Travel Log - Brittany and Normandy

From the Third Roman Empire to the Third Reich: – Brittany and Normandy
by Joe Rohner

France is an ancient country, but you don’t fully appreciate that until you have been there. The Romans were there before Christ was born. They built roads and bridges and aqueducts that have stood for 2,000 years and will stand for 2,000 more. A thousand years later the Normans crossed the channel from France and defeated the Anglo-Saxons at Hastings in 1066 conquering England. Sixty years ago the Allies invaded France here signaling the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. So much of what happened here dictates the landscape of the modern world.

The buildings in this picture are relatively new. They only date back to the 15th Century, but the town has stood in the same place perched on a rocky cliff since Roman times.

This is a view of Dinan from the road leading down the cliff from the center city to the river below. The road and the walls were Roman and original sections still remain. Don’t try riding your bike on them.

Maybe the most spectacular thing we saw in Brittany was not a building or a ruin but a tapestry. In 1066 after the Normans defeated the Anglo-Saxons and conquered England, legend has it that Queen Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, and her handmaidens created the tapestry to chronicle the Norman conquest of England by her husband, although there is some uncertainty as to just who actually did it and when. It is a long, narrow strip of coarse embroidered linen, 230 ft long by 20 inches tall. It was long and narrow because it was designed to hang on the inside wall of a church above the doors, and was believed to have circulated from one church to another in England for some years after the war. Since nobles of the time could generally read and write in Latin it is assumed that the tapestry was a pictorial to explain the events to the peasants who could generally not read. Think of it as a 1,000 year old comic book!! Given that its account of the events were a very one-sided portrayal, it probably also qualifies of one of the first recorded examples of political propaganda.

The most spectacular architectural work was by far Mont-Saint-Michel. Originally a Benedictine Monastery, the first buildings were constructed starting in 1,016. Built on a rocky island separated from the mainland by almost a mile of tidal flats it was a natural fortress and served dual religious and military purposes throughout its history.

Because of the tidal flats it was virtually immune from siege. Medieval siege weapons were very short range, heavy and took a long time to set up. The tides would have drowned any attacking army before they could deploy their weapons.

Mont-Saint-Michel lost its value as a fort once cannons had the range to reach across the one mile tidal flats.

The Mont as we see it today began to take shape in 1,203 when the construction of major military fortifications began. It took over two hundred years, completing sometime in the 1,400’s before Columbus sailed for America. It was also used at times as a prison because the difficulty of escape, most recently in the First World War it was used to hold high ranking German POW’s. In the picture above you can see the evidence of its dual use; the graceful cathedral rising above the battlements. Imagine knights in heavy body armor trying to fight their way up those stairs, which were the only way in.

While Normandy has just as many things of historical interest dating to medieval times and earlier, World War II dominated this portion of the tour.

As a child growing up in the 50’s, World War II was very recent history. Many of my parents’ friends had served. One of my dad’s friends had fought from Normandy to Berlin. He met his wife in Berlin where she was a nurse with the British Red Cross. Another friend had been at Pearl Harbor on December 7th. My wife’s father was a Navy counter-intelligence officer who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard monitoring new ship construction for espionage or sabotage. My dad had not served because as a NYC Fireman he was exempt from the draft. He tried to get a commission in the Navy as a damage control officer but they wouldn’t take him because he was color-blind. Even those who hadn’t served were touched in some way; by lost friends and loved ones, by gas and food rationing, by air raid drills. They never talked about it. They wanted to put it behind them and move on with their lives as best they could. It seems to me that only now as the Greatest Generation is leaving us are many beginning to talk and the stories are coming out.

I have always wanted to see Omaha Beach in person. I’d seen it depicted in war movies and seen the old newsreels. But nothing you may have seen on TV can quite prepare you for the stark reality of it. It is tranquil now. Summer cottages and wild flowers dot the rolling hills just up from the beach and below the cliffs where the Germans were dug in and waiting. Families play in the clear blue water where the GI’s stormed ashore. The mines, barbed wire and the steel tank traps that had been deployed on the beach to stop the landing are gone now. But not all of the wreckage has been removed; the gun emplacements and concrete bunkers built into the cliffs above the beach are still there. The cliffs and the ground behind them still bear the scars of the ferocious naval bombardment that tore gaping holes in the earth and shattered concrete bunkers. Just off shore the hulls of a couple of sunken ships are still visible just below the surface and have become popular scuba diving locations.

What is so striking is the shear insanity of what was required on that day; the landing craft driving ashore into a hail of gunfire directed toward the beach from the cliffs above. My immediate thought was “How could they possibly have done that?” That was before I had a chance to read the account that was filed by famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle shortly after D-Day that the Backroads guides handed out for us to read (see below). Although he couldn’t mention it by name at the time, he was writing about Omaha Beach.

In one of the most famous actions of that day US Army Rangers scaled a 100 foot cliff at Point du Hoc to take out the guns that were so well dug in the Army feared that Naval bombardment alone would not be able to take them out of action. The Rangers took fearsome casualties as the Germans fired down on them from the top of the cliff. But somehow they did it. The wreckage of the guns remain, and huge blast craters still pockmark the top of the Point, silent reminders of the battle that took place there.

