One hell of a battering ...

On our last afternoon in Normandy my brother Wayne indulged me and, after a quick look at that airship hangar at Ecausseville, he took us around a couple of WW2 sites that are almost on his back door (i.e. within 5 km or so).

The first site was that of the German emplacements at Azeville. From these photos you can see that they had been attacked, and there were plenty of signs of hits on the concrete emplacements themselves, although the pillboxes themselves were still entirely intact. It is impossible to tell what effect the hits would have had on the occupants, but there were no immediately obvious physical signs of their experience (although it would be hard to imagine them being unscathed in some way).

We then drove on to the emplacements at Crisbecq. Now from this first photo you’d say, more of the same…

But this was clearly a different ‘kettle of fish’. These views of the damage inflicted on the concrete alone leave you with a pretty good sense of the horrifying destructive power that had been unleashed on these emplacements. 

The area must have been bombed extensively. Even this view out across the adjacent fields towards the coast still shows the signs of extensive cratering. That’s the coastline on the horizon.

Sobering views ......