Les Grandes Grandes Vacances de Petite Grace, Part One

Or, Mini Grace's Long, Long Holiday

Guess who finally graduated from her master’s program! And then promptly still hasn’t had enough time to sit down and get back to blogging the way she wants to. Hopefully that will change once I’ve moved into my new place, gotten back to work, and gotten married (!!), but we’ll see. Maybe I just need to make peace with the fact that A Peek into the Pantry isn’t going to ever get back to a seven posts a month schedule. 

Another reason I’ve been a little absent here is Mini Grace and I went on quite an adventure! Enough of one that I’ve decided to split it into two blog posts to spare you all from sifting through hundreds and hundreds of photos all at once. I’m really excited to share some of our adventures with you. 

Where did we go?

France! Disney Paris, Normandy, and Paris itself, to be exact. This post is going to focus specifically on the Normandy section of the trip, because that’s the part I’m really dying to tell everyone about. Seriously, I’ve been basically nonstop hyped up about this trip for over a month at this point. 

I know I usually credit American Girl as my gateway to history, which led me to getting this degree and a career in the field and all, and that’s still very true, but the historical topic that really ensnared my interest like nothing else was D-Day. In 6th grade, my French teacher let us watch a week’s worth of documentaries in honor of the 60th anniversary, and something about it just really hooked me. Military history was (and is) a major boy’s club, and often isn’t taught well in grade school (or college…) and something about these documentaries really brought the moment to life for me in a way nothing else had. One of my first forays into historical fiction was a short story about the landings on Omaha Beach which I still have the original draft of somewhere at my parent’s house. 

So, needless to say, I’d wanted to visit Normandy since I was like, 12 years old. I missed out on an opportunity to visit seven years ago when my family went because I had a summer job I felt like I couldn’t duck out on, so my dad surprised me with a trip with the National World War II Museum as a graduation present. We visited the museum two years ago and it’s easily one of my favorite institutions I’ve ever visited. 

Well, until now anyway.

The tour started in Bayeux, a really beautiful medieval town probably most famous for the Bayeux Tapestry, a mostly intact tapestry depicting William the Conqueror’s conquest of England. It’s a must see for anyone visiting the city, and has survived numerous attempts to destroy, kidnap, and restore it. You can’t take pictures of it, but here’s Grace with an example of the embroidery used to make the tapestry in the museum:

Bayeux is also famous for being the first major town secured by the Allies during Operation Overlord, the codename for the D-Day operation. It’s survived mostly intact, unlike many other Norman towns like Caen, St. Lo, and Cherbourg, which were extremely heavily damaged by Allied bombing. 

It was secured by British forces, and the first day of our tour largely focused on the British perspective. We got to visit Pegasus Bridge, a major objective for British glider infantry during the first stages of the invasion of Normandy. Major John Howard and his men successfully captured the bridge, which helped limit the effectiveness of German counterattacks in the weeks ahead.

You can see the real bridge along with a replica glider and artifacts from the 6th Airborne at Memorial Pegasus, or Pegasus Museum, just down the street. The real bridge was moved to the museum because it was no longer meeting the traffic needs of the road, and it is preserved outside the museum’s building. You can walk across it and see the shrapnel marks from the battle. 

There are no surviving World War II era gliders because they were extremely fragile aircraft made of wood and canvas, so the fact that any managed to get airborne and not splinter into a million pieces upon landing is seriously a miracle. The museum does have some fragments on display in a room discussing the history of the unusual craft. 

They also have artifacts from Major Howard and the whisky flask of Lt. Den Brotheridge, the man considered to be the first Allied casualty of the D-Day invasion. It was donated to the museum by his daughter, who still visits the museum on the anniversary of the landings.

Our next stop was the Museum of the Grand Bunker, a surviving piece of the Atlantic Wall built by Germany to watch for potential threats to the coast. This particular bunker was captured by two British engineers, who single handedly captured a couple dozen Germans who decided it was better to drink the rest of their schnapps and wait for the Allies to come than to make a dramatic final stand. 

