Every year P&O Ferries carries hundreds of passengers to France, en-route to Normandy, so that they may remember the 10,000 Allied troops who died during the D-Day landings. John Hillman looks at the city of Caen, whose unfortunate inhabitants found themselves thrust onto the front line of one of the most brutal struggles in western history.

The wealth of history that saturates the damp shores of Normandy covers almost every conceivable human experience.

When the Allies landed in June 1945 and the people of Caen abandoned their beautiful city to the effects of that remorseless struggle, it must have occurred to one or two of them that the emotions they were experiencing couldn’t have been all that different from how the Anglo-Saxons must have felt a thousand years before, as they fled their Norman ancestors.

However, it is truly difficult to imagine what they were thinking as they took refuge in the Hopital du Bon Sauveur, an eighteenth century asylum on the outskirts of town.

They were being liberated from a brutal Nazi occupation by having their entire city utterly destroyed. A city many Victorian visitors compared to Oxford, with row upon row of honey-coloured townhouses and two royal abbeys – the jewel of the Normandy coast in fact – forced to pay the price for having been previously occupied by the 12th and 21st German Panzer Divisions.

Canadian tanks cut through the historic centre, crushing houses, shops, cafés and hotels on their way to the Ile St Jean – rudely grinding down on the remains of the ancient capital of Calvados. This final act of violence came only after a month long bombardment from the British and Canadian heavy artillery and more than 2,500 tons of bombs dropped by the RAF.

As happy as they must have been to see the back of the German invaders, it’s difficult to believe that they felt much joy as they cleared the flower beds at the asylum to make graves for the war dead as the bombs fell around them.

People still come from all over the world to remember those events in the middle of the last century, usually to remember a fallen relative or an old friend, but the people of Caen still live with the results to this day, surrounded by their post-war architecture – a salient reminder of the price you pay for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Image Credit: Lt. Harold G. Aikman/Canada. Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada/PA-116510.

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