On Sunday, 15th August, we washed up on the shores of Arromanches. It's a beach where a big fight happened in WW2 between English and German soldiers. It was called 'Operation Overlord', it happened on the 6th June 1994, and is commonly known as D-Day. Winston Churchill, (our Prime Minister at the time) came up with a plan to free France from Germany's occupation. It was a simple plan but took months to come up with, and it was to get hundreds of British soldiers to literally run on to Arromanches beach. The genius of it was to keep the soldiers coming, so when one lot of soldiers unfortunately died, another load would run to attack. Lots of soldiers knew they would die, but the aim of it was to get to the German bunkers and take over from the German soldiers. England did succeed although lots of our soldiers died whilst running on to the beach. If you've watched 'Saving Private Ryan', you will have seen the disturbing video at the beginning of Operation Overlord taking place.
On the Monday, we went to a museum about D-Day, and it had loads of diagrams showing how the soldiers attacked and what happened. Apparently at one bit, the plan went wrong. There were gliders that had the job of landing behind the enemy lines and the soldiers in the gliders would attack from behind. But the navigation went wrong and the mistook one bridge for another bridge and landed at the wrong place. But the soldiers on the beach had to carry on fighting without the back up from behind. Eventually, the gliders did get to the beach and could help out. There were lots of exhibits in the museum and lots of objects from various soldiers that fought. A pilot had given his belongings he had at the time to the museum, so people could see what things he had. It wasn't a lot, just normal accessories, like a toothbrush, hairbrush, tablets, emergency escape kit etc. It was very interesting, and you should go if you ever go to Arromanches and if you have time.
We went up to the 360 degrees cinema, and it was showing a good film about D-Day, and the writing at the beginning was explaining what the film would be about. The languages that they wrote it in were French and German!!! No English when we were the ones that freed France!!
Another funny thing was, we went out to eat on Monday night because we had no food in, and Edie got really annoyed that everything was called something to do with Operation Overlord! She said 'It's like Arromanches is only famous for D-Day! Everywhere you turn, D-Day this and D-Day that...'!! Turns out the restaurant that we ate at was called '6th Juin'!! She was a bit cross with that!
We were staying at a campsite very close to the beach which was good, but we only stayed there for two nights, because we were going to see Minnie and John (Beth's godparents) on the Tuesday. When we were packing up the tent, guess what? Yep, it was raining!! We looked on the bright side that it was raining while we were traveling and not glorious sun shine!! On the way to Min and John's on the Tuesday, we stopped off at another beach where the same operation happened, and there was a massive bunker that was hit by a bomb. It was very interesting but cold and wet, so we didn't stay for long!!
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