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| Destruction of Caen – Caen after British Royal Air Force bombing |
The British Air Marshal Arthur Harris's RAF Bomber Command bombed Caen twice, once on D-Day and again a month later on July 7 1944. There were more than 2,000 civilian casualties there on the first two days of the invasion. About 35,000 residents were made homeless after the Allied bombing. The scale of destruction is already well-established. Hundreds of tons of bombs destroyed entire cities and wiped out families. In some areas, barely a building was left standing and the liberators had to walk over banks of human corpses. Although Allied correspondence and reports state that most of the population welcomed them as liberators, civilians' feelings were often more confused. The exhibition at the Caen memorial displays the diary of Corporal LF Roker of the Highland Light Infantry: It was rather a shock to find we were not welcomed ecstatically as liberators by the local people, as we were told we should be... Another Allied serviceman, Ivor Astley of the 43rd Wessex Infantry, wrote: If we expected a welcome, we certainly failed to find it. But the suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image, that of the French welcoming the Allies with open arms. The combination of anticipation and resentment of the Allies, noted among the French, also applied elsewhere in Europe. References: Jean-Claude Valla (La France sous les bombes américaines), Henri Amouroux, Roger Céré and Charles Rousseau, William Hitchcock and Christophe Prime. Top image: a Halifax Heavy Bomber of RAF BC over the target during a daylight raid in 1944. Credit: Nathan Howland. Imperial War Museums. Bottom image: a street shot showing the devastation after Allied carpet bombing of Caen known for its historical buildings. In the centre is the remains of the 13th century church of Saint-Pierre. The spire of the church was destroyed on July 9 1944 by a British Royal Navy shell fired from HMS Rodney. Photo by British photog. James Jarché. LIFE photo archive.
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ReplyDeleteHeavy bombers were a dreaded sight for the residents of Normandy during the Allied air raids. When Allied troops finally arrived, all they found in the smell of death that still lingered in the air was giant piles of bricks, timber, roof tiles, and thousands of stunned residents picking through the wreckage of their once beautiful cities. Some 1,570 French towns were bombed or hit by artillery fire by Anglo-American forces between June 1940 and May 1945.
ReplyDeleteAfter the liberation of France and Belgium, American soldiers and the local populace didn't like each other very much (in contradiction to the movies showing the locals kissing and throwing flowers at the American GIs). In fact the American soldiers much more preferred and took a liking to the German population after the occupation of Berlin and Germany.
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