The vast expanse of Juno Beach

Our trip to Juno Beach was a full, rich and slightly overwhelming one.  The beginning of our day at Juno Beach Centre can be read about here.

After leaving Juno Beach our guide Christophe spent the next 5 hours taking us from the west side of the beach (in Courseulles-dur-Mer) eastward, through Bernieres-sur-Mer and Saint-Aubin-sur Mer.    These three downs hold the majority of Juno Beach (which s I mentioned, is 7 km long).  Driving (and walking) up these beaches you see a few repeated patterns.  The first - memorials.  There are memorial plaques, stones, and flags at an unparalleled frequency.  Honouring different countries, regiments, and people.  Each one is similar, but yet different.  There was a moment where I found myself stopped wondering if these were just on repeat, or if they each had their own significance.  And each is unique - a testament to how many people fought, how many lives were lost, and how important this battle was to the future of the world (also known as our present).  There is the Canada house - the original house that was liberated in 1944, with names posted under it's front window.  There are bunkers, and anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns - still in the cement along the shoreline.  There are local restaurants with the bunkers still attached to it.  Tanks sit along side the street as a reminder, with plaques on them dedicated to various regiments and their impact they had on the invasion of Normandy.  

There was a moment along the beach where Mr. Becker, and shortly after, a group of our students, walked down to the water.  Placed their hands in the Atlantic.  As the group was leaving, Mr. Becker turned around and started running back up the beach to meet us.  When he got back he commented how hard to was to run up the beach.  And how much harder it must have been with 80 lbs on their backs.  Wet clothes and boots, thick military apparel, and of course, a gun in their hands.  "And then", he said to me, "I tried to imagine doing this while people were shooting at me." Trying to understand war is sometimes easier (and then again, harder) while being able to stand in someone else's shoes.  The is a large part of the reason we were here.  

After we finished our time at the Beach we had one last stop - the Beny-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery.  Over 2000 Canadian soldiers who died here at the Battle of Normandy are burried here.  Some of the same monuments we learned about from Steve were here (as determined after WWI by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) - the Cross of Sacrifice, and the monument with the phrase "Their Name Liveth for Evermore."  

A lot of our students found this cemetery to be the most moving.  Opposed to the WWI cemeteries, the epitaphs found in this one were much more personal; this made them harder to read.  Lots of love for families, lots of sacrifice.  Honour.  Pride.  Courage.  And because of this, there were many more tears and aching hearts at the end of the day.  Some students walked around for almost an hour.  If we would have given them time to ready all 2048 headstones - many would have.  They wanted to understand.  And pay their respects.  And hear the stories.  If only we had time for them all.

And so our time in Normandy came to an end.  All too soon of course.  Until next time.

Juno Beach Centre

I've been working on this post for over a week now.  Going through 500 pictures trying to figure out how to share, explain and show what we learned, did and saw.  And there is lots.  So first off, I apologize for how long it will take for all the pictures to load, and secondly, you will find this broken into 2 posts.  There was just too much.

I wanted to talk all about the war, and educate you on the significance of every little thing we saw.  My brain is still struggling to process, and there were so many stories, battles, artifacts, places and names - too many for me to recount.  So if you need more information on D-Day and the battle that took place at Juno Beach, I know a great History teacher I can refer you to.  But for the purpose of this post I am going to simplify it - what we did, what we saw, why it mattered.  Our story.

August 31 was our WWII battlefield tour day - focusing on Juno Beach.  We had seen quite a bit from WWI, so this was a shift in the types of stories we were telling.  WWI was more about trenches and WWII was more about tanks.  It was interesting to see the shift in how wars were fought, as evident in the fields (and beaches) we visited.  War had changed drastically.  Looking back on both it could be too easy to see them as the same - just a first and second war.  But the 20+ years in between saw a lot of things change.  And these wars were definitly not the same.

We started our morning on the farm - loading the bus with our faithful driver Adri, as we journeyed 45 minutes to the town of Caen.  When we arrived it was raining heavily.  A few brave souls jumped out of the bus to take a photo of the Caen Memorial (Memorial de Caen).  This is a museum, but currently has a large statue out front of a sailor kissing a woman after the war.  The statue, 25 feet tall and officially dubbed "Unconditional Surrender" is rather controversial.  It was given to Caen as a 70th anniversary gift since the end of the war.  It is based on a picture from Life magazine from 1945 off a sailor who kissed a random women as a celebration of the end of the war.  This stature was created, because as the American who designed it said "A symbol of peace should include both men and women."  However, French feminists want it removed, and have argued that the symbol is actual assault (as coming up and kissing a random woman on the street in France would leave one charged with assault).  I didn't realize until reading more about it how controversial this image really is.

It was here in Caen that we picked up our tour guide for the day - Christophe.  He was our source of education to all things Juno Beach on this dark, somber, rainy day.  The rain did stop shortly after arriving at the beach, but the gray skies never lifted.  This didn't bother me though.  Somehow a sunny day with locals on the beach would have felt out of place for the war stories we were hearing.  The ominous skies were more appropriate, at least in my mind.

We drove from Caen to Courseulles-sur-Mer - one of the towns along the Atlantic Ocean that contains Juno Beach.  Juno is 7 km long - much bigger than I had ever imagined, and stretches through many seaside villages.  Courseulles-sur-Mer is the village that is home to the Canadian Juno Beach Centre.  It was hear that we had our first sight of Juno Beach.  We were able to get out of the bus, walk down into the sand, and watch the waves lap against the shore.  The sand is silky smooth, and unlike the farm fields full of shrapnel we met in the WWI regions, it looks more like a beach for sand castles than war.  Except the the shore line is littered with bunkers all the way down the 7 km beach.  Every once and a while you see a large block of cement in the same - evidence of something buried below.

We have an appointment at the Juno Beach Centre.  It began with an introductory film, followed by moving through a museum about the Canadian contribution to the war, here on Juno Beach.  There were so many video clips, sound clips, articles, posters and artifacts to see - more than we had time for in our 45 minutes.  This was one of the things we lamented at the end of the day - feeling rushed through the museum.  It was hard to rush, but also hard not to - we only had one day here and there was so much to see!  

Our museum visit was followed by a guided tour of the bunkers on the beach.  A representative from the Juno Beach Centre took us down below ground to understand how the beach and bunkers were set up in order to both protect themselves, and aid their offensive strategies.  The springs from the beds are still attached to the walls, and the floors are as cold and damp as they would have been in 1944.  As with our previous battlefield experiences, it is surreal to stand were they have stood.  To try and understand what it was like to have been there.  Not that much older than the students.  Maybe the same age as me.  Maybe younger.

After we left the bunkers we headed down to the beach with our Juno Beach Guide, while she told us all about what had happened here.  Maybe not ALL.  Between her and Christophe my mind is still swimming with information I am trying to piece together.  I had always imagined Juno Beach much smaller.  Like being able to see from one end to the other.  But it wasn't.  It went as far as the eye could see in both directions.  And then after Juno there was Sword Beach (to the east) and Gold Beach (to the west), with the British Forces.  And further west Utah and Omaha beaches, with the Americans.  This was not something you could observe in whole from a single watch tower.  It was a massive co-ordinated effort.  On the 6th of June, 1944, approximately 150,000 troops landed on the beaches in Normandy.  By July 4, it was over one million.  This is the largest seaborne invasion in history, and the beginning of the Allies reclaiming western Europe from the Nazi's.  I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it.

(Part 2 of the trip to Juno can be seen here)