The liberation of Bayeux

On the morning of 7 June 1944, the day after the Normandy landings, soldiers of the British 56th Infantry Brigade, supported by tanks of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, entered Bayeux – the capital of the Bessin, some ten kilometres from the coast. The Germans had withdrawn from the town during the night, and it was taken practically without a fight. Bayeux, with its eleventh-century cathedral and medieval centre, came through the war almost untouched. In French memory it is recorded as the first major town of mainland France liberated in the course of Operation Overlord and the first liberated seat of a sub-prefecture. In the weeks that followed it became a base behind the British front, a town of hospitals, and the place where Charles de Gaulle spoke to the French on French soil for the first time in four years.

A first-day objective

In the invasion plan Bayeux was one of the main objectives of Major General Douglas Graham’s British 50th (Northumbrian) Infantry Division. The division was part of XXX Corps and of General Miles Dempsey’s Second Army, under Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. It was to land on the Gold sector – between Le Hamel and La Rivière – and then widen the beachhead to the west and south: to capture Arromanches, where the Mulberry artificial harbour was to be built, cut the N13 road from Bayeux to Caen, seize Bayeux itself and make contact with the Canadians on Juno Beach to the east and the Americans on Omaha Beach to the west. For D-Day the division was reinforced with an extra infantry brigade (the 56th), an armoured brigade (the 8th), No. 47 Royal Marine Commando, artillery and engineers.

Facing it were units of the German 716th Infantry Division, a static division made up largely of older age groups and “Ost” battalions, and of the 352nd Infantry Division, which since March 1944 had been responsible for the sector from Carentan to Asnelles. The latter’s reserve – Lieutenant Colonel Meyer’s battle group, some 2,700 men according to British studies – was stationed in the Bayeux area. On the night of 5/6 June, as reports of parachute landings came in, it was sent west towards the base of the Cotentin peninsula; at dawn it was recalled, and in the afternoon, after being strafed from the air on the way, it attacked the British east of Bayeux. Under fire from the 69th Brigade and its tanks it was almost entirely destroyed, and its commander was killed. The western wing of the German defence thus lost the only reserve that could have defended Bayeux.

D-Day on Gold Beach

The first waves of the 231st and 69th Brigades landed on 6 June at about 7.25 a.m. On the eastern part of the sector, near La Rivière and the Mont Fleury battery, resistance was broken relatively quickly; it was there that Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis of the Green Howards won the only Victoria Cross awarded for that day’s fighting. In the west, fortified Le Hamel held out until the afternoon, which forced the command to divert the 56th Brigade – the 2nd South Wales Borderers, 2nd Gloucestershire Regiment and 2nd Essex Regiment – to the neighbouring sector. The brigade landed late, at about 11 a.m., and pushed inland through Ryes towards Bayeux. Meanwhile the 1st Battalion, Hampshire Regiment took Arromanches towards evening, and the 151st Brigade cut the road and railway from Bayeux to Caen.

By evening the 50th Division held a beachhead several kilometres deep, and on the eastern flank the 69th Brigade had made contact with the Canadians from Juno Beach. The price, according to British estimates, was losses of around a thousand men, including some 350 killed, across the whole Gold sector. Patrols of the 56th Brigade reached the outskirts of Bayeux, but the brigade, which had left the beach late, dug in for the night a few kilometres short of the town. In the evening the commander of the 352nd Division, General Dietrich Kraiss, ordered a defensive line to be built north of Bayeux, but he no longer had the troops to man it – most of the ground was in British hands, and his units had lost a large part of their strength.

7 June: a town taken without a fight

On the morning of 7 June the 56th Brigade resumed its advance. According to British and French accounts, the town had already been abandoned by the Germans, who had withdrawn to the south; troops of the 2nd Essex and the accompanying Sherwood Rangers tanks came across only the odd straggler. The inhabitants came out into the streets with French tricolours and British flags, showering the soldiers with flowers, cider and calvados. By midday Bayeux was in British hands, and the division pushed on a few kilometres further south. The same day, however, brought the first counter-attacks: the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend struck near Caen, and from 8 June the Panzer Lehr Division began to move into the sector south of Bayeux. At Tilly-sur-Seulles, barely a dozen or so kilometres from the liberated town, days of heavy fighting began in the Normandy bocage – a landscape of fields divided by tall hedgerows.

Bayeux enjoyed a good fortune that the region’s other towns did not. It lay far enough from the coast not to be a target of the bombing that preceded the landings, and the Germans made no attempt to defend it. When, in the weeks that followed, Caen, Saint-Lô and Vire were reduced to rubble, the cathedral of Notre-Dame and the old houses along the River Aure remained untouched.

Joining the beachheads

The liberation of Bayeux coincided with the first attempts to stitch the separate beachheads together into a single front. In the east, contact with the Canadians from Juno had already been made on the evening of D-Day. In the west, between Gold and Omaha, lay the small fishing port of Port-en-Bessin, fortified by the Germans and important to the planners: it was to become a fuel terminal for both armies. Its capture was entrusted to No. 47 Royal Marine Commando. The commandos lost some of their boats and equipment in the landing, marched overland to the rear of the defences and, in fighting on 7–8 June – known as the Battle of Port-en-Bessin – took the port early on the morning of 8 June, losing, according to British figures, 46 killed and 70 wounded. That same day, in the Port-en-Bessin area, they met American soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division advancing from Omaha. The British and American beachheads were thus joined. To complete the front, Omaha still had to be linked with Utah Beach, separated from it by the estuary of the Vire and the Douve – this came only after the fighting for Carentan a few days later.

