Road Trip Through History: The Falaise Pocket and The Long Legacy of Battle
The final day of our tour of Normandy was spent on the critical engagement known as the Falaise Pocket or Falaise Gap, Between August 12 and August 21, Allied forces, including exiled Polish forces who had taken refuge in Britain after the Germans invaded Poland, encircled the German Seventh Army in a pocket around the city of Falaise.
Unlike many of the operations of the Battle of Normandy, which are often told in terms of the heroic actions of small groups or individuals in the midst of chaos, the events of the Falaise Pocket lend themselves to clear descriptions of troop movements. Allied troops surrounded 100,000 of Hitler’s best troops in a pincer movement: United States forces moving south and east while British, Canadian, and Polish forces moved in from the North. The delay of American troops created a brief opening, the Falaise gap, through which some 50,000 German troops fought their way free. The two thousand man 1st Polish Armored Division captured Hill 262, in the middle of the bottleneck, and held it against overwhelming odds against German forces for two days and nights until relieved by Canadian troops. It was a thrilling story, even though I am not generally a fan of military history reduced to troop movements.
After driving through the Dives valley where the battle of the Falaise Pocket occurred we stopped at a small private museum, the Mémorial de Montormel, located on a hill overlooking the battlefield. The museum told the story of the battle in three different forms: on a contoured table map with lights representing the various troops movements,* in a brief film, and as a personal narrative told by the museum director while we stood at an enormous picture window looking out over the valley where the battle occurred.
The director’s account brought the battle back to the human level, and reminded us that even liberation leaves horror in its wake. General Eisenhower described the events at Falaise as “one of the greatest killing grounds that any sector of the war has ever experienced... forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap, it was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.” The museum director made it clear that the effects lasted more than forty-eight hours. He described land cloaked first with a layer of black flies and later with a white layer of maggots. It was two years before the people of the Dives Valley could plant crops again because the ground water was polluted with the corpses of dead men and dead horses.** Twenty years later, contractors were still removing scrap metal left from the battle. I can’t say it too often: war is ugly.
*I thought it was excellent. My Own True Love thought it was confusing. Just so you know.
**We tend to think of World War II as highly mechanized, but horses still played an important role and died in battle. More than 10,000 horses were killed in the Falaise Pocket alone.
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Before I abandon the invasion of Normandy for other historical topics, I want to recommend a museum on the other side of the Channel which deals with the invasion from another perspective: the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth. The museum does an excellent job of portraying both preparations for D-Day and the invasion itself, but it is not “just” a military museum. A significant portion of the exhibit focuses on social history of the period, looking at bombing raids, women in the workforce, black outs, evacuation and rationing as experienced in Portsmouth. I was particularly taken by the oral history element of the museum: the museum not only provided book after book of first hand accounts for the visitor to read, it also played recordings of those accounts in the relevant sections of the museum. The centerpiece of the museum is the Overlord Embroidery: a 272-foot long embroidery commissioned as an answer to the Bayeux Tapestry. Pretty spectacular.
Road Trip Through History: The Bayeux “Tapestry”
I played hooky from the tour on the second day devoted to D-Day because I wanted to visit the Bayeux Tapestry,(1) (Which is actually a work of embroidery. Just saying.) The group was scheduled to see the tapestry several days later, but I was sure I would want to spend more time than was officially allotted. (I’m almost as fascinated by needlework as I am by history. ) I am so glad I did. If truth be told, I would have happily made a third visit. Because, wow!
I have read a great deal about the tapestry over the years. But nothing had prepared me for the real thing. Plates don't do justice to the skill of the needleworkers or the power of the images. And quite frankly, I was never able to get a feel for the scale of the work (224 feet long and 20 inches high, more or less.) Made with only ten colors and four stitches,(2) the work is both historical document and artistic masterpiece. The central panel tells the story of how William came to conquer England, focusing on the actions of Harold Godwinson in Normandy that lead to the Battle of Hastings. The battle itself appears only in the final scenes, appropriate because in this version of the story it is the end of the narrative. An upper border includes Latin text describing the action below and Roman numerals that mark the transition to each scene. A border on the bottom edge is filled with the embroidered equivalent of marginalia: tales from Aesop's fables and details of daily life in eleventh century Normandy.
