Camp Cromwell Invades Normandy

 As expected we hit Sword Beach unopposed at dawn on the ferry from Portsmouth & caught the no.12 bus to Caen for breakfast (eat your heart out Monty).  We Picked up a Sdkfz A3008 Citrone scout car & headed back to the beach & headed north.

Pak 38 bunker.

There were heaps of Allied tanks on display along the beaches, but this lovely Hetzer outside the Bayeux D-Day Museum the only German tank we found.  That museum gave pretty good overview of the campaign & is worth a visit.

Lots of German guns though.

The destruction & craters at Point du Hoc are awesome, but the exhibits are very chauvanistic.  They are all about the bravery of the US soldiers, yes they were heroic, but not a word about the greatly outnumbered German garison that withstood days of pounding by naval & air bombardment & still held off the yanks for 3 days.

We stayed overnight at Hotel Le Vabaun in Carentan & enjoyed our first meal at a French restaurant for the trip.  Then in the morning headed for Utah.

Utah turned out to be the best beach of all.  There was little new development & shirtloads of bunkers & batteries to be found & examined. 

On a replica landing barge on Utah Beach.

There were large gun emplacements at regular intervals, many of them a shambles of broken concrete.

In between the large emplcemnets were small Tobrucs or anti-tnak gun bunkers at about 100m intervals.

The large guns had great enfilading fields of fire down the beach.

Behind the first line on the dunes there was a network of smaller bunkers.

North of nthe beach attack frontage we found a battery that originally had 3 210mm guns, several 155's & a bunch of AA, all in bunkers with connecting trenches, all restored apart from the Allied damage & the removal of the original guns for scrap.

A 105 shell flew down the atircase & blew this hole in the inner wall.

This site was well posted with information signs in 6 languages and uniquely it paid respects to the German defenders.  This poster tells the story of the commandant who held the fort for 8 days under US bombardment & infnatry attack.  After 8 days he was given permission to withdraw.  He withdrew his remaining 77 men of a garison of 280 to Cherboug where he was later catured.  He left behind about a hundred wounded & about a hundred US prisoners.

The team voted Utah as the best beach & this battery as the best presented & informative site on the front.