Beyond the feats of incredible heroism, there are also incredible feats of ingenuity, an aspect of D-Day that isn’t told as often. Consider for a moment the logistics of trying to supply an army of a couple of hundred thousand men, tanks and trucks, consuming ammunition, food, gasoline, spare parts and medical supplies at an astonishing rate. Then consider that there were no deep water ports available; the one French deepwater port on the Cotentin peninsula at Cherborg was too heavily defended to be taken by a direct amphibious landing. Without supplies to keep the army fighting the invasion would fail, so what do you do? What the Allies did was build their own port, in pieces in England and then tow it over to Arromanches a town on the Normandy coast near Omaha Beach. Barges made of steel reinforced concrete were constructed in England before the invasion. They were towed into place and valves were opened to sink them creating a breakwater for the harbor. They even came complete with anti-aircraft guns and crews for defense. Other prefabricated sections were towed into place to form piers that ships could dock at to unload their supplies. The Allies created an artificial, fully defended harbor within a month of the D-Day landing. The GI’s were perilously short of supplies in the first month, but never again once the port at Arromanches was up and running.

Then there is the American Military Cemetery at Coleville set on the cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach. 10,000 GI’s are buried there in neat little rows marked by white crosses and an occasional Star of David.

The French have always been fickle friends. In the 1950’s Charles de Gaulle, then President of France ordered all American military personnel out of France immediately. President Eisenhower, always the diplomat when he had to deal with de Gaulle during the war was not so tactful this time. His famous response was “it will take us a while to dig up all the bodies”. De Gaulle’s opportunistic nationalism proved too much even for his countrymen; France later ceded the grounds of the cemetery to the US so the soldiers would remain. It is actually a small part of the USA.

Every American should see Omaha Beach sometime in their lives just to remember how lucky they are and how much they owe to those guys who stormed ashore on June 6th 1944.

A Pure Miracle

by Ernie Pyle, June 12th 1944

NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 12, 1944 - Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn't arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore.

By the time we got here the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.

Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.

That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea.

Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.

In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.

Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.

Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.

Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been made. And in other places at the far end of the beach, where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls. These were blasted by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.

Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys, each about one hundred yards wide. The Germans made the most of these funnel-like traps, sowing them with buried mines. They contained, also, barbed-wire entanglements with mines attached, hidden ditches, and machine guns firing from the slopes.

This is what was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly as this before they even got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. The Germans had whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats. Even now, several days after the landing, we have cleared only channels through them and cannot yet approach the whole length of the beach with our ships. Even now some ship or boat hits one of these mines every day and is knocked out of commission.

The Germans had masses of those great six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high, just beneath the surface of the water for our landing craft to run into. They also had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to these logs were mines.

In addition to these obstacles they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.

And yet we got on.

Beach landings are planned to a schedule that is set far ahead of time. They all have to be timed, in order for everything to mesh and for the following waves of troops to be standing off the beach and ready to land at the right moment.

As the landings are planned, some elements of the assault force are to break through quickly, push on inland, and attack the most obvious enemy strong points. It is usually the plan for units to be inland, attacking gun positions from behind, within a matter of minutes after the first men hit the beach.

I have always been amazed at the speed called for in these plans. You'll have schedules calling for engineers to land at H-hour plus two minutes, and service troops at H-hour plus thirty minutes, and even for press censors to land at H-hour plus seventy-five minutes. But in the attack on this special portion of the beach where I am - the worst we had, incidentally - the schedule didn't hold.

Our men simply could not get past the beach. They were pinned down right on the water's edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first waves were on that beach for hours, instead of a few minutes, before they could begin working inland.

You can still see the foxholes they dug at the very edge of the water, in the sand and the small, jumbled rocks that form parts of the beach.

Medical corpsmen attended the wounded as best they could. Men were killed as they stepped out of landing craft. An officer whom I knew got a bullet through the head just as the door of his landing craft was let down. Some men were drowned.

The first crack in the beach defenses was finally accomplished by terrific and wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked out the big emplacements. They tell epic stories of destroyers that ran right up into shallow water and had it out point-blank with the big guns in those concrete emplacements ashore.

When the heavy fire stopped, our men were organized by their officers and pushed on inland, circling machine-gun nests and taking them from the rear.

As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it's the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.

Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy's side and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on.

Before long it will be permitted to name the units that did it. Then you will know to whom this glory should go. They suffered casualties. And yet if you take the entire beachhead assault, including other units that had a much easier time, our total casualties in driving this wedge into the continent of Europe were remarkably low - only a fraction, in fact, of what our commanders had been prepared to accept.

And these units that were so battered and went through such hell are still, right at this moment, pushing on inland without rest, their spirits high, their egotism in victory almost reaching the smart-alecky stage.

Their tails are up. "We've done it again," they say. They figure that the rest of the army isn't needed at all. Which proves that, while their judgment in this regard is bad, they certainly have the spirit that wins battles and eventually wars.