The images manage to be both stylized and realistic. (In fact, the boat building scenes are a major source for students of medieval navies.) Realistic details bring events to life: it never occurred to me to wonder about how soldiers got from the boat to the shore until I saw images of Harold Godwinson wading barefoot through the surf in France. (If you look closely, you'll see that the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans have very different haircuts. The Anglo-Saxons wore their hair relatively long; the Normans wore their hair in a modified Mohawk.(
The museum itself is well designed. The tapestry is exhibited in a darkened, climate controlled room designed to protect it.(3) You walk its length with an audio tour that narrates the story as told in the tapestry, linked to the scene numbers that are part of the embroidery. Displays upstairs explain the construction of the tapestry and put it in context. An excellent film tells the story of William's claim to the throne (4) and describes the conundrums surrounding its construction. (We don’t know who commissioned the work or where it was made.)
In truth, the tapestry, er embroidery, could have been hung along the wall of Bayeux Cathedral, as it was for two weeks each year for centuries, with no modern display aids and I would have been entranced.
1) And a local bookstore and a pair of shoes that had screamed my name every time we walked past them in the store window. The bookstore visit was a success—bookstores in foreign countries are eternally fascinating as far as I’m concerned. (What English language books do they carry? What do the covers of my friends’ books look like in a foreign edition? Plus the cookbooks, the children’s books, the history books, all the other books…) The shoes were a bust—they didn’t carry my size. Story of my shoe-shopping life.
2) Stem stitch, chain stitch, split stitch, and a variation of satin stitch known as "Bayeux stitch" LINK? (In case any fellow embroiderers are reading this, it is a variation of laidwork.)
3) Making me wonder why France would even consider lending the tapestry to England. The mere act of moving it would cause damage.
4) Told from the French perspective, Harold Godwinson is a usurper and an oathbreaker.
Road Trip Through History: German Bunkers and Reinforced Concrete
At dinner on our first night in Normandy, we ended up in conversation with two men at a neighboring table, a pair of British history buggs who were also touring D-Day sites in Normandy. They had already spend several days looking at the remains of the battles over Normandy, and one of them made a comment that stuck with me for the rest of our time in Normandy: "The Germans sure loved reinforced concrete."
We soon found he was right. The remains of German bunkers and gun batteries bite into the landscape of Normandy: squat ugly concrete constructions with none of the grace of ruins from earlier ages.*
In our first day of touring alone we saw two fine examples: The Grand Bunker Atlantic Wall Museum at Ouistreham and the German gun battery at Longues-sur-Mer.
I must admit, the gun battery at Longues-sur-Mer was of only passing interest to me. It was the site of a key incident in The Longest Day.*** Seeing it gave me a sense of physical place, but did not change my understanding of the event. The serious D-Day buffs on the tour were more enthralled, and spent a bit of time quoting their favorite lines from The Longest Day to each other in situ.
The Grand Bunker Atlantic Wall Museum, also the site of a memorable incident in The Longest Day, was a different experience altogether. The concrete tower was the German headquarters in charge of gun batteries the covered the entrance to the river Orne. The top floor was a 360-degree observation post overlooking "Sword Beach", where the British landed on D-Day. On D-Day, the tower housed two officers and fifty men, who formed the last pocket of resistance after the British landed. For three days the German garrison held off Allied attempts to take the tower with heavy machine gun fire and grenades thrown from the roof of the Bunker. On June 9, the German garrison surrendered to Lieutenant Bob Orrell and three other members of of the Royal Engineers, who blew open the armored door of the bunker. (A four-hour process.)
Today, the fully restored tower is a museum that gives visitors an understanding of the cramped and claustrophobic experience of life in a bunker. The interior of the bunker is a multi-story corkscrew of small rooms on uneven levels, that house a radio transmission room, an electrical generator, ammunitions storage, bunk rooms, the original range finder in the observation post, and a medical bay that makes a Civil War hospital look like a modern surgical theater by comparison. In addition to German artifacts, the museum includes exhibits about the creation of the German system of coastal defenses and fortifications known as the Atlantic Wall****
An illuminating stop by any history buff standard.
*The Romans loved their concrete, too. They used it to build temples and coliseums and the renowned Roman roads throughout an empire that stretched from Persia to Britain. And while I suspect the people they conquered hated their Roman invaders as much as the people of Normandy hated the Germans,** the concrete constructions they left behind them are beautiful.
**Based on the regular revolts against Roman rule from one end of the empire to the other.
***Both the book by Cornelius Ryan and the 1962 movie based on the book--a three hour blockbuster with an ensemble cast that included virtually every male star in Hollywood.
****Built between 1942 and 1944 using conscripted French labor. By June 1944 the Atlantic Wall extended eight hundred miles with some nine thousand fortified positions. Not that it did the Germans any good.