HISTORIC NORMANDY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 82, 16 June 1944, Page 4

HISTORIC NORMANDY

WHEN Britain's Great Prime Minister, Mr Winston Churchill, stepped ashore on the coast of Normandy less than two weeks after the news that electrified the world, we wonder if he realised the significance of this new and latest assault upon that historic French bastion. Home of the first of England's Norman Kings, it was on these shores and in these coves and inlets, William the Conqueror first assembled his invasion fleet in the eventful year 1066. The tiny craft of the Conqueror's army poured across the Channel in what was then regarded as one of the mightiest fleets ever gathered. The sea-faring Normans manned the ships, and on the main decided to stay in the land of the defeated Saxons. The next time Normandy figured in the war history of the world, occurred in the reign of Henry V. when with the positions reversed the Norman-Saxon armies combined to drench the fair fields of Normandy in blood in the great and decisive battles of Crecy, Agin- 1 court and Poitiers. The shores of northern France seemed fated to be the scenes of bitterly contested fighting between the twp races for hundreds of years, building up the traditional belief that the soldiers of Merrie England and La Belle France were natural enemies. In the subsequent centuries barbarous fighting in wars offering little or no excuse took place on the slightst provocation. In the reign of Queen Anne, the Duke of Marlborough (Churchill's great ancestor) again led the invading armies of England across the Channel, where the flower of French chivalry perished in four catastrophic defeats at Ramilles, Malpla* quet, Oudinarde and Blenheim. The English invaders withdrew, but in succeeding centuries, the French Revolution brought about another war with England, followed by the toughest of all conquests for the combined European powers—the world-shaking battles of the Nepoleonic era. Final victory to the Allied Anglo-German arms brought peace after Waterloo, and once again the fields of Normandy and Flanders breathed the calm of peace until the Franco-German wars of the middle 18th century. Not until fifty years afterwards did France bleed once more on the alter of Mars. In the year 1914, English Armies entered Normandy for the first time in a thousand years in the guise of co-defenders and allies of the French people. Five years of the bloodiest warfare known to man followed, with the English again re-crossing the Channel after leaving a million dead on French territory. Twenty years later in 1939, with the German monster once again raising its head a new British Expeditionary force of 250,000 men poured into France across the famous Norman and Flemish bridgeheads. Eighteen months later they were evacuated by a miracle from the shell-torn sands and beaches at Dunkirk. To-day, two years after, almost to the day England, reinforced by the fighting men of America has returned to the battle. Strong and confident the eightymile beach-head on the Norman coast, has once again seen bitter and victorious fighting for the English armies, which have come once more as Allies and deliveries. As the great Churchill surveyed the scene of the mighty battle now taking place, we have no doubt but that his powerfully imaginative and alert mind must harked back to the epoch-making struggles between the two races which had taken place on those very shores.