A couple of week's ago I had the chance to visit the site of the
Bruneval Raid once again.
 |
| Lighthouse at Cap d'Antifer |
Whilst there I took the opportunity to visit the Freya site at
Cap d'Antifer, that wasn't part of the scope of the raid, but was just north of where the attack took place.
 |
| The concrete base for the Freya Radar. A similar construction is easily accessible on the high ground overlooking Arromanches and I believe has been restored with a replica aerial. |
From the
Rue de Major Frost in the village of
La Presbytere, take the
Rue de Phare towards the Lighthouse at
Cap d’Antifer.
 |
| Personnel Bunker |
Visit the lighthouse and the German Naval Radar buildings around it before heading back the way you came.
At sharp left hand bend, park your car by the gate. Here you’ll see immediately a good example of a
Tobruk bunker. Now walk towards the cliffs and you can climb up onto the first flak position you come to.
 |
| Nice Tobruk emplacement....popular with the locals! |
From here you can view the other bunkers, the
Freya base (in the distance) and the old entrance blocks that were either side of the flak position’s gate!
 |
| Flak Bunker |
 |
| These two concrete blocks are the former entrance gate posts to the flak position. The way in was blocked by slotting in a steel pole between the blocks. Another flak position is in the distance |
I also (rather foolishly as it was a very hot day) decided to climb up the path to the concrete bunker at the site of "REDOUBT".
 |
| "REDOUBT" looking across to the modern day memorial |
The bunker is likely to be a later addition, but this was the path down which the raiders evacuated to the beach.
If you ever go there be aware that it is very steep, not very wide and very challenging!
 |
| View from "REDOUBT" across to the drop zone where two sections accidentally were dropped |
 |
| Hotel Beauminet in Saint-Jouin-Bruneval (just up the road from the beach), that housed the Luftwaffe personnel who manned the radar and which was visited by two members of the French resistance to gain intelligence before the raid. The mission was a total success, they even found out that the mine fields at the beach were dummies! |
I hope you find the photographs of the areas I visited interesting, and perhaps inspire you to take a look yourselves one day!
At sharp left hand bend, park your car by the gate. Here you’ll see immediately a good example of a Tobruk bunker. Now walk towards the cliffs and you can climb up onto the first flak position you come to.
Thank you for your two blogspot pages about operation biting, and the geography of the area. I just finished reading the 2024 book "Operation Biting" by Max Hastings, which is very detailed about personalities, but weak about geography, distances, hardware, etc. For example, what was the "rectangle", and where were the actual drops and routes taken - the book's text and the partially-unlabelled maps confict.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, your web pages fill in some of the details. Elsewhere, I found more details about the electronics of the RDF station, though Appendix IV of the book has a few incomplete extracts from the Telecommunications Research Establishment report.
As an aging electronics geek who disassembled discarded tube television sets as a preteen to build my own electronics in the early 1960s (much closer to WW2 technology than today) , I'm much more interested in what the engineers thought than what Lord Mountbatten said.
As a miles-a-day walker, I'm very interested in your own perambulations at the sites. If your explorations ever take you to the Pacific Northwest, I can take you to some of our "war places".
Hi Keith, thank you very much for taking the time to pass comment. I’m glad I’ve been able to fill in some of the gaps. I took some friends to visit this area once again, in April this year. We also made the trip into Le Havre and sought out the graves of the two British casualties who are buried in the town cemetery. It fantastic that we can still reach out and touch recent history!
Delete