V-E Day visit to Musée de la Libération de Berjou

This V-E Day, 8 May 2022, was a suitable day for a pilgrimage to a hidden gem of a museum in Normandy:

The Musée de la Libération de Berjou is dedicated to the history of the battle around Berjou on 15-17 August 1944. This was the moment when German 7th Army was scrambling to escape the Falaise Pocket, which was about to be sealed. The British Operation Bluecoat had covered the flank of the American breakout (Operation Cobra) and brought British 2nd Army down past Vire. To cover their retreat, the Germans had tried to establish a new defensive line facing west, anchored on Flers and Condé-sur-Noireau. Now 2nd Army launched Operation Blackwater to cross the River Noireau (i.e., "black water") and breach this last German line.

Berjou is on steep wooded high ground 5km east of Condé, covering the flank of the German line. At dawn on 15 August, 214 Brigade of 43rd (Wessex) Division crossed the Noireau at several points. The next morning, the German 276 Infanterie-Division launched a violent counter-attack. The arrival of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry's tanks helped to repel this. Then, after a powerful artillery barrage, 1st Battalion the Worcestershire Regiment liberated Berjou. The battle cost the lives of 70 British troops, several hundred Germans, and between 15 and 30 civilians.

The museum commemorates this action in a building absolutely packed with artifacts, all recovered from the battlefield. Because it has so much stuff now, they are planning to extend it. The building itself had a German gun position next to it and still bears the scars of battle damage. Exhibit highlights include an intact 81mm mortar, a rare Gw-43 German automatic rifle, an SS colonel's uniform, and (bizarrely) half a German sea mine (apparently jettisoned by a German plane, it blew out every window in the village), but these are just a few out of hundreds of items of kit, weaponry and miscellanea of all kinds. This is a very substantial collection which is still being added to: just last week, two Lee-Enfields, a Kar-98K and a Sten in good condition were discovered in a case concealed in a building wall. Our group was treated to a personal guided tour by the grandson of the man who owned the building during the war. (The owner was serving in the French military and was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, I believe; his uniform, POW documents etc are on display.) Our guide himself was responsible for many of the finds retrieved from locals' attics or metal detecting in the fields around about, and his knowledge and enthusiasm made the visit even better.

 

The museum is only open on Sunday afternoons, 14:00-18:00, from May to September. If you should find yourself in Normandy in those months, do make the effort to go to Berjou - it's well worth it and much better than some bigger and better-known museums in Normandy.

The museum has a Facebook page here.

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Lest we forget

November 11 is Remembrance Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries, Veterans Day in the US, and a public holiday in France and Belgium as well. On this day, my dice fall silent. It is not a day for wargaming but one for sombre reflection on the grim reality of war and for honouring those who died.

Last week we paid our respects at the new British Normandy Memorial. Construction of the memorial began in 2019 and it was completed and officially opened in June this year. It has a fine hilltop site by Ver-sur-Mer, overlooking Gold Beach, with the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches visible away to the west. A few photos below.

The memorial is done in appropriate style.

The names of the fallen are inscribed on the pillars of the colonnades.

Newly laid poppy wreaths.

 

Proper statuary.

 

Not a D-Day veteran, nor one of the fallen. However, this seems a suitable place to remember my grandfather, Frank Pringle, pictured here before going overseas in 1943 as a member of 2 NZ Division. Frank fought all the way up through Italy, including at Monte Cassino and the Sangro, before returning home safe and sound to live a long and happy life back in New Zealand.

Operation Bluecoat: The Wilderness in the bocage?

Had the privilege of spending the 75th anniversary D-Day week in Normandy, witnessing commemorations, celebrations, reenactments, and events of all kinds. A wonderfully memorable week.

[Sorry, no photo right now for technical reasons! I should add one in a week or so.]

Naturally we had to mark it with some suitably themed wargames. One highlight was joining the Guerriers du Marais for their exposition in the municipal gallery in Carentan. They had two display games: one a 28mm Bolt Action section of Omaha Beach (fine scratchbuilt bunkers by Pierre); the other a 10mm representation of the whole of the battle for Carentan, using a WWII adaptation of BBB.

