Nazis' secret base found (Omaha Beach battery contains 40 buildings "untouched" since D-Day)

The Sun (U.K.) ^ | January 24, 2006 | TOM NEWTON DUNN

[Stoat]

Nazis' secret base found

Revealed ... the Nazis’ untouched secret bunker
 

By TOM NEWTON DUNN

Defence Editor 

A WARTIME bunker used by Nazis to bombard Allied troops during the D-Day landings has been unearthed untouched — after 60 years.

British treasure hunter Gary Sterne found the base exactly as it was when German troops fled after the Normandy invasion in June 1944.

Gary, 41, said: “It’s truly incredible. Apart from damage to the radio room, the whole place seemed to escape bombing unscathed.”

 

Treasure hunter ... Gary with RAF medals
 

The bunker sprawls over 20 acres and is thought to be the hidden German battery that decimated US soldiers at Omaha Beach, seven miles away.

The encampment contains 40 buildings — including a field hospital.

Some of the offices contain army papers — as well as radio equipment.

Amateur historian Gary found it in dense undergrowth after buying a German army map at a French car boot sale.

The dad of two, from Manchester, kept it secret for three years so he could buy the land near the village of Grandcamp-Maisy.

He now plans to open it as a tourist attraction this year.

[Lee'sGhost]

Excellent point.

[Lee'sGhost]

This article sucks. I want to know what weapons were found? Remains? Documents? Etc., etc., etc.

[The Right Stuff]

Another interesting thing. In France, there are very few museums that deal with either the Resistance or WWII. I found one. Their glory days seem to date back to Napoleon and WWII is better forgotten.

London, on the other hand has several musuems dealing with WWII.

[wolficatZ]

Thanks for the link, that's the best info available here so far!

 

 

 

 

The 14 spoke wheel in the photo of Maisy Battery is practically identical to the ones used

on the Schneider 155mm C MLE 1917 Howitzer.

The missing guns at Pointe du Hoc

 

"So why has it been ignored by historians after the war – could it be that somone didn't want to admit they picked the wrong initial
target on D-day?” These are questions which are sure to cause controversy amongst WW2 historians.

There is also no mention the 19 US paratroopers who dropped onto the site and were captured by the Germans on D-day,

they were mentioned in Kistowski's interviews - were they just part of the Allied mis-drops, were they shot down or were

 they part of an attack force sent to neutralise the battery which failed?"

 

**********************************************

excerpts from Today In WW II History

"Their communications still limited to occasional contact with passing naval vessels, the Rangers on the Point were unaware through most of the day that a relief force was very near and was battling to reach them.

After reaching St-Pierre-du-Mont before noon, the relief column planned to push along the coastal highway to the junction of the exit road from Pointe du Hoe. Company A of the 2d Rangers, forming the column's point, got to a hamlet within 200 yards of the exit road, when heavy interdictory fire from medium howitzers fell on the highway behind them, forcing the tanks to withdraw."

"Reforming at St-Pierre, the column tried again. This time the tanks got past the exit road, but the 1st Battalion of the 116th was caught by well-directed artillery fire which blanketed a quarter-mile stretch of the highway, and lost 30 or 40 men. This forced another withdrawal.

The 58th Armored Field Artillery Battalion and naval guns endeavored to locate the enemy batteries, somewhere to the southwest."

"General Gerhardt, assuming command of the 29th Division at 1700, implemented the corps order with 29th Division Field Order No. 3, issued at 2330. In this, the 115th Infantry was directed to move one battalion north of Formigny for protection of the division flank near the boundary with the 1st Division.

"Enemy forces in the 29th Division area were estimated as including elements of the 914th, 916th, and 726th Infantry. An important aspect of the next day's operation was the prospect of clearing out enemy artillery positions in the Grandcamp Maisy area, for despite all efforts of naval fire, enemy batteries in this area were still active on 7 June."

"..1st Battalion of the 116th was making a wide sweep to the south, not only outflanking Grandcamp but aiming at Maisy. Paced by Company A of the 743d Tank Battalion, they moved south to Jucoville and then swung west through an areas which was practically undefended.

Heavy naval guns had torn Maisey to pieces, and the tanks were able to deal easily with resistance from enemy machine guns.

Just west of the village an enemy strongpoint blocked by Isigny road and was supported by mortar and 88-mm fire, including interdictory fire behind Maisy which prevented reinforcement of the leading infantry elements. Since the tanks were running short of fuel, advance was halted for the night."

"On 9 June, the 116th and Rangers cleared up the last enemy resistance around Grandcamp, Maisy, and GefosseFontenay."

Francoise Passerat, an historian and scientific director of the Caen Memorial, the official museum of the Normandy invasion, said that the battery unearthed by Sterne was well known.

