Bernières-sur-Mer

Bernières-sur-Mer sits at the eastern end of Juno Beach, on the stretch of sand the Canadians code-named Nan White. It is an unassuming little seaside town of villas and a stubby Norman church tower, and on the morning of 6 June 1944 it became one of the deadliest few hundred metres of the entire invasion for the men who came ashore here. Today it is quiet, walkable and easy to overlook, which is precisely why it rewards a visitor who knows what to look for.

The assault on Nan White

The first wave belonged to The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada, a Toronto regiment landing in the leading assault of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division. The naval bombardment had not silenced the German strongpoint dug into the seafront - Widerstandsnest 28, with its concrete casemate, anti-tank gun and machine-gun positions covering the beach along the length of the sea wall. A high tide had narrowed the sand, so the landing craft came in almost on top of the defences, and the leading company was caught in the open with little cover. Some of the heaviest losses suffered by any Canadian company that morning fell here, in the first minutes, within sight of the houses on the front.

Behind the Queen's Own came the amphibious Sherman tanks of the Fort Garry Horse and, in reserve, Le Régiment de la Chaudière - a French-speaking regiment from Quebec, known to its own men as "les Chauds." There is a particular poignancy to that arrangement worth pausing on: some of the first liberators to speak with the villagers of this Norman coast did so in French. The Chaudières pushed through the town and drove inland; by the afternoon Canadian units had advanced further from the beach than any other Allied force on D-Day.

The house that became a symbol

The seafront villa now known as La Maison des Canadiens - Canada House - stands almost exactly where the Queen's Own landed, and features in some of the most reproduced photographs of the Canadian landings, its distinctive roofline a fixed point in images of troops moving up from the sand. It is often described as among the first houses in France liberated from the sea. Less well known is that Bernières also became the press capital of the invasion: Canadian and British war correspondents, photographers and film crews set up in a requisitioned seafront hotel within hours, and it was from here that many of the first eyewitness dispatches and newsreel images of D-Day reached the world.

What to see today

Begin on the Promenade des Français, directly in front of Canada House, where a plaque marks the villa as liberated at dawn on 6 June by the Queen's Own Rifles; the private house is not generally open, so read it from the promenade. A short walk along the front takes in the surviving concrete of Widerstandsnest 28 - the casemate and sections of the Atlantic Wall are still embedded in the seafront - alongside interpretive panels that pair 1944 photographs with the view in front of you.

Look for the cluster of regimental memorials near the beach: the stele to the Fort Garry Horse, the monument to the Régiment de la Chaudière, and markers to the war correspondents who filed from here. On the road running inland toward Bény-sur-Mer you will pass a monument to the 14th Field Regiment. Set aside time to continue to the Bény-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery a few kilometres inland, where most of the Canadians who fell on Juno now lie - the natural and sobering conclusion to a walk that begins on this beach.

Practical notes

The coast road runs the length of the seafront and everything worth seeing here is on it or within a street of it. Park along the promenade or in the marked bays behind it and walk: the distance from Canada House to the last of the memorials is only a few hundred metres. An hour covers the seafront and the concrete, an hour and a half if you take the inland road past the field regiment monument. The whole walk is open access and free.

Underfoot this is one of the easiest stops on the invasion coast. The promenade is paved, level and continuous, and suits a wheelchair or a pushchair without difficulty. Getting down to the sand is another matter, by steps in most places and a ramp in a few, and the beach is soft above the tideline. Come at low tide if you can, because the width of sand the first wave had to cross is the one thing a photograph never conveys.

The Juno Beach Centre a few minutes west gives the wider Canadian story that this stretch of front only shows a fragment of. Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer just east keeps its own seafront casemate, and walking the two in an afternoon shows how little separated one strongpoint from the next.