans could not stop an Allied assault, at the beaches, they would lose the war.

The Museum goes through various means that the Allies got men and equipment onto French soil, and is particularly focused on the first hours of the invasion, when the paratroop divisions dropped in from the skies, and secured key positions to enable the beach landings, and from there the push from Normandy to Paris, and on to Berlin.  The Battle is refered to as the 100 days of Normandy.

War is an amazing logistical exercise, and I never knew that troops and equipment were delivered into Normandy in gliders, as well as by parachute.  The Gliders were towed from the UK, and then released over Normandy where they would find a place to land.  Rommel knew that this was coming, and had put large stakes into all the paddocks, to catch and destroy any planes that tried to land there.  As a result of this, many soldiers lost their lives being impaled as their planes landed.  To understand the gamble the allies were taking, Eisenhower was expecting losses of 50% of all the Allied Troops which were under his command, and his detractors were picking losses of up to 80%.  Eisenhower was right, but not in a way that anybody would ever want to be.

The Museum had many personal letters from soldiers and their families posted after the war, which was very moving, and as a result we spent a lot of time reading these letters, which isn’t something I would normally do in a museum.  One of the most memorable was the one from John Steele, posted in 1964, after he had attended the 20^th Anniversary thanking the local people for the warm reception he always received.  The Museum is a great exhibitor of the many acts of personal bravery and sacrifice that were made on the day, and ultimately led to the Allied Victory.

From there it was on to Saint Marie Du Monte, and Utah Beach.  There are 5 beaches involved in the D-Day Landings Utah, Omaha, Juno, Gold and Sword.  The first two are American, the last three British.  The British are named based on random selections from the Dictionary, which is good practice.  The Americans however named there after a couple of their states, for varying reasons, and those names seem to be the most famous.  Saint Marie Du Monte is the town inland from Utah Beach, which became the scene of one of the initial engagement of D-Day between the US Para Troopers and the German occupiers.  It is 5ks from Utah Beach.  On the road between Saint Marie Du Monte and Utah Beech is a newly erected monument to Richard Winters who was the commander of the 506^th US Infantry Regiment, upon which the TV Series Band of Brothers was based.  We had watched the series before we came on the holiday, as part of our study and preparation, so were keen to see the monument to one of the outstanding leaders of the D-Day invasion. 

Utah Beach has several monuments to various US Military groups who served and sacrificed their lives on D-Day.  In addition, there is the Utah Beach D-Day Museum, which recounts the events of D-Day, the landings that occurred at Utah Beach in the 5 months following D-Day, in order to provision the supplies needed to support and army that was about to take on and conquer Europe.  The Museum was created by the man who was Mayor of Saint Marie du Monte from 1949 to 1991.  He was around on D-Day, and was mistakenly shot by the Americans.  Given a transfusion, shipped off to the states for further treatment and recuperation, he then set about creating a museum in one of the old German bunkers to honour the men who came to liberate France and the rest of Europe from the Germans. 

Utah Beach was hugely important in terms of being a supply point for the Allied forces.  From June to November 1944, the Allies landed 836,000 men, 220,000 vehicles ranging from jeeps to locomotives and 725,000 tonnes of supplies at Utah Beach.   

After Utah Beach, we headed to Pointe du Hoc, one of the key German defensive positions, located on top of a cliff.  The US Rangers had to use rope ladders to scale the cliff, at the cost of many lives, find the Germans had scarpered, track them down, and destroy their guns.  When they were relieved from duty several days after D-Day, the original 225 soldiers now numbered only 90.

Today was an awesome day, but I have to say it is a totally different experience to the WWI sites we have visited.  For a start, the technology had moved on remarkably in just 20 years, but more importantly, the stories here are about the start of a victory.  What began on 6 June 1944, would result a year later in the total surrender of the German Army, and while the battles were brutal and the costs in human lives horrendous, the results were always a push towards the end.  The WWI sites, covered 4 years, where there was total stalemate, mere yards were gained or lost with the cost of thousands of lives, and the battle was constantly ebbing and flowing.  The conditions the soldiers had to endure during WWI must have been the worst that have had to be endured over a sustained period for so little gain.  The museums at the WWI sites were sombre memorials to a futile battle, whereas the museums we have seen so far are as well as an honouring of the fallen soldiers, also a testament to the extraordinary ingenuity of local people, soldiers, generals and military strategists to overcome almost insurmountable odds to achieve an outcome.  Both sets of museums are amazing in what they teach about a period in history, but both are also totally different in terms of the time and war they portray