The museum focuses their collections on the material the Germans would have used in the bunkers and what sort of people would have been working in them, how the wall was built, and how these bunkers worked. It also featured a lot of really unsettling mannequins, the worst of which I won’t terrify you with. 

Unfortunately, it was so foggy out, we couldn’t really see too far when we got to the top.

We stopped for lunch in Arromanches, a seaside town on Gold Beach. It’s the home of the first ever D-Day Museum, founded in 1954. Unfortunately, we only got to see Musée du Débarquement from the outside, making it one of many things I’m going to have to go back and see again sometime in the future.

The main reason we stopped at Arromanches is that it’s a really great spot to see the remains of the British Mulberry, the fake harbor used to help offload Allied ships before they were able to capture a harbor like Cherbourg. The American Mulberry was damaged in a storm and had to be scrapped the day after it was finished being built, but the British Mulberry played a crucial part in Allied supply lines for quite some time. 

There’s still a lot of it on the beach, which can best be seen at low tide. My dad and I had a lot of fun exploring it, although Mini Grace didn’t get too close because of all the seaweed.

After seeing a film in a 360 degree theater overlooking the beach, we headed to the German gun batteries at Longues-sur-Mer. These are the only gun batteries that actually have their guns inside them, making them a really interesting historical site to visit. It’s also a popular site because parts of The Longest Day were filmed there. 

Again, the fog made it pretty difficult to see anything beyond the guns themselves, but I was still excited to finally see it in person.

The next day was my favorite day of the tour. As I’ve probably mentioned in the past, I – like everyone else – am a huge Band of Brothers fan, so when I heard we were going to have a whole “Airborne” themed day, I was really excited to hit the ground running and see everything there was to see. 

Funnily enough, one of the first sights we saw was a statue erected to honor Major Richard Winters, one of the primary figures featured in Band of Brothers. It’s a relatively new monument, and it’s positioned on the road as closely as possible to Brécourt Manor, the site of then Lt. Winters’s famous assault on German guns that were targeting Utah Beach. It’s still a private property, so tourists aren’t allowed to just waltz right up to it, making this the best spot for the public to enjoy the monument.

We’ll get back to Brécourt later. 

Our next stop was Utah Beach and the Utah Beach Museum. The paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne dropped behind Utah Beach to help support the landings and capture territory that would help link Utah to Omaha beach. No paratroopers dropped behind Omaha. 

Members of the 4th and 90th Infantry Divisions landed on Utah Beach along with the 70th Tank Battalion. Today, the beach has several monuments just outside the beach itself, including one to Andrew Jackson Higgins. Higgins Industries invented and produced the LCVP, the landing craft that General Eisenhower credited as being responsible for the success of D-Day. Higgins Industries was in New Orleans, which is why the NWWIIM is located in New Orleans! That was a fun surprise to discover.

The Utah Beach Museum was one of my favorites we visited, with galleries discussing the lead up to D-Day, the Naval action at the beach, the landing itself, and the paratrooper drop, along with the efforts of medical personnel to help the wounded and how the French civilians responded to being liberated. 

Highlights of the collection included a B-26, artifacts from Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Regiment including wreckage from Captain Thomas Meehan’s plane, an actual D-Ration Chocolate Bar (which I discussed in my review of the NWWIIM), and a Navy Corpsman’s uniform and gear. I’ve done some projects discussing the role of Navy Corpsmen in World War II and it’s always exciting to see them included. 

The museum is also built on top of an old Nazi bunker, as are many of the museums in Normandy. Turns out the Germans left behind a lot of those.

We headed back towards the statue of Major Winters, and when we stopped, got a really cool cross section view of the famous Norman bocage. Bocage – or hedgerows – were a huge problem for Allied troops trying to advance into France during the Battle of Normandy. They were particularly difficult for tanks, as going up through them exposed their fragile underbellies. 