A town behind the lines

Undamaged Bayeux became one of the most important points in the British rear. Its narrow medieval streets could not cope with military convoys, so within a few weeks the engineers built a ring road around the centre – according to French studies, the first road of its kind in France. Field hospitals were set up in schools, convents and the seminary buildings, taking in thousands of wounded soldiers and civilians from the shelled and bombed surroundings. Those who could not be saved were buried in the war cemetery on the edge of the town; today more than 4,600 soldiers lie there, most of them British but also several hundred Germans. It is the largest British cemetery of the Second World War in France. As early as June the weekly La Renaissance du Bessin began to appear here, regarded in Bayeux as the first newspaper of liberated France.

De Gaulle in Bayeux and the end of the AMGOT plans

The liberation of the first French town raised a practical question that had divided the Allies for months: who was to govern the liberated territories? President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would not recognise de Gaulle’s authority until the French had expressed their will in elections, and the American services had prepared a military administration on the Italian model (AMGOT, Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories) and printed their own “flag notes” – francs issued by the Allies, which de Gaulle called “counterfeit money”. On 3 June the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers had proclaimed itself the Provisional Government of the French Republic; Washington did not recognise the decision.

De Gaulle responded with faits accomplis. On 14 June he crossed from Portsmouth on the destroyer La Combattante and landed near Courseulles-sur-Mer. After a brief visit to Montgomery’s headquarters at the château near Creully, he walked through Bayeux, greeted by the crowds, visited the sub-prefecture and, in a square in the town centre, made his first speech since 1940 on the free soil of mainland France. He declared that France would fight alongside the Allies until victory. The same day he also visited Isigny-sur-Mer (PL) and Grandcamp, returning to England in the evening. But he left his own people behind in Bayeux. François Coulet, a Free French diplomat appointed on 12 June as Commissioner of the Republic for liberated Normandy, took over the civil administration and appointed a local resistance activist, Raymond Triboulet, as sub-prefect of Bayeux. The Vichy officials were removed.

The Allies accepted this state of affairs. Montgomery, and above him Dwight Eisenhower, had no intention of building an alien administration behind a raging battle against the wishes of a local population that had recognised de Gaulle as its leader. The civil affairs officers who had arrived with the troops began, in practice, to work with Coulet’s people. According to French studies, it was in Bayeux that the plan for a military government of France collapsed before it had even begun to operate – although the dispute over currency and over formal recognition of de Gaulle’s government continued throughout the summer.

The tapestry that was not in town

Bayeux’s most famous treasure was not in the liberated town. The Bayeux Tapestry – an eleventh-century embroidery nearly 70 metres long depicting the conquest of England by William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings – had been rolled up by the French authorities and hidden in a shelter in the town’s cellars as early as 1 September 1939. In 1941 it was moved to the abbey of Mondaye, where it was studied by German scholars from the Ahnenerbe, an organisation linked to Heinrich Himmler, who were interested in it as supposed evidence of the “Germanic” heritage of the Normans. From August 1941 it was kept at the Château de Sourches in the Sarthe department. According to French studies, on 26 June 1944 it was taken to the Louvre in Paris on the occupier’s orders. In August, in the last days of the occupation of Paris, Himmler, according to post-war accounts, wanted it taken to Germany, but this could not be done; the tapestry remained in the Louvre and returned to Bayeux in 1945.

This story lent the liberation of Bayeux a symbolic dimension that was readily emphasised after the war. The frieze of the memorial erected opposite the local war cemetery bears a Latin inscription, “Nos a Gulielmo victi victoris patriam liberavimus” – “We, once conquered by William, have now set free the Conqueror’s native land”.

Significance

The capture of Bayeux was not in itself a great military achievement – the Germans gave up the town without a fight, and it was taken a day behind schedule. The D-Day plan had in fact envisaged more: the capture of Caen as well, which the British and Canadians were to take on the first day but took only after several weeks of bloody fighting. Bayeux, on the western flank of the British beachhead, became its secure rear base, a hub of roads, hospitals and depots supplying the fighting at Tilly, Villers-Bocage and Caen.

Its political significance proved greater. De Gaulle’s visit on 14 June and the installation of his commissioner showed that the French in the liberated areas recognised the authority of the Provisional Government, not an Allied administration or Vichy officials. This model – civil authority taken over by de Gaulle’s people in the wake of the armies – was repeated in town after town as they were liberated. In July de Gaulle visited Washington, in August the Allies signed an agreement with the French on civil administration, and in October 1944 the United States, Britain and the USSR formally recognised his government. De Gaulle returned to Bayeux in June 1946, by then a private citizen, to deliver his famous speech on France’s constitution, which foreshadowed the constitution of the Fifth Republic.