"There are dozens of bunkers like this one that have been abandoned and grown over. It is always interesting to excavate this kind of battery, but it will not add anything to our knowledge of the period."

Remy Desquesnes, an historian and author of a book on the Nazis' Atlantic Wall defences, said that the Grandcamp battery was one of about 40 along the coast. It had proved especially lethal to the landing Americans because its heavy guns were free to swivel and cover a broad range. The Grandcamp battery kept the Americans pinned to their beach-head for two days.

War enthusiast finds remains of battery

 

[freema]

This is awsome, thanks Coop.



Another point I have not yet seen here, perhaps because it's a trip down a path that veers from the main, however I feel it needs to be articulated.

The French were instrumental in the birth of the United States http://future.state.gov/when/timeline/1776_timeline/French_Assistance.html

I have many times during the course of this war, when criticisms of France's refusal to ally with the US over Iraq became hot, heard that we are beholden to France for that help.

IMO, that's just like we saying are beholden to not criticize Kerry, and likely Murtha, for their service.

Some don't necessarily get involved because it's the right thing to do but that's the nature of the beast, eh. Thank God for those who get involved with no thought of personal glory or gain.

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blpic-frenchmilitaryvictory.htm

[MinuteGal]

Good for this guy. He's an example of the French word "entrepeneur".

In view of the recent Justice Souter Law, any guy in this country that privately held this type of historic property would undoubtedly have it stolen from him by the government so a bigwig contractor could make a fortune and also "expand the local tax base" by erecting upscale condos on the land.

Leni

[The Spirit Of Allegiance]

ping

[zot]

Thanks for the link. Very informative. That was indeed a major fortification, and well-designed. No doubt it killed a lot of our people in the three days before it was taken. Amazing that it was forgotten all these years.

[Atlantic Friend]

"Considering the Islamofascist ties to Nazism, the revelations that "le resistance" would have been more appropriately termed "le collaboration""

Care to develop that, if only to be more insulting to those who died fighting Nazism ?

[Atlantic Friend]

Interesting that it covered 20 acres but the "French Resistance" couldn't tell us where it was.

But it did. The complete plans of the Atlantic Wall were passed to the Allies by the French resistance.

Of course, why let a few historical facts lie in the way of good ol'French-bashing, eh ?

[Atlantic Friend]

Here is what Historian Robert Paxton, who by the way IS a specialist of French history, thinks of "Our oldest enemy". I took the liberty to put some of the excerpts in bold case.

"Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship With France, John J. Miller and Mark Molesky, Doubleday, 304 pages

by Robert O. Paxton

The myth of eternal Franco-American friendship is fair game. John J. Miller, a journalist with National Review, and Mark Molesky, assistant professor of history at Seton Hall University, offer a counter-myth: that France has directed unstinting malice against America from the beginning.

The book opens with a blood-curdling narrative of the Deerfield massacre (1704), when Indians abetted by French-Canadian authorities attacked English settlers in western Massachusetts. They killed men, women, and children, scalped some of the victims and ate some of their flesh, and abducted hostages. The writing has verve, and the reader’s face tingles with anger.

But Miller/Molesky’s account is one-sided. It portrays Indian violence as something the French deliberately provoked and exploited. When the Anglo-Americans’ Indian allies commit an atrocity, as happened under the young Washington near Pittsburgh in May 1754, it seems an unfortunate accident. Miller/Molesky see the French and Indians as aggressors, the American colonists as their innocent victims. In a broader perspective, however, the Anglo-Americans were expelling the French from North America, and the French were resisting, sometimes cruelly. The French had priority—Quebec’s foundation in 1608 predated the Mayflower by a dozen years—but far fewer settlers. It seems a little forgetful to claim, “the United States does not pose and has never posed any threat to their country.”

The French weren’t even the first who resisted Anglo-American expansion. Spain is really “our oldest enemy.” When the English colonists in the Carolinas pushed southwards after founding Charleston in 1670, using Indian surrogates to destroy Spanish forts and missions in what is now Georgia and Florida, the Spanish fought back (admittedly less vigorously than the French). In 1680, they raided English settlements near Charleston. For a similar book about “America’s disastrous relationship with Spain” an author could simply trawl through history for the nasty parts: frontier conflicts in late 17th-century Florida, Spain’s stranglehold on New Orleans in the late 18th century, the Alamo, the Maine, Hemingway fighting Franco in the bars of Pamplona.

So why single out France? France obviously gets the goat of many Americans. German Chancellor Schroeder surpassed Chirac in the spring of 2003, rejecting any military operation in Iraq even with UN approval. But neither he nor the Russians aroused much popular anger here. Miller/Molesky show no curiosity about this difference or about whether any of the friction with France could come from this side of the Atlantic.

