Northwestern France: Normandy Beaches & Bayeux

We left Sarlat for Bayeux about noon on Saturday, October 10th. My original plan was to take a long route through Le Mans to Bayeux, but after the delays from Hendaye to Sarlat, I decided to take the fastest route possible. The first little bit was by bus from Sarlat to Souillac, but after that we only had one train change in Paris. Of course, that was a significant one because we had to take the Metro from one train station to another. It was up and down multiple sets of stairs as well as through lots of tunnels, but the way was well marked and no pickpockets tried to get to us, so we did just fine.

Along the way it seemed like every field had a windmill in it. We saw them between Sarlat and Paris and between Paris and Bayeux.

In Bayeux we stayed at the Hotel Reine Mathilde. Mathilde was the wife of William the Conquerer. On the train we ran into a young couple who were staying at the same place. We arrived after 9:00 pm, so we all decided to take a taxi from the train station to the hotel. I made the phone call since I was the only one with any French at all, and they treated us old folks to the ride.

We went to this part of France for two reasons. The first was to tour the American parts of the Normandy Beaches. The second was to see the Bayeux Tapestry.

We had a generous breakfast on Sunday morning and walked the few paces to meet our American Highlights tour. Our tour guide was a Brit, but he was very knowledgable about what the Americans did and seemed in awe of the sacrifices they made. There were about 8 of us on the tour and we switched out sitting up front with him. As it turned out, Trout and I sat up front on the way out of and back into Bayeux, so we got to have a couple of very good conversations with the guy. His name was Sean.

The first place we stopped was the famous Sainte Mere Eglise. This is the church where Red Buttons hangs from the top in the movie, The Longest Day. They even have a mannekin with a parachute hanging there for us tourists to take pictures of.

But what really happened was that the guy who Red Buttons portrayed, Pvt. John Steele, actually landed on the back side of the church. Pvt. Ken Russell also landed on the roof of the nave. Sgt. John Ray came down in the square just below them.

A German soldier came around the corner of the church, shot Ray in the stomach, thought he was dead and turned his attention to killing Steele and Russell. Ray raised his pistol and shot the German in the head before he could kill Steele and Russell. I'm not sure what eventually happened to Russell except that he survived, but Steele was hauled into the bell tower by some Germans there even though he tried to play dead. They got scared of the way the battle was going, so they split and he was left behind. Sgt. Ray was the real hero here and he left a wife and family in Louisiana to mourn him.

Fighting was furious all around the square that the church is on. These are pictures of a fence across the street that still has the bullet damage to it.

There is a great museum opposite the church square. It tells the full story...and it had good bathrooms.

The guys jumped in wearing this kind of equipment.

John Steele was flattered when Hollywood wanted to make a movie with his story in it but always felt badly because the true story wasn't told in the movie.

If you click on the story below, you will see that he died at the early age of 56. He essentially drank himself to death largely in part to the fame he received from selling his (fake) story.

This shows how the men prepared for the jump.

Gliders were also used to bring men into the battlefield. This is one of them.

Here's Trout reading about the paratroopers.

Sainte Mere Eglise was the first town in France to be liberated from the Germans. The people there love Americans.

After the landings, whether by sea or air, the soldiers fought in the fields and through the hedgerows of the area. We always wondered what the big deal was about going through the hedgerows. Why was it so hard for a tank to go through a hedge? Well this is why.

These hedgerows were built by Vikings (they're everywhere!). The dirt berms are about 12 feet high and made of solid dirt and rocks with trees growing down into them. Their bases are as wide or wider than their height, so it took several runs at them to get through and there were lots of them to go through.

They were built that way so that they could be easily flooded for irrigation and to keep cattle (and horses) in so that so many trees didn't have to be cut for fencing. It was about the work of irrigating crops, building fences and repairing them, not about saving trees.

These horses were in the field to the right of the right hedgerow above.

After the hedgerow stop, we went on to Utah and Omaha Beaches. Here is our tour guide drawing a map of the Americans' arrival on D-Day.

This is one of the gun implacements they destroyed to move on into France.

Here's Trout in a local bar set up like it might have looked at the time. It was really a German command headquarters back then.

I couldn't resist snapping this picture of the nun taking a picture.

Here's this monument from the front.

These are some of the defensive measures the Germans took.

The Americans blew up some of their bunkers.

It wasn't easy to do.

