England and France: a tale of two coastlines

On the eve of D-day’s 75th anniversary, with Brexit looming, how do those on either side of the Channel feel?

• View a gallery of more pictures from the coast-to-coast trip

The landscape remains as it was then,” says Mark Worthington, waving across marshland and poplar trees laden with mistletoe. He stands beside Pegasus Bridge, across the Caen Canal at Ranville, Normandy, taken on 5 June 1944 by an allied advance party that arrived to clear the way for D-day, and the liberation of western Europe.

Worthington, curator of the Pegasus Bridge commemorative museum on this site, proceeds to the cemetery of British soldiers killed on, or soon after, D-day – rows and rows of lost lives. In the graveyard of the lovely church next door “are German graves, and that of the first man to die at D-day, on Pegasus Bridge, Pte Den Brotheridge” – of whom a statue was unveiled in Portsmouth during the week of our visit to Ranville, where it later went for display. This June marks the 75th anniversary of D-day, last of the commemorative five-year “big ones”, which will be attended by heads of state and veterans alike.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2W9f1RW
via
0 Comments