These hedgerows are both the result of hundreds of years of carts and cars creating ditches in the countryside, and intentional natural fences and boundaries between farmland created by landowners.

This hedgerow was at Brécourt Manor! One of the benefits of going on the tour with the NWWIIM was having access to some exclusive programming, and this was absolutely the best part. We got a private tour of the property from the curator of the Utah Beach Museum, who is also the current owner of the Manor. His father was the founder of the museum and is referenced in the book Band of Brothers. He’s the teenage boy who a paratrooper accidentally shot four times in the back. Lt. Winters and some others helped evacuate him to Utah Beach, where he was sent to be treated in a British military hospital. Fortunately, Michel de Vallavieille held no ill will towards the Americans and became a huge advocate for preserving and educating people about D-Day, thus why he founded the museum. The museum was also the location of the world premiere of Band of Brothers. 

Charles de Vallavieille led the tour, showing us where the assault on the German guns took place. In the photos below (the one with me in it especially), the guns would have been near the tree line on the left hand side, while the paratroopers would have had to run across the open field to take them out. 

We also got to quickly drive by a monument to a memorial to the men of Easy Company who died on D-Day and the days immediately following.

We had lunch at a really beautiful old home turned restaurant.

And then we headed to Sainte-Mère-Église! Again, this is probably really familiar to anyone who’s seen The Longest Day, as one of the most iconic scenes in the movie is when a paratrooper – John Steele – from the 82nd Airborne gets caught on the church steeple. The film really embellishes what happened, but the true story is just as interesting. 

The church is one of the must sees in the town. It has a dummy paratrooper stuck on the steeple (although not in the same spot as where John Steele really landed) and there are two stained glass windows inside featuring paratroopers with St. Michael, Mary and Jesus. Sainte-Mère-Église is the first town taken by the Allies on D-Day and still has a huge amount of respect and fondness for the paratroopers who liberated the town. The town’s coat of arms even features parachutes on it!

It’s also the home of the Airborne Museum, a really cool facility that has three buildings, each spotlighting different elements of the American Airborne divisions. It has some larger artifacts in the open air, as well as a C-47, a WACO Glider, and a really awesome interactive where you can climb into a C-47 and “jump” into Normandy. You step through the C-47 and out onto a bridge over a model of Normandy, complete with small C-47s and other sticks of paratroopers jumping, sound and light effects, and even a breeze to make you feel like you’ve actually stepped out of the plane. 

They had artifacts from John Steele, as well as General Maxwell Taylor, Matthew Ridgway, and James Gavin. Their C-47 also has an interesting story: it was flown to the museum with the help of the man who flew it on D-Day!

We finished the day by visiting the site of a bridge in La Fiere where members of the 82nd Airborne held off German counterattacks. It includes a replica of the “Iron Mike” statue that was originally erected at Fort Bragg.

Day Three was about Omaha, and we started off early by heading straight to Pointe du Hoc. Two Army Ranger battalions under James Redder assaulted the cliffs to take out a German gun battery and other guns that would target the landings. The battery had been moved, but the Rangers were successful in disabling the other guns and taking the cliffs, although they suffered a huge loss of life in the process. By the end of the fighting, only 90 of 225 men were alive and not seriously wounded. A sword shaped monument marks the spot where they scaled the cliffs and is the site of one of Ronald Reagan’s most famous speeches. 

We were really lucky in that the fog that had been dogging us all week finally lifted, so we got really amazing views of the ocean and cliffs. Pointe du Hoc also still really bears the scars of the Allied bombardment, with giant shell craters littering the cliffside. The German bunkers are all over the place too.

Although we were there on a Sunday, a Memorial Day event was being held at the Normandy American Cemetery. This is the final resting place of Teddy Roosevelt Jr., his brother Quentin, and the Nilan brothers, one of the inspirations for Saving Private Ryan and indirectly Band of Brothers. The cemetery was originally on Omaha Beach itself, but the military eventually realized it was a huge blow to morale for new troops disembarking on the beach to see a giant cemetery. The graves were quickly moved up the cliffside. 

