We visited Carentan and Sainte Mère Église for DDay this year with our Canadian guests, along with several thousand other international visitors. As we live directly south of Caen, we thought we would approach from the St Lo direction to enter, it was a very good choice as we reached camp Arizona easily parking within 300m of the event.
The para drop occurred at 11:30 first with a fly past of the C-47, who then circled and lined up for the drop, it was a great spectacle to see and bought back memories of my service with the 2 troop, 2/3 Royal Australian Engineers attached to 3rd Royal Australian Infantry paratroop regiment.
We then visited camp Arizona, a US camp which predominantly was made up of trucks and jeeps, some great civilian vehicles also.
We then had lunch and back in the car travelled the back roads to Sainte Mère Église, again scoring a car park within 100m of the famous church. The place was alive and bustling with current servicemen, re enactors and visiting tourists. After walking around the square and taking a few photographs we headed off to camp Geronimo. A fantastic collection of American vehicles including some rare beasts, as an ex engineer I was most interested in the bridging equipment. It was fantastic to see a lot of passionate young French renactors, plus a few oldies.
On Friday off to Pegasus and Gold beach for our British part of the tour, we are skipping the actual 6th because of all the official road blockages and politicians making speeches.
Cheers
Matt
Having the pleasure of attending the 75th Anniversary commemoration must have been very special. Thanks for the photos.
ReplyDeleteIt was mate, we had Canadians in tow too!
DeleteVery Nice ! Thanks for sharing ! I was with the 101, '80-'83. So I missed it ! ;)
ReplyDeleteI was in 2 troop 2/3 FER airborne engineeers attached to 3RAR in the late eighties.
DeleteGreat post Matt.
ReplyDeleteThanks mate
DeleteLiving the dream.
ReplyDeleteCertainly am, it is almost unreal
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