TODAY’S PICKS FOR YOU

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'Picks for you' from past days click here

On this Normandy Battlefields Tour, you will visit the famous site of Pegasus Bridge, captured just after midnight on D-Day by elements of the 6th Airborne Division.You will visit the Hillman Bunker complex. Found a couple of miles inland from Sword Beach, the fortifications that made up the Hillman complex are just outside the village of Colleville-Montgomery, known prior to 1944 as Colleville-sur-Orne. It was here on the June 07, the Germans finally gave up to the 1st Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. The different bunkers, used as a German command post, are now cared for by the Association of the Friends of the Suffolk Regiment.

The Commonwealth Military Cemeteries are sadly present in numerous villages and towns in Normandy. They can be different in the size but the emotion stays the same, each grave has flowers, sometimes photographs and letters are laid down by relatives. You will also read the touching epitaphs chosen by parents, brothers and sisters or children.

Visit Sword beach where 28,000 soldiers including 177 Free French soldiers, came ashore to start the liberation of Western Europe. They were the only French soldiers to be involved in the assaults on D-Day.

Next on to the Merville Battery Museum. The men of the 6th British Airborne Division under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Otway were tasked with the capture and destruction of the guns strategically situated to fire on the landings taking place three miles further west on Sword Beach. These men were missing equipment, ammunition and lacked communications. Also, despite the reinforcements that were meant to arrive during the attack not turning up, this small group of determined British soldiers managed to succeed in their D-Day mission, and this gun battery today remains as a museum to the testament of the courage of these men.