Le Gaudin Battlefield Tours

Le Gaudin's resident historian can run personalised Battlefield Tours for guests. This programme below describes a two day tour, 11th and 13th September 2011' 

Day one - UTAH BEACH - 11 September 2011

The Church, Ste Mere Eglise with an effigy of John Steele on the steeple.

A famous incident involved paratrooper John Steele of the 505th PIR, whose parachute caught on the spire of the town church, and could only observe the fighting going on below.

He hung there limply for two hours, pretending to be dead, before the Germans took him prisoner. Steele later escaped from the Germans and rejoined his division when US troops of the 3rd Battalion, 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment attacked the village, capturing thirty Germans and killing another eleven.

The incident was portrayed in the movie The Longest Day by actor Red Buttons.

Tour the US Airborne Museum

This museum celebrates the extraordinary epic of the American parachutists of the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions, who dropped on Sainte-Mère-Eglise in the night of 5-6 June, 1944.

La Fiere

The river Merderet at La Fiere is very wide here and it was flooded in June 1944. From the bridge ahead a 500-yard-long causeway crossed the flooded area. The Americans actually seized this causeway…one of their prime objectives on D-Day, with a mixed group of 400 paratroopers from eastern side led by Colonel Roy Linquist of the 508th and a patrol of the 2nd Batt 507th from the west. The German opposition was so strong they had to let it go at the end of the day. General Ridgway ordered it to be retaken and on the morning of D+3 following a massive artillery bombardment, the Americans attacked again. Despite intense German resistance, and a Sherman tank being stuck on the causeway, the Americans, urged on at the very front by Generals Ridgway and Gavin, and supported by artillery and direct fire from a platoon of tanks secured the crossing.

General Ridgway is on record as saying that “ So intense was the fighting at La Fiere that it was the hottest sector I saw throughout the war.

Iron Mike

The handsome bronze statue of an American paratrooper known as “ Iron Mike” named after the patron saint of the airborne.

Iron Mike is the de facto name of various monuments commemorating servicemen of the United States military. The term "Iron Mike" is uniquely American slang used to refer to men who are especially tough, brave, and inspiring; it was originally a nautical term for a gyrocompass, used to keep a ship on an unwavering course.

Because the use of the slang term was popular in the first half of the 20th century, many statues from that period acquired the Iron Mike nickname, and over the generations the artists' titles were largely forgotten.

Even official military publications and classroom texts tend to prefer the nickname to the original titles.

Picauville

Used by the 9th Air force as an advanced fighter base. P-47 of the 405th Fighter group used this site from 26th June 1944

Exit 2

Exit 2, is typical of the 4 exits that were the only routes by which the seaborne invasion force would be able to get off the beach, as the whole area had been flooded by the Germans.

La Madeleine Utah Beach

The Utah beach museum opened in 1962 is built on top of the German Blockhouse W5 which defended exit 2.

Lunch at the Le Roosevelt

On the famous Utah beach, this was the first house liberated by American soldiers of the Fourth Infantry Division

La Cambe German Cemetery

The Cemetery was an American cemetery with burials of both American and German dead.

In 1947 the Americans were repatriated or reburied in St Laurant.

Here there are 21,160 dead including 296 in a mass grave under the grassed mount in the centre of the Cemetery.