A Visit To Caen - 10th to 11th May 2014

The original Pegasus Bridge 10th May 2014

Ahead of the 70th Anniversary of the D-Day landings I took the opportunity to travel to Normandy for the first time to see for myself at least some of the places where Jim Heath had fought during the summer of 1944.

The trip was planned to take my fiend Owen and I across to the Normandy beaches via the battlefields of The Somme (this of course also being quite a significant anniversary year in the history of The Great War too). There was no particular significance in the selection of our dates of travel other than to avoid the rush and the exorbitant hotel prices that would surely be a feature of staying in this corner of France in early June!

In the two days that we spent travelling through the key parts of Normandy, we took in as much as possible from Pegasus Bridge, on to Sword Beach at Ouistreham then heading west to take in Juno, Gold and Omaha Beach in turn. Just as an aside, it is only when you take this journey across the length of the landing beaches that the immensity of the front hits you and we didn't even take it as far as Utah!

As the events that took place at locations such as Pegasus Bridge occurred some two weeks before my Grandfather landed himself, I propose to post this information on separate pages so as not to disrupt the current narrative.