D-Day Museums

Seven museums, and what separates them is scale and vantage point rather than subject.

The Mémorial de Caen is the largest and the most ambitious. It sets D-Day inside the whole of the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, and it asks for half a day rather than an hour. If you visit exactly one museum in Normandy, visit this one, and go in the morning while you still have the appetite for it.

The others are narrower and better for it. The Juno Beach Centre stands on the sand the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division crossed, and it tells Canada's war rather than the invasion's, a story most visitors have never been told. The Airborne Museum sits in the square at Sainte-Mère-Église where a paratrooper hung from the church tower, and it only fully makes sense standing there. The Overlord Museum is a collection rather than a narrative: tanks, guns and vehicles close enough to walk around, and the right choice if you are travelling with someone who would rather look than read.

Three sit off the usual route. The Montormel Memorial looks down on the ground where the Falaise pocket closed, and the view explains more than any display case. Fort du Roule is cut into the rock above Cherbourg and covers the fight for the port, the part of the campaign most tours skip entirely. The Douvres-la-Délivrande Radar Station is a German site rather than an Allied one, and it covers the war of detection and jamming that shaped where the landings were expected.

Two museums in a day is comfortable. Three is a lot, and the third tends to blur into the second.