Word: caen
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...much more successfully. The U.S. 4th Division had seized Utah Beach with relatively little opposition and joined forces with the paratroopers who had been dropped near Ste.-Mère-Eglise. The British and Canadians had overwhelmed their three beaches and advanced about three miles inland toward the city of Caen. All told, the Allies had landed five divisions, some 154,000 men. It was a very precarious grip on the European mainland, but for this day, it would suffice...
After the beaches had been secured on Dday, the first order of business was to organize a breakout. It had been an important part of Montgomery's strategy that British forces should thrust inland some 20 miles on D-day itself, well beyond Caen, a commercial crossroads. Partly out of caution, partly out of weariness, the vanguard of the British I Corps halted for the night about halfway there, some four miles north of the city. Compared with the victory on the beachhead, the failure to reach Caen that first day seemed a minor shortcoming. Montgomery even invited Churchill...
...conquest of Caen was considered essential for Allied armor to break out of the checkerboard hedgerows of Normandy and move on to the plains leading to Paris. But Montgomery's British forces could not manage to rout the two panzer divisions that had quickly established themselves on the outskirts of Caen. In the first week, the British tried a direct assault; toward the end of June, they tried two encircling attacks. Each time they failed. On the night of July 7, some 450 heavy bombers pounded Caen, and only then did the Germans begin to evacuate the rubble...
...were forced to house and feed the German occupiers. Resistance was dangerous and reprisals murderous, yet a minority accepted the risks out of a youthful idealism that they look back on with something close to awe. On Dday, the Germans executed 92 Frenchmen who had been held in the Caen prison on charges of helping the Allies through sabotage or intelligence activities. Among the French survivors of that time, though, there is no undercurrent of anti-German feeling today. Liberation?and time?healed their wounds...
...Colleville-sur-Mer, where 9,386 soldiers are buried beneath an immaculate lawn. The sheer multitude of white crosses and Stars of David, arranged in neat rows that undulate over the green expanse, forces a hushed reverence, even on buses filled with students born long after the event. Caen Mayor Jean-Marie Girault points out that a high proportion of the people who come to the D-day beaches are young. "It was a struggle against totalitarianism," he says. "And it's still going on. They ask questions about it. They want to know what happened...