Photo by Tim Street

Students look at names on the Wall of the Missing at the American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.

 

Just reporting in to say that all’s well and our group has had a great day in Normandy.

We started off today by meeting our local tour guide at the hotel in Caen and driving through a bevy of small French villages to Omaha Beach. Our guide, Helen, was a Bayeux local and was very knowledgeable about the area.

We spent some time on Omaha Beach, giving students a chance to walk around on the beach. We then traveled to the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, which Rosemary has blogged about.

We continued our busy day in the afternoon – immediately after we left the cemetery, we drove down the road to the french town of Longues-sur-Mer, where a battery of German 150-mm naval guns was still mostly intact.

Photo by Tim Street

The Musee du Debarquement in Arromanches, France.

We then lunched in the French town of Arromanches, home of the Allied forces’ amazing engineering feat: the temporary harbor that supplied the invasion forces. Originally Winston Churchill’s idea, the temporary harbor supplied the invasion forces with critical food, supplies and ammunition until a larger, more heavily-defended port – like Cherbourg or Le Havre, could be captured. In Arromanches, we visited the Musee du Debarquement, a small museum devoted to the harbor.

The day still wasn’t over, as there was still much more to see – we visited Bayeux, one of the few Normandy towns that had entirely escaped being bombed or destroyed during the war. There, we saw the famous 230-foot long Bayeux Tapestry, which pictorially tells the tale of the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and Norman conquest of England.

Just down the road in Bayeux was the brand new "Memorial des Reporters," which contained the names of many reporters who were killed in the past fifty years. Students stopped to find Ernie Pyle’s name on the 1945 panel. We also spent some time directly across the street at a British war cemetery.

After that our day was finally complete, and we loaded up the bus and completed the half-hour drive back to our hotel in Caen.
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