Euro Tour – Vlog 9

So I spent the day touring the World War II sights in Arromanche (Caen, France). We visited the 360 Theater for an 18 minute reel of what they call “total emotion” captured during WWII from the beaches of Normandie. I went camera crazy on this tour and have decided to write a song in honour of the soldiers who liberated France from the Germans. I will be incorporating these images into my video projections to serve as a narrative for my lyrics much like Lawrence Collins.

We also went to one of the Canadian Cemeteries with over 2000 soldiers (apparently one of the smaller cemeteries). I didn’t get to see the Americain cemetery but I’m told it’s the largest and most impressive with over 8000 soldiers. What really caught my eye was that the average age of these soldiers at death was about 21 and hundreds died on the same days. You could tell that certain days were slaughter days while others, I’m sure were victims of the same days but managed to survive for a day or two before passing on.

Thereafter we stopped into the museum where I got to see a lot of the artilery that was used by our soldiers… let’s just say that back then it would seem that everything was HUGE! Kind of like how cell phones were huge in the 80s and over time were made smaller and more clear. Have a look at the images below, you’ll see a 25 pound round gun (that means the bullet weighs 25 lbs). I can’t imagine the noise, most of these guys must have lost their hearing big time.

Our final stop was “Le Chateaux Brouay”… look at the photo below, it’s the very last one. You’ll notice that the brick colour in the center is more vibrant. That’s because the bricks were replaced after the war. See what happened was there was a German tank hiding behind the castle, but a Canadian tank was made aware of it. So it fire a canon through the middle of the castle and blew up the German tank that was hiding behind it… now that’s what I call your “million dollar movie shot” only this was the real deal.

I’ve got plenty of footage but no time to cut, so sometime in the future I’ll surely be editing this post. That being said, be sure to comment on this page if you’d like to be informed of when that happens.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 10:36 am. It is filed under Blog and tagged with caen, euro tour, france. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.