megram - Index

megram - 55JunGTA - Index

The Juno Beach Centre commemorates Canada’s contributions
to World War II, providing excellent context
for the D-Day operations.
are quiet, stone farmhouses that have stood for centuries
and little country lanes on which to get deeply and intimately
lost.
Between me and a sheer drop to the sea below, the
football field-sized clifftop tells a different tale. The
Americans and British bombed this splinter of coastline
prior to D-Day, attempting to take out the German gun
battery that guarded the beaches to the west and east.
The Germans withdrew, but counterattacked after
American Rangers climbed the cliffs on D-Day, devastating
the eventually victorious Americans. It all seems so
academic until you see the craters strewn haphazardly
over the ground, some so large I could lie down in them,
some so close there’s barely room to walk between
them, the clipped grass and muted visitors’ voices hiding
the mud and acrid smoke of those nights.
I return to the car I’ve rented and turn east, past
Omaha Beach and the German gun batteries at Longues
Sur Mer, the only place on the coast where the guns are
still within their bunkers,and then find the winding road
down to the town of Arromanches.The rusting hulks of
June 2008 • 44 • Fifty-Five Plus Magazine