From Omaha Beach we headed to Gold Beach. The names for the beaches were selected at random but some of the original names were different types of fish. The name selected for the Canadians was originally Jelly Beach (for jelly fish). The Canadians said, nope, that isn’t happening. I think Juno was some guy’s wife.
Leaving Omaha Beach, we noticed several large pictures attached to homes and other buildings. Many were tributes to the American Soldiers, thanking specific soldiers for specific things they did for that family but most were showing before and after pictures.
There were several of them, but I found this church in a small village to be an excellent example of the devastation done to the area.
Before we arrived at Gold Beach, Alex headed off some side road and we drove up to these bunkers. They weren’t on the agenda, but Alex had seen them on google maps as he was uploadeding Gold Beach. They were amazing. There were four batteries, each containing a 155mm gun. For those of you who are metric deficient, the bullets coming out of those guns were over 6 inches in diameter. They are all sitting there, just as they were at the end of the battle. We looked at this first one and decided it must have been bombed or hit by a shell from a ship because it was destroyed. We found out that the Germans were scavenging parts from all over and the gun in this installation was a slightly different caliber from the guns in the other installations and while it worked for a while, the gun eventually exploded.
While the second gun looked much better than the first one it really wasn’t. If you look at this picture you can see a hole just below the left window. What happened was that a ship out in the North Sea scored a lucky hit and put an artillery shell right into the front of the gun. These guns had two operators. One was aiming up or down and the other was aiming left and right. The guns were a good quarter mile back from the edge of the cliff and were getting directions from an observation sight up on the edge of the cliff.
While this gun was destroyed the rest of the bunker was as new and it was fascinating to see the powder storage room and the storage room where the shells were stored and passed out to the guys loading the guns.
The reason we know anything about these guns is because as we were standing there this random guy walks up to us and started telling us all about the guns. He was amazing. And yes, this bunker was full of water because it rained pretty much the entire time, we were in Europe, but we knew that was going to happen and we were dressed for it. Even though it rained a lot, we didn’t even notice it (except for two days), and we never let it affect our schedule. We saw everything on our schedule and more. This last gun was still in pristine condition, so Alex and I decided to take control of it. We got no signals from the observation site, so we had no one to shoot at. Besides, we didn’t want to mess with the pretty little flower that someone had put in the gun barrel.
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