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uring the first week in June the bombings become
more intense around Valognes and along the coast and the railway line.
From the Town Hall office windows, nearly every day we see the Allied
planes diving toward their targets, beyond the steeple of Picauville,
then roaring up again to the serene, quiet sky. Columns of smoke would
appear, to be carried away by the wind. The bombing of bridges would
continue.
Constantly, at night, the window panes and the shop
windows would shake. We would learn in the morning that a farm had been
destroyed and its inhabitants torn limb from limb. And yet, life goes on
as before. The bombs appear to fall more or less at random, without any
definite plan. “Those clumsy people have missed again,” we would
say.
Throughout the night of June 4th-5th, squadrons of
heavy bombers succeed one another over the peninsula. There is a violent
wind blowing, and we wonder which area they are going to attack. We go
to bed late, a little anxious all the same.
And on the morning of June
5th, with the dawn, calm has returned. The anti-aircraft gunners as
usual are in the square, busy about their trucks, and the fatigue groups
have gone to plant their “candles. ” At about 6:00 pm two small Allied fighters come
down from an overcast sky. They cruise very low over the church spire,
then circle the village. The Germans fire. They disappear into the
clouds. At eight o’clock, in the sky from which the clouds have
cleared, we see them again, scribing wide circles around us. The night
promises to be very beautiful.
It was not dark completely, when the humming of the
big planes begins again. The engines are so numerous that is impossible
to make out the directions the squadrons are going. Shots are fired from
the steeple, from the fields, from the trenches.
Over the coast, the sky is
again flare-lit. We climb once more to the third floor and the same
light meets our eyes as the week before, but a little farther away
toward Saint-Marcouf, there was an aurora-glow from explosions that
shook our house like a giant battering ram.
We had just laid down on our beds when we heard a
violent pounding on the front door. I got up. People were coming to tell
me a villa on the other side of the square at the entrance to La Haule
Park was being gutted by fire. The fire brigade was vainly striving to
gain control of the flames.
We made a chain as far as the cattle market
pump. Men ran along with their canvas buckets and threw the contents
into a large tub. Through the bushes, great shadows could be seen
moving about. The wind blew the flames sidewise, and bits of burning
paper and hay were spinning toward a loft twenty yards away filled with
straw and wood.
In the air, heavy bombers were passing in great
waves from west to east. The machine guns were cross-firing above our
heads, and hundreds of big luminous flies whistled, yelled and whined,
occasionally coming up with a smack against the walls of the burning
house where we were gathered. The anti-aircraft men, in the field dress,
with their arms loaded, watched us. The distant explosions of heavy
bombs shook the earth.
The fire alarm sounded, sad and lugubrious, a
succession of short notes, calling for more help. At this precise
moment, a large transport plane, with lights ablaze, came over at
treetop height. It was followed by others, then in waves covering the
earth. Another followed immediately, then still more. Then something,
like enormous confetti, came out of their bellies and dropped rapidly to
the ground. Paratroopers! The anti-aircraft gunners opened fire.
Go
to War Diary, Col. Charles H. Young:
D-Day
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