Thursday, June 17, 2010

Louis VM's writes

Louis did not visit the horses on the trip so we asked him to write for the blog. We think he has done a fine job:

This is the story of someone who had to spend one and a half hours writing about the trip in Normandy. Normandy is a place for people who are very interested in history because it is one of the many deeply historic sites across Europe. Some of the many places that are of deep interest to those history lovers are “The American War Cemetery”. This cemetery consists of just under ten-thousand dead American soldiers who gave their lives for all of us today. As well as Christians buried there, there were also Jews buried in the cemetery with the sign of the star above them. This American War Cemetery is situated on Omaha and it was this beach that suffered the most loss to the Allies where they lost ten-thousand soldiers made up of Americans and the English.

Another site that is of historic evidence is the batterie guns that are situated along the whole of the coast of Normandy and these guns could shoot to an almighty distance of 12 miles out to sea. Unfortunately these guns belonged to the German forces so it made it very difficult for the Allies to reach the French coast because at least half of the Ally forces were wiped out even before they reached land. These battery guns were really one of main strength of the German Army. But eventually the Allied forces did manage to break though the German forces and capture more than half of the battery guns and the English did this through countless and relentless charges at the German lines

Posts here from me

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Boy's thoughts on the first few days

On Wednesday we visited the Pegasus memorial museum on the river Orne. This is where the original bridge was kept. It was an excellent presentation, with amazing detail. The nice tour guide told and showed us that three gliders set out to capture what is now\ known as Pegasus Bridge. The plan went very well except for the fact that one glider got lost along the way and when to a completely different Nazi occupied bridge which, because their mission was to capture a bridge, they captured. This could be forgiven because it was at night a many Nazi bridges looked the same. She also told us that only one person was killed during this daring raid. Next she took us onto the original bridge. This was ridden with bullet and places where the explosives from the Nazis were kept there where also many wrecked structures of the gliders which had crashed, trying to capture the bridge. After we looked at the structure at the bridge we went and had fizzy drinks at the local cafe. Then we went to a fascinating museum which the whole 2nd world war into context. We also watched a fascinating film about the 2nd world war. Then we went back to the hotel and the park, and then we watched the football. It was a great day.
By William silver, Matty Swycher, John Joe Lafferty, nick Donohue

Mr Boardman's thoughts.....

First of all many apologies for those of you who have been trying to log on to the blog I set up for the trip. Unfortunately problems only came to light when some of the parents tried to access it this week.
Secondly well done for getting to this blog! My intension is to let the students post here over the next few days as well as posting some photographs. I will also continue to post to the twitter page. Our name is Thehallnormandy.
Yesterday (Monday) started with a visit to Arromanches Museum for the Landing of Allied Forces. We were given an excellent talk on the creation of the Mulberry B Artificial Harbour. I know that the boys found the discussion of the engineering involved very interesting. We then visited Longes Sur Mere which was the position for the German Gun placements. Again I felt that the boys saw History come alive.
After lunch we arrived at The American Cemetery at Omaha where 10 000 fallen American Soldiers are buried. This was a moving and important experience for all of us.
Tuesday has been a real great day, less busy but no less interesting. First off we visited The Pegasus Museum which commemorates the crucial Allied taking of The Pegasus Bridge over the Orne. The presentation there was excellent, with detail of the glider landings (amazingly the British Troops managed to land within 45 yards of the bridge without being detected). We then had a drink at the cafe on the bridge which is still owned by the family who owned it at D-Day.

Some photographs from the first day