The Drama of Juno Beach

On Wednesday we planned to visit the Juno Beach Centre.  This required a day trip to the small sea side town of Courseulles-der-mer, which is close to port city Caen.  According to the information Thomas got off the Juno Beach Centre website there were trains from Paris to Caen about once an hour.  In the morning, before leaving the Paris apartment we phoned the DB Bahn office in Paris to enquire about booking space on a train to get to Prague. We discovered too late that they don’t allow online booking after a certain point, and we had missed that. Fortunately I got a very helpful agent who was able to find us space on an over-nighter to Prague - but one connecting in Mannheim rather than Cologne as we had originally planned.  She told me that the trains are very full these days, thankfully there was still space for our family on one train to Prague.

So on our way to the station to catch a train to the coast we stopped at the DB Bahn office and picked up our tickets for the trip we are on currently (as I write this post).  When we got to station it looked like the next train for Caen was over a 90 minute wait - that didn’t seem right (according to the info Thomas had).  I noticed that a train from Caen had pulled in shortly after we arrived and I mistakenly assumed that that same train would shortly head back to Caen, so I went to buy tickets but the line-up at the ticket office was huge, so I decided to take a chance on a ticket dispensing machine. It seemed to work and thus we assumed we were set to go... but the train from Caen didn’t seem to be going anywhere.  So we asked at an Information desk - there we discovered two things: the train for Caen was indeed not leaving for 90 minutes yet, and we yet bought the wrong tickets for the kids.

Now we did have to get in the long queue at the ticket office.  Good thing we had that amount of time because it took Beth and I almost a full hour before we were served.  We managed to get the kids tickets straightened out and paid the difference (we had gotten a discount only available for European Union youth).  We asked the ticket agent when the final train from Caen to Paris left the coast - he said 6:50 PM.  That didn’t seem right, according to the info on the Juno Beach Centre website which said there were trains late into the evening.

So finally it is time to board our train and we are on our way.  The train ride was longer than we anticipated as well - we were counting on less than 2 hours, this train took over 2 and a half hours.  The bottom line is that we were pulling in to Caen around 4:00 PM, much later than anticipated.  I tried to figure out if the ticket agent was correct about the last train, and I found a printed schedule (but it was rather convoluted and tricky to figure out).

There was a regional bus service that would get us from Caen to Courseulles-der-mer, but we missed that connection and the next one wouldn’t be for another hour.  It was looking like we were going to get less and less time at the Juno Beach Centre.  I decided we would check about getting a taxi - lo and behold across the street from the train station was a taxi business which advertised about visiting the landing beaches with service in English.  Perfect!

The helpful woman who functioned as receptionist and dispatcher called us a cab big enough to fit all 5 of us.  It was there within 10 minutes and we were on our way.  When we arrived the cost for the taxi was only a few euros more than the bus would have been and we were dropped off right at the door of the museum (whereas the bus would have dropped us off at a stop in town requiring us to walk to the Juno Beach Centre which was a little ways out of town).  We asked the driver to wait until we found out for sure when the last train was.  We went in the museum and the good Canadian lads behind the counter helped us.  It seemed like the ticket agent was wrong and there was indeed a later train according to the info they had.  A few minutes later one of the young men at the Centre found us and explained that they double checked on the internet and indeed 6:50 PM was the last train (it seems we picked the one day of the week when there were fewer trains on that route).  So we had limited time - better make the most of it.

The Juno Beach Centre was well done, and started with a video presentation that asked us to imagine we were a young Canadian soldier in a landing craft (the room was shaped like the interior of such a transport boat).  I found myself getting quite moved by the video presentation and simply the idea of being in this place where so many sacrificed their lives for the liberation of Europe and the defeat of Nazism.  The rest of the museum told not only the D-Day story, but also the pre-war, early war and post-war reality for Canadian soldiers.  It was well done, with interesting artifacts and lots of personal stories related through multi-media stations.

Two artifacts touched me deeply, the first was a temporary grave marker used to mark where fallen soldiers had been buried, the other was an actual helmet recovered from the beach years later - it had obviously been in the water for some time, and it had a single bullet hole in its crest.  A sad reminder of one soldier who did not come home.

An actual temporary grave marker used on D-Day at Juno Beach.

After going through the museum we went and looked at the beach itself.  I looked out over the horizon and imagined the HMS Belfast out there pounding the gun installments all along the beach where the Canadian troops were going to land.  Then I looked at the size of the beach - it was not very deep, but very wide.  This meant Canadian soldiers would have very little manoeuvring room once they landed - in so many ways they must have been like sitting ducks for the Nazi guns.

Juno Beach - looking out from the top of a Nazi bunker.

Sadly we needed to end our time looking around so we could catch the train back to Paris.  I’m sure Thomas could have spent another couple hours out there easily, but such was the reality of the train schedules for that day.  It turns out the taxi driver had figured out the time to get back for the train incorrectly at first and we needed another 10 minutes.  In other words we were leaving the Juno Beach Centre 10 minutes late.  Fortunately we had a very skilful driver who drove much faster than he was supposed to get to the station on time.  There were some nerve-wracking moments, and as I watched the clock tick closer to the time the train would leave the station I began to think about contingency plans (like booking a hotel in Caen and heading back to Paris first thing in the morning).

Well we got to the station with 7 minutes to spare, we ran to the platform and found a lot of people waiting there.  When I asked someone I found out the train was late!  In the end we had over 10 minutes to spare - the hair-raising drive back from Courseulles-der-mer wasn’t quite as necessary as it seemed.  The little bit of nerve-wracking experience our visit to Juno Beach was, I kept reminding myself how much more so it would have been for those young Canadian soldiers waiting in the wet dark of the English Channel, waiting for what I’m sure they could only imagine. I have a renewed sense of gratitude for their sacrifice (both those who died that June day in 1944, and those who lived the rest of their lives with the horrific memories of such a terrible battle, and the terrible things that had to take place for victory to be secured).  While our time at Juno Beach was short I still feel it was worth it - part of our heritage worth remembering.

A sculpture outside the Juno Beach Centre.