Bayeux: Gateway to the Battle of Normandy

Although my fellowship is focused on developing material for my Humanities class, I am taking this small side trip to benefit my World Studies. We left Rouen on Sunday, June 28 for Bayeux, one of the few towns in the area spared the destruction of the Battle of Normandy. We started out on Monday a little further back in time with a visit to the Bayeux tapestry, a 70 yard tapestry that is, more or less, a comic book version of the Battle of Hastings. It was commissioned in 1077 for the opening of Bayeux’s beautiful cathedral and served as a reminder of the story of William the Conquerer’s 1066 conquering of Harold for control of England for a largely illiterate population. It is amazing that the thing still exists; not only is it nearly 1,000 years old, but it has been misused in a variety of ways including serving as a tarp for an ammunition cart during the French Revolution. Today it is on display in a small museum where we were able to listen to an audio guide of the history as we walked along the tapestry. It was hardly necessary though, as the pictures are incredibly vivid and easy to follow.

That afternoon we rented bicycles and rode about 6 miles to Arromanches, code named Mulberry Harbors during the WWII landing. In the past, when I have taught WWII, I have skipped right over the Western Front to get to the good stuff – Stalingrad and the Pacific Theater. Now having been to the sites of the Normandy landings I am convinced that this is just as much the good stuff. I don’t think I ever knew how interesting the Battle of Normandy was. At Arromanches we visited the Musee du Debarquement, which is dedicated to the enormous undertaking of constructing ports since the Allies knew the Germans had an iron grip on the existing ports and would destroy them rather than lose them. Large pieces of the breaker walls and floating bridge are still visible from the beach.

Tuesday morning we visited the Musee Memorial 1944 Bataille de Normandie in Bayeux, which is great. It is full of the quotes and narrative that make me love history. Pilots dropped aluminum paper strips in the channel to confuse German radar and during the Battle of the Bulge, when the Germans demanded the surrender of General MacAuliffe’s troops, his response was, “Nuts!”

That afternoon I left Aaron to his own devices while I went on a tour of Omaha Beach, where the Americans landed and faced the most difficult conditions of the invasion. I had a fantastic guide who took a small group of us through the plan and then through the actual assault. I tell my students that the Normandy invasion was important and bloody, but to stand there on the beach and see the cliffs with the German bunkers visible and to imagine them with guns while the tide rose so quickly makes the success of the operation stunning. Again, I took an incredible lot of pictures and look forward to walking my students through the nuances of the landings. My visit to the Normandy Beaches was so fascinating that I’m wondering if I can’t find a way to get to Verdun while I am still in France…

This gun was one of 6 that the Germans placed on Pointe du Hoc as part of the Atlantic Wall. On the morning of D-Day, 225 Rangers were to climb the cliffs on either side of the Pointe and make sure that the guns were destroyed by early morning bombings so that they could not be used on the approaching armada. The Rangers arrived to find that the Germans had removed the guns several months earlier in order to build bomb proof shelters for them. In there place were gun sized logs. The Rangers were able to report the mission as a success, but had to wait there for two days before receiving backup due to the fighting conditions on the beach.