After such a short night sleep and a long drive the day before, I knocked off pretty early, so I didn't have much problem waking up at 5:30 the next morning. I packed my camera up and quietly snuck out of the darkened B&B in the earliest traces of morning light. Or rather, morning grey.
It was heavily overcast, with light sprinkles. I knew I wasn't going to get my great sunrise photos, but I was already up, so I wasn't going to stop now. It was a quiet, pleasant 20-minute drive on deserted country roads to reach Utah Beach. I pulled off near the museum and climbed up the back of the small dune at the top of the beach, and was there.
It was low tide, and the beach spanned for several hundred yards in front of me. Far out, near the water line, several tractors with their lights on were combing back and forth across what were apparently mussel cages, literally farming the seabed. I had a quiet moment of reflection, took some pictures, and texted in this post from my phone at exactly H-Hour (the designated time of the landing on D-Day): 0630.
Utah Beach at H-Hour
I spent about 20 minutes wandering the beach and reflecting before heading back to the car. I decided to cruise up the road a bit and stumbled across the remains of a pillbox, or German bunker.
Pillbox near Exit 3, Utah Beach
I cruised up the road a bit more to the memorial at Exit 4, then decided to make my way back to the B&B for breakfast. After a nice, light breakfast of a croissant, a bit of yogurt and some bread (I've decided by the way, that I think Ireland may be the only place in the world where the 'breakfast' part of 'bed & breakfast' is taken seriously.) I gathered the rest of my stuff and headed back out.
I passed by Dead Man's Corner, but as the museum wasn't open yet, I figured I'd hit that later in the day on my way back into town. Just a stone's throw up the road was the town of St. Come-du-Mont.
Let me step aside here for a second and say that a lot of my prior knowledge of the spots in this region, and the action that occurred here in early June of 1944, came not only from HBO's "Band of Brothers", but also from the "Brothers In Arms" series of PC games which follow a fictional squad of paratroopers from the 101st Airborne, from D-Day, through the fall of Carentan, and beyond.
I realize it seems trite to look back at something so serious and significant as the Normandy campaign through the glass of a video game screen. However, in the case of the BiA series, the team at Gearbox Software put a phenomenal amount of time into framing the events as realistically and historically as possible. Each mission in the game is based on actual after-action reports filed by paratroopers of the 101st, and is set in a game world that was modelled with an extreme level of authenticity and accuracy. Further, as you progress through the game, the perks that you unlock are, in many cases, small featurettes that delve even further into the history of the real events, people and areas, including maps, diagrams, photos and reports.
My experience playing that game was, in many ways, my guidebook to the region, and it was fascinating, and at times, eerie, to visit these locales and have the distinct feeling that I'd been there before. It, like "Band of Brothers" and the many various movies, TV and other media representations of war, was, and is, to many, the key to unlocking a deeper interest in the history behind the entertainment.
The first such spot was St. Come-du-Mont. St. Come was where the troops gathered and regrouped before making their push into Carentan along the road I drove up and down several times, known in history as "Purple Heart Lane".
The south entrance St. Come du Mont along the N-13 highway.
Passing through St. Come du Mont after a few pictures, I continued to St. Mere-Eglise. St. Mere-Eglise was the first town in France liberated by American forces, and is the home of the Airborne Museum honoring the men of the 82nd and 101st. The museum features two buildings, both shaped like parachutes, which house a C-47 Dakota and a Waco Glider, among other various vehicles, weapons and artifacts.
The church in the center of St. Mere-Eglise has a mannequin of a paratrooper hanging from its steeple, a dramatic portrayal of Private John Steele, whose chute snagged on the steeple during the D-Day drop. Private Steele hung from the tower for 2 hours, playing dead, before being briefly captured by the Germans.
Interesting side bit I just learned while checking wikipedia to try and recall Steele's name: The airdrop for the 82nd Airborne into Normandy was known as Operation Detroit. The 101st's drop was known as Operation Chicago. Both, obviously, were sub-operations of the overall invasion plan, known as Operation Overlord.From St. Mere-Eglise, I headed northeast, to the gun battery at Azeville. Azeville was a relatively small battery site, compared to the other two I visited, but the admission included a guided tour of the tunnels connecting the various bunkers and pillboxes. The most impressive site at the Azeville site was a hole that was punched in the back wall of the firing room of pillbox #3 by a shell from the USS Nevada, shown in the following sequence of photos:
These photos shows how amazingly precise the shot from the Nevada was. That window is only about 3-4 feet high and maybe 15 feet across. The Nevada was about 14 miles away. The second photo shows our guide next to the hole for scale.
