Arromanches: The Mulberry Harbour and the Longues Battery

Required Activities

• From the sea wall at Arromanches, count the Phoenix caissons still lying offshore and work out what you are not seeing: the largest were 70 m long and 20 m high and weighed over 6,000 tonnes, so only their tops break the surface. Then look straight out from the village and place the quay that stood there — seven floating platforms linked into 750 m of pier, joined to the shore by two floating roadways

• Stand in the middle of the circular cinema on the cliff above the town for its twenty-minute film, thrown onto nine screens all round you, and afterwards step straight outside to put the archive footage of the harbour against the caissons still sitting in the water below

• Work along the four casemates at Longues-sur-Mer with their 150 mm naval guns, left in place since the war, and find the one that was hit: casemate number two took a direct strike through its two-metre roof slab on 27 May 1944 that blew out the west wall where the ammunition was kept, and the damage is still plain, while numbers three and four came through almost untouched

• Walk the 300 m forward from the guns to the Anton fire-control post on the cliff edge, go in and find the map of Port-en-Bessin cut into the concrete wall, then stand at the observation slit with its view of more than 180 degrees over the sea — the room that was supposed to aim all four guns, and the one they filmed for The Longest Day