You can see how bundled up Trout was here. It was cold and rainy.

These are the Pont du Hoc cliffs that the Rangers climbed.

You can see how cold it was by the limited number of people on the beach. These were the only ones besides our tour group.

This is looking out across the English Channel.

Our last stop was the American cemetery. This land was given to the US by the French government and is considered to be American soil. We were also told that soil from all 48 states (remember, there were only 48 during WWII) was brought here.

The cemetery was just getting ready to close when we arrived. We had about an hour to visit. They were bringing down the flag and we noticed a ceremony of some type going on. At first we thought they were giving the flag to a young boy, but that was only done symbolically.

If you have a relative buried here, you can participate in the flag lowering ceremony in honor of your family member and you are given another flag as a remembrance of the event.

I happened on this cross for Red Cross worker, probably a nurse, who died in July, 1945 and is buried here.

There are many crosses for unknown soldiers.

That's the English Channel beyond these crosses. Omaha Beach is below.

Stars of David mark the graves of Jewish soldiers who lost their lives fighting the Nazis.

This is on part of the large memorial.

This is it from the back side.

These names are on the circular wall enclosing the rose garden behind the memorial. They are of men whose bodies were never recovered. I took this particular panel because it has a PFC James Garland from Kentucky. Western KY is as far back as I can go with my Garland genealogy. He may have been a relative.

Speaking of genealogy, a young guy in our tour group was from Denora PA. Trout talked quite a bit to him and it's possible that he might be a relative on Trout's mom's side of the family. It's a small town and he certainly knew some of the family names Trout mentioned.

After the cemetery we drove back to Bayeux, rested a bit in our room and headed about a half a block down the street to dinner at a place our tour guide recommended, Le Petit Normand. It more than made up for the odd experience we had our first night in Bayeux. At the recommendation of the young woman who checked us in, we ended up in a local bar for a mediocre meal, but we were definitely someplace where there were no other tourists.

After dinner, I walked around the Cathedral (across the street from the restaurant) and took these night pictures.

On Monday we took the train back to Paris, but not before we saw the Bayeux Tapestry. I studied it in college as a work of art and it was great to go to the museum and learn about it as history. You're not allowed to take any pictures, after all it's almost 1000 years old.

I pulled this picture from a website to show how you walk along to look at it. We had English language audio guides that made us go pretty fast, but you could pause and repeat things if you wanted. It's 70 meters long. You should be able to go to this Google search for more pictures.

The visit to the tapestry didn't take as long as we thought it would and there were plenty of trains going back to Paris, so we decided to hang around in Bayeux a little longer, see the Cathedral in the daylight and have lunch at our hotel before we left.

Bet you didn't know that I'm a saint.

We both went inside, but Trout sat on a bench in this little square in front of the Cathedral while I explored inside in more depth. He loved watching the cars almost hit each other as they navigated the tight turns here.

This little house built into the side was the caretaker's house.

I thought this was a lovely smallish Cathedral.

These pictures are from a burial vault below the altar.

This is back in a side chapel off the nave.

This half-timbered house was across the street from the Cathedral.

As we were walking back to our hotel, Trout loved this ivy so much that I had to pose with it. That's Le Petit Normand on the other side of the street.

We weren't real hungry but we knew we would be by the time we got to Paris, so we shared a 4-cheese pizza at the hotel restaurant. It seemed to be a very popular restaurant and almost always full. We were surprised but not disappointed when the 4 cheeses were Norman French cheeses and not the typical Italian. Of course we had to celebrate with ice cream. I think this was some kind of cabernet sorbet.

And Trout couldn't get away without taking a couple of pictures of this MG in the parking lot across the street.

Being full of pizza, sorbet and laziness we took a taxi to the train station. We had to wait a bit, but we had an absolutely wonderful French/English conversation with a woman with an old French bull dog who was also waiting there. She was a bit older than us and unbelievably beautiful with no Botox or plastic surgery. She and her 70-year-old husband had a place in the countryside near Bayeux and an apartment in Paris.

She spent most of her time in the country and he mostly stayed in Paris to run their fashion related business. She had been a model most of her life and said she was so glad when she got too old because then she could eat what she wanted. She was tall, not fat or even plump, but she wasn't model thin any more. She told Trout that he looked robust like a typical Norman man. Thank goodness her English was better than my French, but we both managed to do okay with the communication.