The buildings for the latter were real works of art, having been handcrafted by Colin based on actual Carentan buildings, using photos from 1944. The game was good value too. The poor German players really felt pummelled by the US artillery, airpower and naval gunfire support. At the end their paras were still hanging on grimly, but 17th SS had taken a battering and the Ostbataillons had lost interest long ago. The game felt right, and of course it was great to fight for Carentan in Carentan.

We fought a couple of other battles as well. But my favourite game of the week was the tail-end of Operation Bluecoat. Bluecoat seems to be a somewhat neglected operation in Normandy histories, perhaps because it is a kind of bridesmaid as it covers the US flank after the more glamorous and well-known US Operation Cobra. But whereas much of the Normandy fighting is simple frontal assault slog with limited options for the defender, the last part of Bluecoat offers scope for games of much more complex and interesting maneuver.

The focus of our game was the period in early August 1944 when two British divisions - 11th Armoured and Guards Armoured - push south from St.-Martin-des-Besaces toward Vire and the critical east-west highway through it that the Germans are using as an axis for their drive on Mortain. The result is that they collide at right angles with 9th SS Panzer Division 'Hohenstaufen' and some other fragments and remnants. Hence the attacking British forces are not much larger than the defending/counterattacking Germans; both sides have substantial mobile and armoured formations; and both sides need and want to maneuver.

To me the situation is strikingly similar to the ACW Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. (See here and here.) Invert the map east-west, and you have the British playing the part of the Union - with Guards Armoured showing some of the diffidence and caution of the passive and confused Union army - while 9SS is Bobby Lee's mobile, smaller but highly motivated and aggressively led army, striking at ninety degrees. Vire isn't quite Richmond, but near enough in providing an objective at the southern end of the pitch that the CSA/9SS have to stop the US/Brits from reaching; and to do so they have several options of blocking, smashing, or cutting rear lines of communication.

We fought this twice in Normandy, having fought it once already in UK. In game 1 (UK), the British easily raced south and cut the road at Vaudry and Viessoix but then couldn't make much progress along it to the east, and ended up winning by turning west and taking Vire (unhistorically, since in the actual campaign this could shifted from the British to the US sector during the operation). Game 2 was another British win as the Germans opted for a straight punch to the west from Estry, came within an ace of cutting British supply lines completely, but left the road to Vire and the highway too open. Game 3, benefiting from previous experience, the German players followed a more historical plan. KG Weiss's Tigers successfully dominated the main road toward Vire for the whole game, and 9SS managed to string out along the key Estry ridge and hold that against all efforts. There was an alarm late in the game when Guard Armoured briefly opened a gap on the eastern flank and looked like getting through behind 9SS; but reserves plugged the gap. By then all the British formations had run out of steam, so a German win evened up the score somewhat.

The game was fought with a playtest version of Frank Chadwick's forthcoming Breakthrough! rules.

Canadians vs 12th SS Panzer Div

My old buddy Graham rarely gets to wargame these days. We had the rare chance of a game together so decided to blow the dust of his lovingly painted collection of 1/300 late WWII Germans. I'd been reading Napier's very fine book, The Armoured Campaign in Normandy. Napier devotes a good number of pages to examining the Canadians' actions on and just after D-Day. Their fight on 7-9 June with 12th SS Panzer Division "Hitler Jugend" seemed to me to offer particularly promising material for a wargame. Both sides are in motion, both sides have about 100+ tanks to play with, the country is pretty open, with fairly low troop densities and without crushing amounts of artillery or airpower. I thought this should produce a nice mobile game rather than the bocage slog we often think of in connection with the battle for Normandy.

Nein, nein, nein! 

Direly ineffective German defensive fire 

as Canadian 7th Bde storms Bretteville.

(Carpet tiles are hills; pipecleaners in the background

mark the railway embankment.)