The shell punched through the wall without exploding, and into the command room on the other side. This is the hole as seen from inside the command room on the other side of the wall (top). It glanced off the floor and up passing through the back wall of the command room (bottom).
This is looking back from outside the command room, following the path of the shell. It passed right through the entire pillbox without exploding, but the concussion alone killed 15 officers and soldiers manning the gun there. It was a demoralizing blow for the German garrison stationed there and led to the surrender of the site.
From Azeville, it was a short hop up the road to another gun battery at the hamlet of Crisbeq, near Saint-Marcouf. This site included several bunkhouses that had been set up as dioramas, and in at least one case, fully restored with its interior, to convey what life was like for the German soldiers stationed there:
Occasionally, I'd stop off to try and get a photographic sense of the countryside. Here are a few shots that I particularly liked:
Farm fence, peeking through a hedgerow, and cows
From Saint Marcouf, I started to make my way back down towards Utah Beach to catch the museum. On the way, I passed through another town that had been represented in "Brothers in Arms - Road to Hill 30": Foucarville.
Foucarville, it seems, has not changed much since 1944. In the game, you begin in the building on the left and make your way up to the crossroads, making a right and eliminating road blocks ahead, before securing and defending the church.
From Foucarville, I cut back over towards the beach and caught back up with the shore road near Exit 4, the northernmost of the four designated exits from the beachhead that were to be secured by the 101st Airborne in order for the armored and supply units to be able to move inland. (In anticipation of the invasion, the Germans had flooded the low-lying fields all up and down the peninsula, making the roads the only way inland from the beaches.)
Monument at Exit 4
I headed back down the road from Exit 4, passing by the pillbox I'd explored earlier that morning and back towards the museum. By this time, the grey clouds were finally breaking up, allowing for some nice shots of the museum and beach in the afternoon sun.
The beach shines in the sun, while the museum structure guards over the beachhead
An LCVP (or "Higgins" boat) personnel carrier sits at the entrance to the museum
"Hedghog" beach obstacles on display near the museum
This gun was one of the guns captured at Brecourt Manor by Dick Winters and the men of Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. This assault on the gun position was portrayed in the "Day of Days" episode of "Band of Brothers".
I spent a good hour and a half to two hours perusing the museum and the beach some more, before starting to make my way back down the road towards Dead Man's Corner and Carentan.
Dead Man's Corner is so-named because early in the fighting, a US tank was destroyed at the corner, and for several days, it was left there, with the driver's body fused to the turret. The men began to refer to it as "the corner with the tank with the dead guy". Eventually, the "Dead Man's Corner" moniker stuck.
The house that is now home to the Dead Man's Corner museum was there in 1944, and was used as a German command post prior to the invasion. The fighting that took place in this area is well represented and well modelled in "Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30":
On the top is a composite image showing the house at Dead Man's Corner as it was in 1944, and how it was rendered in "Brothers in Arms". On the bottom is how the house--now a museum--appears today. St. Come-du-Mont lays half a mile down the road on the left, while Carentan is a mile in the opposite direction.
Inside the museum are a number of displays, including some that are centered around and show an appreciation for the attention drawn to the area by, both "Band of Brothers" and "Brothers in Arms":
By the time I was done with the DMC Museum, it was nearly 6 o'clock, so I headed back into Carentan. As I mentioned above, the road between St. Come-du-Mont and Carentan, particularly the last half mile or so, is a stretch known as Purple Heart Lane. The low lands on either side of the road were flooded and crawling in German soldiers a week after D-Day. In order to move in on Carentan, the Airborne forces had to advance along this road, flanked on either side, with basically no cover.
Purple Heart Lane
After dinner in Carentan (fish this time, not sausage), I had a few hours until sunset, so I just went for a drive. I tried, unsuccessfully, to find the location of the Battle of Bloody Gulch, near Hill 30 just outside Carentan, where the 101st, with the assistance of the 2nd Armored Division, repelled a German counter-attack on Carentan. Instead, however, I took a nice drive through several sites to the north and west which were represented in the sequel, "Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood", including Baupte, Etienville, and the locks at La Barquette.
Etienville
Chateau le Bel Enault - I'm not sure if this was the chateau represented in "BiA: Earned in Blood". I've seen some stuff online indicating that it was, but I'd have to go back and check the game to be sure.
By that time, dusk was quickly approaching, so I returned to Carentan for the night, a full day complete.
For more photos on these areas, see the following sets on my Flickr account:
2 comments:
Awesome post. Can't wait to read the next one. (but off to the sox game outing now)
- jrt
Love the post and photos.
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