Picking up the car Wednesday morning and realizing I would be well over the mileage limit for two days, I rented an additional do to give some flexibility; I then headed to Arras, picked up Vanessa, and visited the Vimy then the Beaumont-Hamel memorials. The Vimy monument is quite impressive; and perhaps also interesting that it survived through Nazi-occupied France in the Second World War. The trenches have been changed to concrete shaped like sand bags and have hard floors, unlike the mucky mess that would have been there during the War War I. The tunnels were also quite impressive and the scale of the operations involved is almost unimaginable – the multitude of trenches spanned many hundreds of kilometres.
Beaumont-Hamel was next and provides a better view of the trench networks. The trenches have had grass grow over them, and I suspect they are neither as deep nor with walls as steep as they once had, but the site provides a good impression of how significant the trench network was.
The next day I drove to Juno Beach for the Canadian memorial site (which is funded by donations and admission, and not by the government of Canada, apparently). The site features an extensive interpretive centre, a bunker entered during the tour, and some guns. The bunker reminded me of Saving Private Ryan and, having seen the real things, it would be interesting to see the movie once again.
I took the advice of a tour guide and drove along the coast line and checked out a few other installations – the two I found most interesting being the artificial harbour, Port Winston, created by the Allies who brought “caissons” and scuttled ships to build suitable areas to operate a port and a four 152mm gun battery mounted on a bluff. The guns were quite impressive, and could apparently shoot up to 12 miles (about 19 km). Except where the installations were collapsing I was able to walk up and around the guns and through their protective structure. These, unlike the earlier bunker, appeared designed mostly to shield from air bombing – there were no doors to the major passages; only to rooms which I assume held ammunition. The idea, I understand, was to put a huge chunk of concrete above and around the gun to prevent it from being destroyed by a bomb dropped on it. It seemed to work, I wondered in the collapsing bits, which were fairly minimal given the structures are about 70 years old was perhaps caused by the Allied bombing attempt prior to D-Day – only two of the structures had any collapsed roof, and none over the guns.
At the same site I was able to see the aiming station, which I assume would have been used to spot and identify ships, then calculate what direction to shoot the guns. This station featured two lookout platforms covered by very thick concrete with thin horizontal slits to see outwards. The top station’s roof was supported by four metal rods which looked quite small given the massive size of the concrete roof. There were also a few other gun sites and ammunition storage facilities.
Before finding the gun battery I also found a neat bunked/shelter near a farm house – these war installations were made of very thick concrete and have withstood 70 years of weather in quite good condition.
I headed back to Paris, caught a nap on the side of the road, then enjoyed Paris traffic in the morning to return the car. That is, Paris traffic without having entered Paris itself – only reaching the approximately the outermost station on the #1 Metro line. The folks at the rental place were confused by the more than 900 kilometres I had put on the car in two days.