A few weeks before the game Graham and I drove around the battlefield and visited the Canadian museum at Juno beach. I have to say this was a sad disappointment - sorry, Canucks. I'd been there before when it was fairly new and hoped it might have improved, but it hasn't. Being a latecomer, it has very few actual exhibits to display: a couple of bits of ordnance outside; a few uniforms, fragments of DD tank, and a Sten gun within. Most of it is just big infoboards with blown-up photos. It has quite a lot of info about non-D-Day stuff - the home front, industry and society, RCN convoy battles in the Atlantic, etc - but I learned virtually nothing about the 7-9 June actions. Nevertheless I had high hopes of finding some decent books in the museum shop, in which case I could have forgiven it - but no, there were a few general works but nothing that helped me. (I think the book I need is this, "Stopping the Panzers" by Marc Milner - from my own current favourite publisher, I'm pleased to see.)

Anyway, to the game. The rules we decided to use were Bruce's experimental WWII adaptation of BBB (the third significant effort in that direction, after Bob Mackenzie's and my own). I sketched out a scenario to cover the two major episodes: first, the Canadian 9th Brigade's encounter with SS Panzer-Grenadier Regiment 25 and friends around Authie on its way toward Carpiquet; and then the German counter-attacks against 7th and 8th Brigades by Panthers and SS PG Regt 26 around Bretteville.

This worked out rather well as a see-sawing "game of two halves" - with the seesaw swinging in kind of the opposite direction to history. Historically, 9th Bde had a nasty surprise when it was taken partly in flank by 25 SS PG supported by the Panzer IVs of  II./12 SS Pz Regt. In our game, it was the Pz IVs that had the worst of it, being pretty much blown away without loss by the Shermans of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers. This was partly due to the German advance exposing their flanks to envelopment, but mainly down to the dice. Thus at the halfway mark of the game, on the Canadian left there was very little between 9th Brigade and its objective of Carpiquet, while on the right 7th Brigade had made good progress as it mostly only had a flimsy tripwire of remnants of 716th Infantry Division to deal with.

Day 2 and all changed. Although the Canadians were now substantially reinforced by their artillery in the shape of four regiments of Priests, it was the arrival of the potent Panther battalion of 12 SS Pz that turned the game. First they confronted the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, whose luck with the dice had changed; a few Panthers perished, but all the Shermans burned. 9th Brigade's push on Carpiquet was decisively halted.

The Panthers then turned west (which historically they did as soon as they arrived, not having to detain 9th Bde). Here, on the Canadian right, 7th Brigade had mounted a textbook attack of two battalions, shot in by their field artillery, to turf 26th SS Pz Gren Regt out of Bretteville l'Orgueilleuse. The 7th was poised to pursue the Panzergrenadiers and chase them out of Norrey-en-Bessin as well when the Panthers showed up. The last turn of the game saw a climactic counterattack in the dusk, rather like the history. Again like the history, Canadian PIATs deterred the Panthers from the village, but they couldn't halt the SS Panzer Pioneers. Bretteville was stormed and the Canadians pushed out.

This was quite a long and exhausting game (about 5+ hours) for various reasons: Graham hadn't played at all for a while; we were using an unfamiliar rules variant; we hadn't had a chance to print out QR sheets so kept having to flick through laptop screens to check charts or OBs; and there were a couple of untested aspects of the rules that proved a bit fiddly (but can be fixed).

Despite these elements of Clausewitzian friction, we achieved our aim of playing a fun and interesting game. It did seem to get the right feel for me of the difficulty of winkling Germans out of their strongpoints, while Graham as the Germans felt suitably stretched and under pressure from Canadian numbers and artillery for most of the game. The scenario justified its choice as we both had plenty of options and plenty to do, and it matched up pretty well to the shape of the actual operations. I expect this one will be seen on my table again some time.

I will revise the scenario a bit and then post it to the BBB Yahoo group as usual.

Anyone interested in seeing more detail of the game can find annotated photos in my Flickr album here.