Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share
my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the
main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to
check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top.
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I crossed the channel yesterday on a ferry from Newhaven, UK to Dieppe, France. That was the easy part, believe me. Granted, thanks to dragging my feet months ago, I was unable to cross from Poole, UK, to Cherbourg, France, on the route closest to what Dad and the 129th AAA Gun Battalion did, so I had to do the next best thing and go three hours out of my way. Then I had to wait 30 minutes for a random cab to show up. Then there was the rental car scare, in that the independent AVIS agent told me I couldn't rent a car without an international driver's permit, issued in my home country, which I don't have, and of which there was zero mention in the rental literature I received when I booked it! “Their mistake," he said! After several minutes of serious, true panic, I asked him (thank you Google translate!) what I can do. He then said, “You could call another rental place and see if they don't have the restriction."
So it turned out that it wasn't that I couldn't rent a car, but that he couldn't rent me a car! Then I asked him if he could call around, which he did, and then he found one that had a car available. He sent me around to the front of the train station to catch a cab to the rent-a-car place, called, oddly enough, Rent-A-Car, but there were no taxis to be had, and none of the companies I called was answering. SO, fearing I would run out of time waiting for a cab, I wound up walking approximately 1.3 miles to get my car. |
| Le car. I mean, yes, it's a Renault, but not a Le Car. Just le car. |
Anyhoo, up early today (Saturday 3 June) and out the door, I drove the three hours to Omaha beach to bring Dad and the boys onto the continent....
6 Weeks in One Day
Nearly three weeks had passed since 6 June, the day the invasion had begun, and the allied infantry had not yet been able to push the German forces more than 20 miles or so from the Normandy coast. The 129th came ashore at the beach code-named “Omaha," but then traveled west to La Fiere, within a stone's throw of the beach code-named “Utah" (I drove from “Omaha" to La Fiere today. It's quite a bit more than 15 miles!)
(Lower your volume due to incessant wind noise and an annoying clanging of a rope against a flagpole.)
The beach at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, France, code-named “Omaha," where Dad's unit came ashore on D-plus-20, 26 June 1944.
The
area around the bridge at La Fiere had long been secured by allied
forces (“long" being a relative term in the realm of combat) before the 129th got there to bed down, but the fight for
this extremely strategically important little bridge had not been
without significant sacrifice:
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| Memorial overlooking La Fiere Bridge. |
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| The bridge over Le Merderet River, at La Fiere. |
For most of the existence of the 129th in Europe, they stayed in areas already captured by the forces ahead of them, required to stay to the rear in their air defense role, so there were no heroics on the scale that occurred at La Fiere, yet theirs was a vital role in keeping the forward units as safe as possible.
After two days they moved out. I have the impression that the diarist wrote down town names the best he could and perhaps often from memory. The diary reads “Bouville," but I was unable to find a town by that name. My research shows a close spelling in “Douville," but that town is so far out of their way in relation to the rest of their travels that I had to make an educated guess to something within only a few miles of La Fiere, and that is a village called Boutteville.
In the early days of the invasion, a farm in the tiny hamlet was home to a mobile Army hospital.
After the hospital moved on to follow the casualties, the 129th moved in briefly to set up camp, came under fire, and experienced perhaps their first casualty.
As with “Bouville," I could not find towns called Les Drousiers or Baronville in the vicinity of the 129th AAA's actions. The closest I could estimate is the towns of Les Droueries and Barville, neither of which I visited today, though there was a battle at Les Droueries concurrent with the action at La Fiere Bridge.
As I stated at the start of this blog, Dad was in the HQ Battery, and this diary is written by a member of battery “A." I don't know (I tend to doubt) if Dad's battery was dispatched to Tank Destroyer (TD) duty, but just for the sake of clarifying how a unit trained to shoot cannons and machine guns into the air at flying machines can suddenly shift to firing cannons and machine guns at machines that do anything but fly, it's all in the matter of ammunition. The tank destroyer units simply shifted from their anti-aircraft ammunition to rounds of the same caliber designed to be fired from their same guns at much closer range to pierce the armor of the enemy tanks.
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| Saint-Jean-de-Daye, France |
The Liberation of Saint-Jean-de-Daye, where the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion won the day.
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| The Churchyard at Le Mesnil Angot |
The 129th experienced three casualties in two weeks, two of the KIA in the same location five days apart. They weren't right up on the front lines, but they weren't immune to enemy fire.
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| The ancient church in Le Hommet d'Arthenay. |
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| The main road in Marigny city center. |
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| La Manoir. My best guess is it's simply a farm, but I could see ammo being stored here.... |
The last place I visited today was La Manoir, mentioned in the diary as the location of an ammo dump the 129th set up to protect. I suppose I was trespassing, as I saw the sign and just drove in and happened upon what appeared to be a working farm. I saw one man in the distance who didn't seem to notice me, but I decided to shoot a quick photo through the windshield (top) and skeedaddle outa there! The second shot, also through the windshield, was taken on my way out.
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| A snapshot of the first six weeks of movement of the 129th AAA Gun Battalion (Mobile), but with Google Maps efficiency. |
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