Atlantic Wall Batteries

Eight German gun positions, and they divide cleanly into the ones you walk over and the ones you go inside.

Pointe du Hoc is the one to see if you see only one. The clifftop is still a field of bomb craters, the casemates are broken open, and the scale of the bombardment is legible in the ground itself. It is free, open, and takes about an hour.

Longues-sur-Mer is the rarity: the only battery on the Normandy coast that still has its guns in their casemates. Everywhere else the barrels were cut up for scrap, so this is the only place you can see what the Atlantic Wall actually looked like when it was working.

Three are properly excavated sites with tunnels and museums attached. Merville was taken before dawn on 6 June by a battalion that landed scattered and attacked anyway. Azeville and Crisbecq sit a few minutes apart inland of Utah and are best done together: Azeville has the underground galleries, Crisbecq has the heavier guns and the longer fight.

Maisy is the strange one. It was buried after the war and effectively forgotten until it was rediscovered and dug out in 2004, so what you walk through is trench system rather than tidy monument.

Two are small and free. Widerstandsnest 62 is the bunker position on the bluff at the eastern end of Omaha, looking down the beach exactly as its gunners did. Hillman Fortress above Sword was a command post rather than a gun battery, and it held up the advance on Caen on the first day.

Three batteries make a full day. Pointe du Hoc and Longues alone make a good half.