Day Eleven, July 31: Point du Hoc (sort of) and Omaha Beach
Day Eleven, July 31: Point du Hoc (sort of) and Omaha Beach
After a pleasantly unremarkable night in Camping du Fort Sampson, I set off for part two of the Operation Overlord segment of my tour. Per Marie’s recommendation, I was first going to visit Pointe du Hoc, then Omaha Beach, and hope to end up in Bayeux by the evening.
Pointe du Hoc is an elevated promontory on the Norman coastline between Utah and Omaha Beaches. It is visible on a map as a point that sticks out from the coastline. In 1944, it was the site of a German artillery battery, under concrete casemates to protect from aerial bombardment. Accordingly, the Allies felt that the only method available to attack it was to do a special forces attack, climbing up the cliffs from below. The commanding officer of the Army Rangers who is supposed to lead the attack said the night before that he thought it was a “suicidal” mission, and was replaced at the last minute. There were, in fact, quite heavy casualties for Rangers, but they did successfully destroyed the guns at the top. The 1962 movie The Longest Day is made about the attack.
When I arrived at Point du Hoc I was expecting something similar to Utah Beach: maybe some memorials but mostly and open air Park that you could visit the actual site. In fact, it was a rather built up memorial, and there appeared to be a security entrance to part of it. It was not very clear which part was meant to be secure: there was a building where I could see the there were metal detectors, but it seemed like it was maybe an entrance to some separate part, or building that I couldn’t fully see. I went ahead and walked towards what seemed to be the actual natural feature of Point du Hoc, but I was stopped by a French woman in a uniform and told that I would have to leave my bike and bags in the parking lot. I explained that I could lock my bike, but I didn’t have a car trunk or other secure place to leave my bags. If I just set them in the parking lot, I would be afraid that they would be stolen.
“This is not my problem,” she said. “These are the rules: no bicycles, and no large bags.”
“I have come several thousand miles from California to visit the place that is important to people for my country. Is there nowhere that I can leave my bags, I can ride my bicycle several kilometers to leave them somewhere else.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know where you can leave them. There’s not very much around here.”
So I left. It seemed like such a ridiculous rule, but I couldn’t think of any way around it. I suppose I could ask some other people if I can leave something in the trunk of their car, but it’s a seemed too difficult. I looked around the perimeter of the park; there was no barrier, and there was another trail about 300 m away that seem to go to the other side of the promontory. It had a “no bikes” sign, but no attendant. If I hadn’t just been stopped by the security staff, I might have tried it. As it was, I decided to move on.[1]
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Omaha Beach was even more “just a beach” than Utah Beach. There were signs, and some cafés, but no large museum; just large, expensive, homes that look like they were probably high-end vacation rentals. The people who were on the beach seem to be mostly there just to enjoy it; some were flying kites. It was starkly sparse: almost a kilometer of sand from the road to the water line, nothing but a shallow slope of sand and an enormous expanse of blue sky overhead. I couldn’t help but imagine arriving on one of the little Higgins Boats I had stood in the day prior, with hostile machine guns on the shoreline; it made me feel very small and vulnerable. Having read All The Light We Cannot See recently also made me sympathetic to the idea of being a teenage boy in 1940s Germany, swept into the Nazi machine; I don’t most boys at that age has been able to sense of moral agency to be able to consider what they are doing, anymore than American boys in the 1970s had a considered sense of why they were fighting in Vietnam.
In the early afternoon I made my way from Omaha Beach towards Bayeux. This is mostly flat, ordinary agricultural land, with some occasional forested sections. The main memorable part of this afternoon was that I was getting really tired. I didn’t want to fully admit it, but I had been biking every single day now for almost 10 days. I was very motivated to complete the loop that I had planned out, biking down the Seine to Paris, but I also had to recognize some fundamental physiological limitations. The typical advice for bike touring is to take a day off every week. When I was bike touring with Suzanne, she enforced that strictly. I was a little bit more zealous in trying to bike until I dropped, but I was now finding that I was dropping off.
I got to Bayeux around two in the afternoon, and for the first time on this trip I went and found a hotel instead of a campsite, so I could really completely rest. I checked in, and as is often the case they wanted to store my bicycle in a garage. While I’m separated by my bike that it will be stolen; one comfort of camping is that your bicycle is always five feet from you. Bayeux is a minor tourist destination, mostly with history buffs who want to visit the historical tapestry that documents the Norman invasion of England. I joined the tourists where the tapestry is displayed in a dedicated museum building.
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The tapestry is 230 feet long; in order to create a coherent viewing experience, the museum is audio tour only. Everyone gets an audio tour and walk along the tapestry as explained to you what’s going on. What was most surprising about the tapestry is how expressive it was. The stitching is done in a way that looks for all the world like a modern day cartoon. The characters are expressive, and even the border is used creatively: initially it is abstract decorative creatures, but when the battle of Hastings is shown the order is transformed into jumble of dead bodies. The authors did not shy away from demonstrating the cruelty and in humanness of warfare.
One of the difficulties with biking in France is that the food is very delicious and as a calorie-burning bike tourist you want to eat a lot of it; but it often takes a couple of hours to eat a proper meal in France, which is not so much fun by yourself. So in many cases I had been eating pizza, crepes, doner kebabs and other faster-foods because I just wanted to fall asleep after it had reached a campground in evening, or because that was all that was available in the particular village.
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When I finished looking at the tapestry though it was 4 PM, so I found a Norman restaurant in Bayeux had a multi-course meal: prawns (memorably served with their claws stuck into their abdomens), cheeses, hanger steak (ordered à point, having learned my lesson; sublimely pan-fried, caramelized-crispy on the outside, rare inside), a “trou normand” (“Norman hole”) which is calvados served mid-meal, and ice cream. Normally I don’t mind eating alone, but on the French multi-course meal schedule – designed for social eating – it was something of a Buddhist exercise. I essentially had to meditate in between courses while I waited for the next dish to arrive. The food itself was amazing, and I could feel my body soaking up the calories.
After dinner, I stumbled home and went to sleep immediately, the only night I spent in a hotel on the tour.
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[1] Six months later I emailed the American Battle Monuments Commission to complain, and they replied "While are policies prohibit riding bikes on this site, there are no restrictions on carrying your personnel bags onto the site. If you wish to enter the Visitor Center, then you will need to pass through our security procedures to include a search of your bags." Either I didn't understand something, or the ABMC doesn't understand what is going on at the site. I suspect it is the latter, since the policies there were consistent with other French high-risk-of-terrorism sites (usually labelled as "Project Vigipirate"), like Giverny later in my trip. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
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What we did was to wheel the bikes toward the point and ducked into a field - auxiliary parking lot? - and ate our stuff. Pee'd on their bushes, too. And left.
We would have made more of a fuss, but being Canadian we did not feel we had the same claim that obviously you did. Kudos for following up. At the time I felt the site must be a private enterprise, since I would not expect a government institution to be so rude to North American visitors at such a place, imbued with the mythos of a fight for liberty and rights. Wrong!
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