GOING TO BATTLE

Alan Cochrane journeys to Normandy to marvel at the courage of the brave soldiers who fought on the battlefields and drink a few beers along the way

Alan Cochrane is back on the historical tourist trail, this time visiting Normandy

Is it glorifying war or taking a perverse pleasure out of conflict to be overkeen on visiting battlefields? That’s a thought that occurs to me whenever, with three friends, we embark on another trip to a former war zone.

As a group, we haven’t done many; the last, a couple of weeks ago, was only the second – the first, as regular readers might remember, was to Ypres and the Somme last autumn. It’s as amateur students of history, albeit in its most violent form, that we make these journeys where, like everyone else, we marvel at the courage of our forebears but recoil at the appalling sacrifices they made.

Our latest outing was to Normandy and the D-Day invasion beaches, or Les Plages du Débarquement as they’re termed by the French. And why not call them ‘landing beaches’, which is the translation? After all, why would the French and their allies ‘invade’ their own country, even if it was to liberate it after it had been occupied by a cruel enemy for five years.

The contrast between the two areas, divided by a little more than a couple of decades, would at first glance appear to be pretty great. The scale of the slaughter around Ypres, Arras, Albert and the Somme between 1914 and 1918 defies belief, with around 20,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers dying on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Estimates for the death toll on D-Day – 6 June 1944 – were comparatively small at between 2,500 and 4,000.

For the casual battlefield tourist, it is much easier to take in all the main scenes of action in Normandy. The invasion beaches, from Sword in the East to Utah in the West, are only about 60 miles apart, and all the beaches can be visited in a day.

In fact there are regular guided luxury coach tours on offer from Paris where, for £150 or so, you can take in a couple of beaches, visit a cider orchard, sample some calvados, have a nice lunch and still be back in your Rive Gauche Hotel in plenty of time for dinner.

However, there is no real difference between Normandy and Flanders; their essence is the same. Thousands, often hundreds of thousands, of brave souls were hurled at equivalent numbers of the enemy with devastating results in terms of human lives lost. The overall battle of Normandy resulted in 425,000 casualties, 209,000 on the Allied side, of which 37,000 were killed. In addition, an estimated 20,000 French civilians were killed, mostly by RAF and USAF bombers. Still, this isn’t supposed to be a history lesson; it was just four blokes with an interest in war zones spending a weekend away.

The museums are tremendous and what struck me most of all was the genuine acknowledgement by the local population for the sacrifices made by the British, American, Canadian, Polish and all the other nationalities who took part.

The French guide and her audience in the Pegasus Bridge museum was typical. Speaking fluent English to a class of French teenagers, she gave a brilliantly detailed account of this incredible smash and grab raid by British airborne troops.

Arromanches has not one, but two excellent museums, and what appeared to be a privatelyowned-and-run little museum on the road down to Omaha. That imposing beachfront memorial to all those American dead was the one that impressed me most.

As well as an array of the impedimenta of the warring armies, it also contained relics of everyday life for the French population. Most harrowing of all, to me at any rate, was a simple document, signed by a local French official – no doubt under German instruction – that certified that the bearer, in this case a women, was not Jewish. She presumably had to carry it round with her so as to escape transportation to a death camp.

In a lighter vein, there was the roadside cafe outside Caen where we sheltered from a howling gale and we could watch the rugby with beers. We won, if you remember, with the last kick of the game.

All in all Normandy was a great place to visit, even if it is quite a trek – via Southampton and Portsmouth by planes, taxis and ferries – for a weekend from Edinburgh. We haven’t decided where our next war tour will take us. But if I had one wish it would be that my travelling companions might learn a bit of French. Not too much – the words for ‘beer’ and ‘coffee’ would be a start.

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Thousands of brave souls were hurled at the enemy with devastating results