GOLD BEACH, MULBERRY HARBORS, AND LESSONS IN HISTORY

I was a military brat, and as such, most of what I learned about WW2 in high school was from an American perspective. I knew the name of Omaha Beach, but very little else about the D-Day landings or the military operations of the war. I read a lot of books about the resistance, the holocaust, and the lives of ordinary people living through the war, and as an adult have educated myself much further with movies, books, documentaries, and other sources of historical information. I’ve been to Berlin when it was still behind the wall, and I’ve been to 2 different concentration camps, but the military part was never what interested me most, and I wasn’t really interested in “doing” the D-Day beaches or visiting cemeteries or war memorials when we planned our trip to Normandy.

The beach at Arromanches was part of Gold Beach on D-Day. British troops landed there as part of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France. Our hotel in Arromanches-les-Bains was named The Mulberry, and we found out later why: it was named for the artificial harbors that the Allies built to use during the invasion of Normandy, which were codenamed Mulberry harbors. I had never even heard of the operation or the artificial harbors, and didn’t know much about the non-US aspects of the D-Day invasion. Arromanches was the site of one of the artificial harbors which was built in pieces in England, towed overnight to France, and deployed. The artificial harbor in Arromanches ended up being used for 10 months, though it had only been planned for 3, after the other harbor in place at Omaha beach was destroyed in a storm. If you are interested, there is a lot of great information about the mulberry harbors and Operation Overlord on the internet. 🙂

We arrived in Arromanches on June 5, the day before the D-Day anniversary, and the town was hopping with tourists, because a weeklong festival to celebrate the anniversary was getting started. There were people walking around all over town dressed in vintage military uniforms, lots of people from England, Canada, the US, and other parts of Europe and a general holiday atmosphere. Old military vehicles including jeeps, tanks, motorcycles, and an amphibian were parked around the center of town. Anders and I had dinner and then walked around a bit.

The next morning, after breakfast, we walked down to the beach, which at low tide, was sand quite far out. Many of the remains of the building blocks for the artificial harbor are still in place on the beach and out in the water. We waked right up to one huge remnant, and then down the beach to a long series of blocks leading out toward the water. These were part of the floating roadways used to offload vehicles and other war materiel for months. Afterwards, we went up again to the D-Day Museum, which very thoroughly covered all the info about the entire operation. Opened in 1954, it was actually the first museum dedicated to the Normandy landings. We were there for about 2.5 hours and at the end as we were coming around to the sea side windows of the museum, we could see that the tide had come all the way in and that the giant structures we had been standing next to earlier in the morning were nearly underwater!

Later in the afternoon, we walked up the hill to Arromanches 360, which was a circular cinema showing footage from the D-Day operations, and a sculpture park at the top of the cliff. It was sunny but super windy up on the hill. We went shopping in town for calvados, wine for the kids, and French shortbread and cookies, and then had dinner at the same restaurant we’d eaten at the night before…I made the mistake of ordering sea bream and was a bit taken aback when it arrived whole with head, fins, tail, and boiled eyeballs!

Our hotel: The Mulberry