WEATHER: Windy, sunny and 12C
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Learning about a part of history I knew nothing about
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Seeing the 10,000 white crosses at Omaha – sad
BUYS OF THE DAY: A couple of postcards and a magnet
WORD OF THE DAY: Omaha and D-Day
MOVIES WATCHED TODAY: Morning Glory and The Grace Card
WHAT WAS ON THE MENU:
Mixed leaves with oven baked goat cheese, topped with honey, thyme and pine nuts
French onion soup with crouton and cheese
Roasted duck leg confit with cherry sauce, accompanied with red cabbage and rissole potatoes
Bourbon vanilla crème brulee with fruit skewer
Today was going to be the longest day of the week with us heading out to the beaches of Normandy. Breakfast was at 7am and we were off the ship and into our numbered coaches at 8am. Rouen is the capital of the Normandy region and it is quite a large city with the 5th largest port in France also located here. The kids are currently on school holidays and there is a fair that has set up on the opposite side of the river. I would love to go if I had some-one to go with, but I just don’t think that it is going to happen with my new ‘older’ cruise friends. The crazy mouse looks insane and as we pulled up last night, with the riverside park all lit up it looked like a mini Las Vegas.
There was an incident on the ship last night where a lady had fallen over a raised doorway. She was the talk of dinner last night and we found out this morning that she had broken her ankle and was being taken to hospital to get emergency surgery. Wow – I guess the stats are high on a cruise like this that there would be a fall of some sort. Poor thing – her trip is now over.
After driving through the beautiful French countryside for 2 hours we got to our first stop Arramanches. His little town got famous for the fake harbor called Mulberry that was built here in 1944. The Royal Engineers built a complete Mulberry harbor out of 600,000 tons of concrete between 33 jetties, and had 15 km of floating roadways to land men and vehicles on the beach. Port Winston is commonly upheld as one of the best examples of military engineering. Its remains are still visible today from the beaches at Arromanches. 17 old ships crossed the English Channel under their own steam and were then sunk by their crews bow to stern and formed the first shelter. 115 football field sized cement blocks were towed across the channel and also sunk, creating a 4mile long breakwater 1.5 miles off shore, creating a port the size of Dover. Then 7 floating steel pier heads with extendable legs were set up and linked to shore by 4 mile long floating roads made of concrete pontoons. Within 6 days 54,000 vehicles, 326,000 troops and 110,000 tons of goods had been delivered! In 6 days!!!!
We got given 2 hours here to see the small infamous n/ famous village and also a visit to the D-day Museum. I have to be honest; I really didn’t know much information about WWII and D-Day, so it certainly was very informative and interesting to see footage, memorabilia, statistics and quotes of the lead up, the events and aftermath of D-Day in particular. To see the older generation walking around, some with tears in their eyes, it was quite moving. Most of my cruise companions are around the 60+ mark, so certainly not old enough to have been in the war themselves, but to have their fathers or remember where they were on the 6th of June 1944, just makes me think that I am just not sure if young people today really do register what was done for our freedom in the wars gone past. Not just WWI and II.
Besides the harbor being the first prefab harbor that was built in 12 days and an ensuring storm that totally ruined another man made harbor, Mulberry survived. The second main note is an invading army had not crossed the unpredictable and dangerous English Channel since 1688. Once the massive Allied force set out, there was no turning back. The Allies boasted a 5,000-vessel armada that stretched as far as the eye could see, transporting both men and vehicles across the channel to the French beaches. In addition, the Allies had 4,000 smaller landing craft and more than 11,000 aircraft.
By nightfall on June 6, more than 9,000 Allied soldiers were dead or wounded, but more than 100,000 had made it ashore and secured French coastal villages. Within weeks, supplies were being unloaded at Utah and Omaha beachheads at the rate of more than 20,000 tons per day. By June 11, more than 326,000 troops, 55,000 vehicles, and 105,000 tons of supplies had been landed on the beaches. By June 30, the Allies had established a firm foothold in Normandy. Allied forces crossed the River Seine on August 19.
There is no official casualty figure for D-Day. It is estimated that more than 425,000 Allied and German troops were killed, wounded, or went missing during the battle. That figure includes more than 209,000 Allied casualties. In addition to roughly 200,000 German troops killed or wounded, the Allies also captured 200,000 soldiers. Captured Germans were sent to American prisoner-of-war camps at the rate of 30,000 per month, from D-Day until Christmas 1944. Between 15,000 and 20,000 French civilians were killed during the battle in the end, the invasion of Normandy succeeded in its objective by sheer force of numbers. By July 1944, some one million Allied troops, mostly American, British, and Canadian, were entrenched in Normandy. During the great invasion, the Allies assembled nearly three million men and stored 16 million tons of arms, munitions, and supplies in Britain.
