Bigtallfatbloke
New Member
this is a very interesting spot. The cafe was the first building to be liberated in France in WW2 and I think I am right in saying that the same family still own & run the cafe today....although the lady is a little...erm...blunt in some of her remarks!
On the other side of the river you will find memorials placed in the exact spots where the gliders landed that night...I was amazed at just how close they got to the bridge...just a few yards. You can walk across the bridge (which is a replica of the origional)...it is a lot smaller than I had imagined. Off to the right on the opposite bank to the cafe is the museam, and the origional bridge (which was moved).
One must visit place is St. Mere Eglise in the American sector behind Utah beach. The church there in the sq still displays a parachutist hanging from the spire as a memorial, and there are still bullet holes in the church. Inside there is a stained glass window designed after the war which depicts the raid by the US airbourne that night. There is a museum as well.
One tip for getting the most out of your visit. get a guide book with photos and maps. It is very easy then to locate the exact same places today as are depicted in the photographs, which is a 'strange'(for want of a better word) experience.
If you go to Utah beach there is a museam there as well. Just along to the west of that are the heavily fortified German bunkers...go inside...they still have the origional Nazi wall paintings in a couple of them. Luckily for the Americans on D Day they drifted along th ebeach away from their landing zone and landed in the wrong place....this saved many lives as the 'right place' was smack bang in front of those bunkers....where they actually landed there were just the two small bunkers which are incorporated in the museam today...one of which is now a toilet! You will notice the names of the sandy paths up from the beach to the street are named after American soldiers who died on those paths.
