Anniversary: D-Day Seen from the Longues-sur-Mer Battery — June 6, 1944

At 5:37 on the morning of 6 June 1944, the British cruiser Ajax opened fire on the German battery at Longues-sur-Mer, four 15cm naval guns sealed inside as many concrete casemates on a bluff in Lower Normandy, midway between the landing sectors the Allies called Omaha and Gold. The battery answered at 6:05. At 6:20 it targeted the Bulolo, the ship carrying the invasion staff to Gold Beach, forcing her to move. At 8:00, Ajax and Argonaut opened fire on it again; the French cruisers Georges Leygues and Montcalm and the American battleship Arkansas fired on the same position. One casemate was put out of action, two damaged.

The most widely told version of that morning ends there, with the battery «silenced». The day’s own tally says otherwise: the battery fired more than a hundred rounds over the course of 6 June, and by evening one gun was still capable of firing. The document that scales back the British account is British: the Admiralty, reviewing its own gunnery afterward, wrote that the coastal batteries had been «silenced or reduced to short periods of sporadic and ineffective fire», and that the bombardment had left the enemy «temporarily incapable of offering strong resistance». Not destroyed: neutralised. The battery’s 184-man garrison surrendered the next day, at noon on 7 June, to a single company of the Devonshire Regiment, without a fight.

It is the only coastal battery in Normandy to retain its original guns, and has been a listed historic monument since 2001: the Longues-sur-Mer battery entry tells how it was built, by whom, and why the accounts of that morning do not agree.