I love statistics, but those numbers are just amazing and really hard to comprehend. War sucks.
After lunch we boarded the coach again for the hours’ drive to Omaha Beach. The beach was just beautiful and very hard to imagine over 70 years ago there was so much blood shed on the very sand that we were walking on. There was a massive memorial on the beach in honor of those who lost their lives during that invasion that lasted 2 months. There were people from the tour collecting some sand and putting into bags or bottles. There was an air of respect and no one was yip yayying or being crazy on the beach, not just our coach. We stopped here for 25 minutes before then heading to the main stop of the afternoon at The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.
The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial is a World War II cemetery and memorial that honors American soldiers who died in Europe during World War II. On June 8, 1944, the U.S. First Army established the temporary cemetery, the first American cemetery on European soil in World War II. After the war, the present-day cemetery was established a short distance to the East of the original site.
Like all other overseas American cemeteries in France for World War I and II, France has granted the United States a special, perpetual concession to the land occupied by the cemetery, free of any charge or any tax. This cemetery is managed by the American government, under Congressional acts that provide yearly financial support for maintaining them, with most military and civil personnel employed abroad. The U.S. flag flies over these granted soils.
The cemetery is located on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach (one of the landing beaches of the Normandy Invasion) and the English Channel. It covers 70 ha (172 acres), and contains the remains of 9,387 American military dead, most of whom were killed during the invasion of Normandy and ensuing military operations in World War II. Included are graves of Army Air Corps crews shot down over France as early as 1942. Only some of the soldiers who died overseas are buried in the overseas American military cemeteries. When it came time for a permanent burial, the next of kin eligible to make decisions were asked if they wanted their loved ones repatriated for permanent burial in the U.S., or interred at the closest overseas cemetery. All the marble crosses face westwards towards the United States of America and they had name, rank and the US State they came from. No ages were engraved on the stone, as there were a lot of men who were signing u that were under age and it is up to the country whether that information goes on the inscriptions which the US declined solely for that reason. To see rows upon rows of white crosses was super sad and see men’s names on the crosses. We were all given a flower to go and pay our respects to some-one. It is an initiative of 2 men, who didn’t want any of the men to be forgotten and Uniworld is an advocate for the programme, so we got to place our flower where ever we wanted to pay our respects. I walked to the very last line of crosses and chose one that I like the sound of. I rekon the last row would be too far for a lot of the older people who come here. I have to say I shed a few tears, for the lives lost, but it also reminded me of my mum and I had planned to see her grave before I embarked on my trip, but due to cyclone Carlos it was cancelled, so I didn’t get to see her before I left. I haven’t been in a graveyard since her funeral, so it was all a little too much for me. There were also a number of crosses that read “Here rests in Honored Glory a Comrade in arms known but to God”
The names of 1,557 Americans who lost their lives in the conflict but could not be located and/or identified are inscribed on the walls of a semicircular garden at the east side of the memorial. This part consists of a semicircular colonnade with a loggia at each end containing maps and narratives of the military operations. At the center is a bronze statue entitled Spirit of American Youth. Facing west at the memorial, one sees in the foreground the reflecting pool, the mall with burial areas to either side and the circular chapel beyond. Behind the chapel are statues representing the United States and France. An orientation table overlooks the beach and depicts the landings at Normandy.
There is also a museum on the grounds, but there is always a lineup and takes up more than half your time to line up and walk through it, so I just decided to walk around the grounds and took a seat on the many benches that are around the gardens and just think back to 1944 and just horrific that time must have been and now looking at the tranquility and peacefulness of the area and knowing time passes but it will certainly never forget.
So after 2.5 hours at the Cemetery and Memorial it was time to hit the road back to the ship. I got a lot of people asking me what I thought of the afternoon, being an Australian and not having any Australians in the cemetery. But we did lose lives as well in both wars, they may not have been in that particular cemetery, but at the end of the day it is all the same thing, no matter what country these young men came from. They died young, they died for our freedom and they died with comrades in arms fighting in a common cause.
Dinner was served a little later tonight, to give us all a chance to freshen up after being out all day. It is a BIG day for anyone, let alone for some of the older passengers. It was a French themed dinner, and I must admit I passed on the escargot. I just couldn’t do it, and they were in garlic sauce and already de-shelled, but even knowing that it was a firm no from me.
The day was not quite yet over with AJ getting in his port talk after dinner at 9.15pm. he good thing is he is aware of how tired we all were. He recaps the day’s events, goes through the next day’s events and timings and then we were let loose for the remainder of the evening. Yeah, well off to bed for this black duck. It was a rewarding, sobering, informative and emotional day for us all and we hope that those who fight and lose their lives in war will never be forgotten.
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