A visit to Pointe du Hoc
Friday, June 12, 2024
Dear Valued Customer,
Liam stood on the cliff, looking out to the English Channel. The soft blue of the sky, interrupted by a few white clouds banked on the horizon, deepened into green as it met the sea. A huge wedge of broken stone, sharp as a pointed tooth, rose up from the beach below. A whitened limestone reef stretched under the shallow water of the incoming tide.
Up on the cliff, long grass and rough gorse grows over hundreds of hillocks and hollows left by bombs and grenades thrown 80 years ago. The turf ends abruptly at the edge of the point, revealing bare rock under a shallow layer of brown earth. Recently, chunks of the coast had plunged down to the stony beach and sea below. The edge of the cliff was cordoned off for safety.
We went down cement steps into a blockhouse next to the cliff. It had been an essential part of the Atlantikwall built by the German army, intended to protect its Western front against an Allied incursion from English shores in World War II.
The Pointe du Hoc juts into La Manche, the English Channel. Across is the Isle of Wight and the Solent, with its shipyards and ports. Le Hoc overlooks beaches to either side, now known as Omaha and Utah.
From this vantage point, six heavy, long-range guns set in concrete casements could shell ships, airplanes, and troops running across the strand. In a telling irony, these French-made guns had been manufactured in 1917 to use against German tanks. In June of 1944, they were serving France’s German occupiers. For the Allies on D-Day, destroying the guns was primordial. The U.S. Rangers and their commander, James Earl Rudder, were to take the Pointe and its battery.
Liam’s great-grandfathers had both been engaged in World War II, though one – my father -- was so young at the time he’d never left boot camp and the other fought in the Pacific. We brought our grandson to the Normandy coast so that he could look down to the rugged beach. He could imagine soldiers barely older than himself starting the climb up the sheer cliff walls in the morning mist.
By June of 1944, everyone knew there would be a débarquement. The glorious borders of the Third Reich were rolling back even more suddenly than they had swept forward. The Russians were approaching Germany; Rome was about to fall to the Allies; North Africa was long gone.
On June 3, Philippe Henriot, porte-parole of the Nazi-controlled government of France, addressed the French population on Radio Vichy. The coming Allied invasion would bring not only fire, death and destruction, but a violent Bolshevist revolution, the end of French civilisation. Frenchmen must resist the impetuous and irresponsible call to arms; they must obey their benevolent occupiers and the Milice, the French military police.
Meanwhile, weeks earlier, the Allies had begun to deliver “les armes secrètes,” weapons to be hidden until “le jour J,” by the Résistance.
At Pointe du Hoc, a German company of 100 infantrymen pushed on, constructing concrete casements for the guns and blockhouses for themselves.
The exact date of the débarquement was a closely-held secret. Général de Gaulle himself, representing free France in London, was only informed hours before ships landed on Normandy beaches.
Unfortunately, the Germans at Pointe du Hoc were also alerted at the last minute.
Allied bombers targeted the bunkers and surrounding gun casements in the early morning of June 6. But, like many aspects of the D-Day landings, nothing went quite to plan. The bombs fell harmlessly into fields and pastures further inland. Meanwhile, boats carrying three companies of the 2nd Battalion of U.S. Rangers led by Lieutenant Colonel Rudder had been driven off course by sea currents. When the Rangers finally made it to the base of the falaise, the defenders were armed and waiting.
A German sentry guards a camouflaged anti-aircraft gun during the Occupation of Normandy, 1940-1944. German photograph in U.S. National Archives
The Rangers eventually took the Pointe. The heavy guns they had had been sent to disarm were not trained on Omaha and Utah Beaches after all. The Germans, anticipating the débarquement, had hidden them under a hedge half a mile inland. Two Rangers on an expedition found and destroyed them.
“Good work,” responded headquarters. But no reinforcements were available. The backup company of Rangers was embroiled in desperate fighting at Omaha Beach.
Isolated and penned in, the Rangers fought alone for the next two days. When at last the tanks of the 116th Regiment arrived on June 8 at dawn, 77 of the 225 Rangers who had survived the landing had been killed, with another 152 wounded.
