It’s a rainy Monday morning, and no one is particularly motivated in any direction until Bennett declares that we’re going to Utah Beach; we leave in an hour.
Utah Beach is 45 minutes from us on the Normandy coast. It’s one of the five (I think) landing sites for D-Day, the June 6, 1944 Allied invasion that pierced German control of Europe and effectively won the war.
It’s a small museum but with a good collection of relics from le debarquement. I’ll be honest here and admit that war history doesn’t interest me, and I don’t pay much attention at all to the things that are on display. I enjoyed walking around the outside of the museum - around the American tank and the Higgins boat, the crafts that carried thousands of GIs into shore from the big naval ships; I was also struck by the experience of being on the beach itself.
Inside the museum, we watched a 20-minute movie about the invasion that I thought was perfect in length, pacing and its ability to convey the scale of the invasion, the sequence and timing of the airborne and amphibious attacks, and the target - in this case, gaining control of the port at Cherbourg, where we’d eaten dinner the previous night.
It was cool to see the starting points of the forces all along the southern coast of England and recall the plaque we saw in 2013 in our wood in Emsworth, dedicated to the Allied troops who were staged there for D-Day.
After a brief stop in Saint Marie du Mont while Rowan finished her pass through the museum, we headed back to la maison sur la page, where I walked the beach. Bennett made spaghetti and Griffin sliced cucumbers for dinner.
No comments:
Post a Comment