Perhaps a clash of styles provokes a special virulence: the elegantly literary French condescending to nice Americans. A more likely cause is rivalry between two countries that feel entitled, as first democracies, to offer universal moral lessons. Still more likely is American over-expectation based on our aid to the French. We have indeed helped France with thousands of young lives, and in my experience most French admit they “owe their liberty” to the United States, as Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of the Paris daily Le Monde, wrote in his famous editorial “We are all Americans” on Sept. 13, 2001 (a passage omitted by Miller/Molesky, who denounce this article heatedly as “an anti-American diatribe of extraordinary virulence and rage”). But often we have not helped them (as in Algeria or at Suez), or helped them late (as in 1917 and 1944), or caused “collateral damage” like the 50,000 civilian dead in French cities razed by Anglo-American aerial bombardment during World War II. We helped them when we thought it was in our interest.Nothing sours a relationship faster than one side’s overdeveloped sense of largesse.

So the Franco-American story is indeed replete with conflict. What Miller/ Molesky have done is furnish maximum negative spin and place most blame on the French. A good example is the famous sea battle off the east coast of England on Sept. 23, 1779, between John Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and the pride of the British Navy, HMS Serapis. Every American schoolboy knows Jones’s proud response (probably apocryphal) to the British captain’s summons to surrender: “I have not yet begun to fight!”

Jones’s squadron included three French ships. One French captain, Pierre Landais, aboard Alliance, inexplicably held back. Later, when Serapis and Bonhomme Richard were heavily engaged, wreathed in smoke, Landais came up and fired grapeshot into both combatants. Miller/Molesky have him fire only at Jones’s ship, in typical French perfidy. They credit later rumors that Landais wanted to sink Jones’s ship and claim the victory for himself. They omit details that don’t fit a Francophobic version. The other French captains defeated British ships, though perhaps less dashingly than Jones. No French perfidy there. As for Landais, his behavior during the trip home to Boston in Alliance was so bizarre (he threatened his main American supporter, Arthur Lee, with a carving knife during a quarrel over a roast turkey) that on return he was court-martialed and removed from service in the infant U.S. Navy. Many contemporaries considered Landais insane. Madness, not Frenchness, seems to have been the problem.

Miller/Molesky portray French malevolence toward Americans as so uniform and unchanging over the centuries as to seem virtually genetic. Their French are, with occasional exceptions like Lafayette and Raymond Aron, cowardly, cynical, duplicitous, and overfed, bullies when strong and craven when weak. Their Americans are nearly always fair and well meaning. Miller/Molesky write skillfully, with a gift for pejorative shadings. Their French characters never simply “speak”; they “sneer” or “scoff.” Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin is “oily,” Marshal Pétain is “a well-groomed thug and bigot,” Napoleon a “dwarfish hero.” Count Vergennes, foreign minister in 1776, thought God “had endowed his country with a special importance.” These arrogant chauvinists all considered their country superior to others, destined to rule the world.

If Americans have similar thoughts, or deal with the French in a thin-skinned, uncooperative, or self-interested way, Miller/Molesky approve. In 1917, U.S. commanding general John J. Pershing adamantly refused to let his troops come under French supreme command (as even the British accepted in the emergency of July 1918). When Charles de Gaulle takes the identical position in 1944 or 1966, he is an unreasonable chauvinist.

French aid to the American War of Independence is the Francophile’s exhibit number one. But Miller/Molesky affirm that the French were only pursuing national self-interest in fighting the British—and they fought badly to boot. Afterwards, they showed their true colors by trying to block American westward expansion and preying upon American shipping.

But are not governments supposed to serve their perceived national interest? “Realists” or “pragmatists” in foreign policy expect nothing else. In their view, successful diplomacy is the skillful persuasion of other countries that a desired course of action is in the mutual interest—as in the important role France plays today in the NATO peacekeeping force in Afghanistan and in sharing intelligence information about terrorists with the United States. (The latter, at least, is acknowledged in this book.)

Miller/Molesky, by contrast, are idealists in foreign policy. For them, alliances rest not on interest but on affection. They divide the world into friends and foes. A friend is not “difficult to control.” Since French governments, with broad public support, pursue an independent foreign policy, France is our foe. This book evaluates as “fawning” the admiration of American realists like Kissinger and Nixon for Charles de Gaulle, whose proud and independent France they considered generally an asset in the Cold War. An idealist foreign policy sounds superficially more “moral” than the calculation of national interest, but it leads easily to self-righteous crusading.

Miller/Molesky admit that de Gaulle was good for France. But since they equate alliance with subservience, a Gaullist France must be bad for the United States. Far from reaching obsessively for France’s ancient glory, as this book interprets him, de Gaulle was the quintessential realist. He understood lucidly the limits to France’s power, which enabled him to take the hard but correct decision for Algerian independence. Thereafter he was determined to use his limited power to the utmost to give the French a sense that their country still mattered. His complicated game of vigorous support for Washington during tension over Berlin, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia, alternating with quests for elbowroom during calmer periods, is simply incomprehensible to Miller/Molesky. So they falsify his language, perhaps unconsciously. They quote de Gaulle claiming to be the leader of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” but that famous phrase actually offered Khrushchev “détente … from the Atlantic to the Urals.”

