Normandy Day 2 Part 1

For our second day in the Normandy region we basically decided to go back to the places we saw the first day but were not able to spend enough time at and just to see if we found anything on our own.  We spent the morning exploring the rest of the town we stayed in, Arromanches.  

Here is a picture of our hotel.  The sea is right behind us.

Arromanches is where you can still see the remains of "Mulberry B."  This was the code name for the artificial harbor that was built off the beach in order to offload all the supplies and troops once the beachhead was established.  There were two harbors planned, Mulberry A at Omaha beach and Mulberry B at Arromanches.  The harbors were towed across the channel from England and were in place by June 9, just 3 days after the invasion started.  On June 19, a large storm all but destroyed Mulberry A leaving Mulberry B to supply the entire invasion.  10 months after D-Day, over 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tons of supplies came into France on Mulberry B.

The remains are about 10 miles from the shore as seen from Arromanches.

Here is a close-up of some of the parts left on the beach.  The people of Arromanches decided to leave the harbor as is in the sea and on their beach.

The large supply ships would offload the supplies at the harbor about 10 miles off the shore and then they were driven down these floating roadways called "Whales" to get the supplies onto the beach.

The next place we decided to see was Utah beach.  We saw a different sector than we did on the tour.  This is about in the middle of Utah and has a sculpture for peace.

And here is Brian gathering some sand from Utah Beach.