We touched the walls of the blockhouse, feeling the cool, smooth surface of pebbles embedded in the concrete. It was a last redout on Pointe du Hoc of a small parcel of German fighters desperately clinging, not to the hope of victory in Normandy, nor perhaps even to protecting the retreating armies of the Reich, but to life.
In the gentle gloom, where the only light comes from firing slits and a circular opening at each end to allow anti-aircraft fire, les allemands too had their moments of heroism in the face of death.
We followed the path around the Pointe, diligently reading signs that told the story of those faraway days. It was hard to know what Liam made of Pointe du Hoc. Barely 15, he still seemed half a child. He looked intently, and said little.
The idea of Libération had been anticipated eagerly, and the news of June 6 was greeted with joy. But Pointe du Hoc, like the other landings on Normandy’s coast, was merely a prelude to months of bitter fighting. Succeeding events were terrifying, shocking, deadly for many. Allied bombs flattened Le Havre, Caen, Rouen, Saint-Lô, Falaise and smaller towns, killing more than 20,000 Norman civilians in June. At Falaise, the inhabitants rushed out of their bombed houses to find Allied war planes circling back for another attack.
“We have no Germans here!” they exclaimed, not understanding what was happening nor why.
Not only towns, train depots, and factories were blown up in the Normandy campaign. A farm in ruins near Falaise. "Les Rochers" in 1944, from the Archives de Calvados.
At noon on June 6, on the BBC airwaves of Radio Londres, Générale de Gaulle spoke to France:
“La bataille suprême est engagée…c’est la bataille de France et c’est la bataille de la France.”
The supreme battle was underway. It was a battle not only for control of France. It was a battle of the French, for their country, their history, their nation. The ennemi, he warned, would cling to France with all the despairing fury of “un fauve,” a wild animal.
Indeed, instead of surrendering, the German army trapped in Normandy fought on for another two and a half months. The Bataille de Normandie finally ended on August 19, not far from Courtomer at Montormel. Not counting civilians, the casualties – the dead and wounded -- were reckoned to be more than a quarter million men, almost all of them American and German soldiers.
Perhaps, after another decade of winter rains, constant wind, and swelling waves, the blockhouse at Pointe du Hoc will tilt out of the earth and plummet over the edge. Unlike chunks of earth and stone, it is hard to imagine the building will scatter into the sea and disappear. Roman arches using concrete still stand. The Third Reich intended it, if not to last a thousand years, to drive off British bombardiers and withstand battleship fire. So far, at least, its mute solidity has outlasted both its makers and its enemies.
Pointe du Hoc means “point of the little mountain.” “Hoc” is a version of the Norse word “haugr.” A thousand or more years before, the descendants of invading Vikings had named the point in their own language. Presumably, the triangular stone on the beach was standing even then. And probably it will stand long after the blockhouse has fallen into the sea.
“Derrière le nuage si lourd de notre sang et de nos larmes, voici que reparaît le soleil de notre grandeur!” concluded de Gaulle in his appel to the French people on June 6, 1944. “Behind this heavy cloud of our blood and our tears, reappears the sun of our greatness!”
Twenty years later, on June 6, 1964, Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander on D-Day, was interviewed for television by the great newsman Walter Cronkite. He was filmed overlooking the American cemetery at Omaha Beach.
Reflecting on the blood and tears shed on that day and in the months that followed, he said:
“I devoutly hope that we will never again have to see such scenes as these. I think and hope and pray that humanity will learn more than we had learned up to that time. But these people gave us a chance, and they bought time for us, so that we can do better than we have before.”
The old general ended the interview with an appeal for peace.
General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, with 101st Airborne before D-Day
We left the Pointe and drove up the coast to the Cotentin peninsula.
Liam was hungry, and so were we. At Sainte-Mère-Eglise, where the Battle of Normandy had been launched with hundreds of parachutistes in the night of June 5, we found a café. Contemplating the church and itsclocher, from which a dummy paratrooper hangs tangled in a parachute, we ate our baguettes and ham in the warm June sunshine.
A bientôt,
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At Chateau de Courtomer, we are taking bookings for 2025 and 2026. We still have a few opening for the Chateau, Orangerie and Farmhouse for 2024. Soon, we will welcome guests in our "petite maison," the Gatehouse.
Heather (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be delighted to help you with your enquiries and dates, and to preview the property on site.
English and French spoken. Concierge services available.