Saint-Lô

Saint-Lô stands on a rocky spur above the River Vire, the old capital of the Manche and the knot where the roads of the western Cotentin tie together. That geography made the town indispensable to both armies in the summer of 1944 - and it is why so little of the medieval place survived. To walk its streets today is to walk through a town almost entirely rebuilt from nothing, with its greatest wound deliberately left open for you to see.

The Capital of Ruins

The destruction began on the night of 6-7 June. Allied bombers struck the rail yards and approaches to choke off German reinforcements moving up from the south; warning leaflets meant to give civilians time to flee were scattered by the wind, and roughly 800 townspeople were killed in the town that first night. Worse followed. Saint-Lô lay beyond a belt of Normandy's bocage - the sunken lanes and earth-banked hedgerows that turned every field into a walled fortress and every advance into a yard-by-yard infantry fight. Through July, American divisions ground forward from the country south of Carentan across this ground and up the commanding heights of Hills 192 and 122, at a cost of thousands of casualties. The town was finally taken around 18 July by the 29th Infantry Division and others, and its capture unhinged the German line: a week later, Operation Cobra broke out from just west of here, the beginning of the end of the Normandy campaign. Cobra had its own tragedy - short-falling American bombs killed scores of their own men, among them the most senior U.S. officer lost to friendly fire in the war.

By the end some 95 percent of Saint-Lô lay in rubble. The name that stuck came from an unexpected source: the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, later a Nobel laureate, worked here after the fighting as a storekeeper, driver and interpreter at an Irish Red Cross hospital built to treat injured civilians. In a 1946 radio text he called Saint-Lô the "Capital of the Ruins," and dwelt less on the wreckage than on the quiet resilience of the people living among it.

The Major of Saint-Lô

The battle produced one of the campaign's enduring images. Major Thomas Howie, commanding a battalion of the 29th Division's 116th Infantry, was killed by mortar fire on the town's outskirts just short of the objective. When his division entered the ruins, his flag-draped body was carried in and laid amid the rubble of the Sainte-Croix church, so that the man who had promised to see his men into Saint-Lô would be the first American there. A war correspondent christened him "the Major of St Lô," and the photograph of the flag on the stones travelled the world.

What to see today

The unmissable sight is the collegiate church of Notre-Dame. Its twin-towered west front was shattered in 1944, the north tower brought down by shellfire. Rather than rebuild the façade as it was, the architects sealed the gap with a stark flat wall of dark green schist quarried from the north Cotentin - a deliberate scar, left raw as a memorial. Look, too, for shell damage still pocking the older stonework. Nearby, the medieval ramparts survive along the spur, with wide views over the valley the fighting crossed.

A bronze bust of Major Howie stands on a roundabout that bears his name; a plaque in the Sainte-Croix church marks where his body was laid. On the town's edge, the Mémorial de la Madeleine, a small 13th-century chapel, gathers photographs, flags and personal effects of the 29th and 35th Divisions, with an illuminated model of the July operations (open summer weekends). Finally, the France-United States Memorial Hospital, an American gift to the rebuilt town, carries a monumental mosaic by Fernand Léger on its façade - apple blossom and clasped hands, reconciliation rendered in stone and colour.

Practical notes

Saint-Lô is a working town rather than a battlefield stop, and it is reached easily on the N174 from the north or the D972 from Bayeux. Park in the lower town near the river or on the streets below the ramparts, and climb to the old quarter on foot; the church of Notre-Dame and the ramparts are close together once you are up on the spur. The church, the ramparts and the Léger mosaic cost nothing to see.

Allow two hours for the church, the ramparts and the Howie memorials, and add time if you want the Mémorial de la Madeleine on the edge of town, which needs the car.

The rebuilt centre is level and easy, but the spur is not: the climb from the river to the old town is steep, and the rampart walk is uneven in places, with steps. Wheelchair and pushchair users will find the upper town manageable once there, and it is worth parking as high as possible rather than walking up. Coming from the beaches, the obvious pairing is Carentan half an hour north, with the memorial at Graignes on the way, and the German cemetery at La Cambe makes a sober counterweight to a day spent among Allied memorials.