Miller/Molesky are vulnerable to such errors because all their French quotations except one, as far as I can determine, come secondhand from someone else’s extracts in English. This flagrant misquotation of de Gaulle came from Brian Crozier, an Australian journalist who imagined that de Gaulle was a crypto-communist. Other factual errors about France mar this book, many trivial, some not. Wagram in 1806 was not France’s last victory (the Marne?), and though many French citizens applauded José Bové’s famous assault on a McDonald’s, Chirac’s government prosecuted him and sent him to prison. At least the authors cannot be accused of contamination by over-familiarity with the details of French life and history.

We must admit that Miller/Molesky sometimes let France off the hook. Anti-Semitism does not bother them overly; they give it half a page. They utter not a peep about the French army’s use of torture in Algeria, or about Chirac’s nuclear test in the Pacific in the face of international disapproval. Can we guess why?

The French Enlightenment, however, takes heavy fire. Its preference for theory over practice, the archetypical French vice, is accused of spawning 20th-century communism and fascism. Voltaire, astonishingly, “propped up delusions of national glory” instead of “speaking truth to power,” and Rousseau wanted “society razed to the ground before it could be built again,” an idea whose “direct outgrowth” was the violence of the French Revolution. It is surprising to see a Harvard Ph.D. in intellectual history forget that the Enlightenment flourished also in Philadelphia, Berlin, and Edinburgh (Adam Smith), and was frequently pragmatic (the first smallpox vaccinations, for example). Its principal heritage was democratic and libertarian (including the American Constitution), and only by perversion did it contribute something to modern totalitarianism.

Miller/Molesky skewer deconstruction gleefully. Ironically, as other reviewers have already observed, their manifest conviction that power consists of shaping the images by which we understand our past makes them closet disciples of Derrida and Foucault. In that spirit they have constructed a wilfully one-track image of the complex history of Franco-American relations. Readers looking for reasons to hate the French, who tolerate selective and slanted scholarship, will applaud.

_________________________________________________________ Robert O. Paxton is Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and author of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order.

January 17, 2005 issue"

[Atlantic Friend]

"Well, considering that "Le Resistance" was primarily dedicated to Vichy and Nazi collaboration, it would have been much like expecting Rommel to pick up the phone and politely inform Patton precisely what his plans were for the next several weeks :-)"

Stoat, congratulations, this has to be the most brainless, gutless, and heartless comment ever made. A strong suggestion : crack a History book from time to time.

[Atlantic Friend]

"Another interesting thing. In France, there are very few museums that deal with either the Resistance or WWII. I found one. Their glory days seem to date back to Napoleon and WWII is better forgotten."

The four I either visited or know of are :

- The D-Day memorial in Caen, Normandy (D-Day)
- The Liberation Museum in the Hotel des Invalides, Paris (Mostly devoted to resistance movements and Free French units)
- The Tanks Museum in Saumur, Loire (tanks from both World Wars to the present)
- The Army WW2 museum in the Hotel des Invalides, Paris (the whole conflict)

I'm pretty sure you'd find some more through a Google search, though.

[Stoat]

Care to develop that, if only to be more insulting to those who died fighting Nazism ?

Those who died fighting the Nazis were and are far more insulted by the actions of their own countrymen than anything I or anyone else here could possibly say.  The links of Islamofascism to the Nazis have been reported and written on in depth and abundance, as has the unpleasant truth about France's collaboration and how the Resistance's numbers have been grossly overstated.

All of this information is freely available on the internet.  The truth will set you free.

[ChadGore]

Excellent analysis, and I would add that the Al Samoud 2 missle was a reality in Iraq before and during the invasion. It's in breach of not only UN 1441, but also the more important cease fire agreements sighned by Saddam after the liberation of Kuwait.

[wolficatZ]

Saumur Museum has the world's only Tiger II tank that is in full running condition; and a Panther; in addition other vehicles, featured at the annual Carrousel.

 

 

 

[The Right Stuff]

Thanks for the info. We toured the Invalides, but I remember it being mainly Napoleon - including his stuffed horse and dog! The Resistance museum was down by the huge tall black building. (Montmartre?)

[steelyourfaith]

I hate to be a Zero Wing lore purist but - the phase should be "All your base are belong to..."

Zig for great justice.

[indcons]

Very interesting thread (a week old though)...thought some of you might still be interersted in this fascinating find.

[indcons]

Thanks for the ping....just saw it while going through my pings. Haven't been on FR for the last couple of weeks.