I was really moved finally getting to see it in person for many reasons, but most specifically because unlike Arlington Cemetery and other military cemeteries, the graves are not all uniform. There’s something really powerful about looking out and seeing Stars of David among the crosses. 

I also learned that of the four women buried at the cemetery, two are African American members of the Women’s Army Corps and both were from Connecticut. They were tragically killed in a car accident.

Finally, we went to Omaha Beach itself. The tide was really low, and it was really weird to see

We got back to Bayeux early that night – and the sun didn’t set until like 10:00 anyway – so my dad and I headed up to check out the British cemetery in Bayeux. Interestingly, the cemetery is also the final resting place of several German, Soviet, Polish, and Italian soldiers, and more. Each grave has a slightly different design to mark the nationality of the deceased, although Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand graves are the same style as the British ones.

Nearby the British Cemetery is the Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy, Bayeux's World War II focused museum. It's part of a partnership with a few other museums in the city, so if you're going to be in Bayeux for a while, it's worth investigating their deals on tickets. 

It was a nice little museum with lots of cool artifacts, just like the rest of the museums we visited, but it has a unique gallery focusing on the efforts of war correspondents and photographers. I made my dad take a photo with the US Army photography truck because he's always taking thousands of photos whenever we go on vacation anywhere. A lot of the nicer ones included in this post are from him! (I just used my phone camera...)

We got to explore Bayeux for quite a while because a train strike made it hard for our guide to come meet us, so there was a lot of down time. But later in the afternoon, we headed to Caen to the Mémorial de Caen, a museum focusing on the widespread effects of the battle of Normandy and World War II more broadly. 

Now, I want to emphasize that this was a really well done museum with a lot of interesting galleries and artifacts. Like many of the others we visited, it was also built on top of a period German bunker! But that being said, it did have some issues I think are worth addressing, specifically in how it handled the Holocaust.

On the surface, it was a really well thought out exhibit discussing how and why it happened, and what it was like for the people harmed by these policies, but there was literally no mention of the French involvement in the atrocities. This really bothered me, and I think is a big oversight for the museum in a way I've seen a lot of museums do better. The Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC does explicitly discuss how the US refused to offer refuge to Jews trying to escape Nazi occupied Europe and touches on the debate of whether the Allies should have bombed the death camps, and how much the governments really knew about what was going on. There was none of that here, and I was not pleased. 

Fortunately, something we saw in Paris helped ease that a lot, and I did genuinely enjoy the museum otherwise. I just would love to have a chat with their team and ask why they're still trying to hide that part of French history. 

Our final stop before we headed off to our next adventure was the Mémorial Musée de Coudehard - Montormel. We drove around the Falaise gap discussing how the battle of Normandy came to an end, and then drove up the impressive Hill 262, where Polish forces successfully held off German forces until being relieved by the Canadians, ensuring the closure of the gap and preventing more German forces from escaping to fight another day. 

We didn't get a lot of stuff focusing on the Canadians during this tour, and nothing about the Poles until this part of the trip, so it was really interesting getting some history we usually don't cover in school. The view from the top of the hill was pretty astounding, too!

Oh, and did I mention we had a lot of amazing food? Normandy is most famous for its delicious milk products, especially cheese, and apples, and I can safely say I had the best apple tart I’ve ever eaten on our Airborne day. I was disappointed I didn’t get to have any mussels, but don’t worry, I made up for that on the next leg of our adventure.

Normandy was everything I had been dreaming it would be and more. I’m already planning my trip back, even though that probably won’t be for many, many years in the future. There was history everywhere you looked and there’s no way you can ever see and do everything on just one trip. 

Not just that, but it was so apparent that this history was important to the people who lived in the area. There was something really electric about being there that I haven’t experienced in any other historic site I’ve ever been to before and I can’t wait to go back and visit to feel it again. 

Next up, Paris! Both Disney and Original Flavor.

Complete with lots of pastries!