Cotentin Peninsula

The weather did not cooperate.

Cloud cover over the Cotentin Peninsula was far thicker than the forecasters had promised.

Some formations began to break apart as pilots lost sight of the aircraft ahead of them.

Navigators who had trained over England and had never flown over France in their lives were trying to find pinpoint targets in the dark through broken overcast.

A very lovely sight the Spitfires are on our port side, ranged in their ranks of three.

And now we're going in over the cliffs from the green fields of France and over there to starboard, the big warships firing inshore towards the Cherbourg Peninsula where the Americans are.

Flash of their guns just gone now.

Another flash from a ship further down the line.

Legend goes on to relate, however, that Rollo refused to kneel and kiss the king's foot, crying out in his own speech, No, by God, and that the companion to whom he delegated the unwelcome obligation performed it so clumsily that he overturned the king, to the great merriment of the assembled Northmen.

Rollo did not receive the whole of the later duchy, but only the region on either side of the Seine, which came to be known as Upper Normandy, and it was not until 924 that the Northmen acquired also Middle Normandy or the Bessin, while the West, the Cotentin and the Avranchin fell to them only in 933.

As to Rollo's personality, we have only the evidence of later Norman historians of doubtful authority and the Norse saga of Harold Fairhair.

If, as seems likely, their accounts relate to the same person, he was known in the North as Rolf the Ganger, because he was so huge that no horse could carry him, and he must needs gang afoot.

I remember on my first journey through Normandy seeing at a wayside station a peasant who might have walked that moment out of a Wisconsin lumber camp or a Minnesota wheat field.

But the statistics of anthropometry show a steady preponderance of the round-headed type which prevails in other parts of France.

Only in two regions does the Teutonic type assert itself strongly, in the lower valley of the Seine and in the Cotentin, and it is in these regions and at points along the shore that place names of Scandinavian origin are most frequent.

The terminations Bec and Fleur, Boeuf and Ham, Dal and Tote, Bolbec, Harfleur, Quilleboeuf, Ouistreham, Dieppedal, Yvetot tell the same story as the terms used in navigation, namely that the Northmen were men of the sea and settled in the estuaries and along the coast.

They sat in the red glow of the jump lights with their legs weighted down with weapons and equipment and the quiet knowledge that in a few hours they would either be on the ground in France, fighting, or they would be dead.

The formations flew in tight at low altitude over the dark water, then hit cloud and fog over the Cotentin Peninsula, and the German anti-aircraft fire that turned the sky into something from a nightmare.

Formation discipline broke down.

Crews dropped their sticks early to get out of the flak.

You got, so what kind of tides have you got there? Like, do you have strong tides in the English channel?

Strong generally up and down, but around the channel islands and the Cherbourg peninsula, incredibly strong.

I mean, you've got seven, eight knot tides.

What? Springs.

Oh, it's phenomenal.

Because if you think about the tide, it kind of, if it's coming out the English channel, it kind of gets caught around the Cherbourg peninsula.

So you get these incredible, huge rise and falls around 12 meters.

wow

It is likely that Rollo died shortly after, around 930.

The final brief mention of Rollo in the early chronicles comes in 928 by chronicler Flodoard, and in 933 it is noted that his son, William, inherited a third grant of land which stretched from the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy southwards to Rennes in East Brittany.

Rollo's immediate successors, William Longsword, his successor and illegitimate son, Richard I, also known as Richard the Fearless, and Richard's successor, Richard II, continued to rule Normandy in the way of their ancestor, Rollo, honoring his policies which had brought Normandy prosperity, order, and peace.

Over time, Normandy was transformed from a neglected backwater into a formidable duchy.

I have to always remind people, Easy Company did a lot of great work in so many ways, but they didn't win the war on their own.

And that's something that's it was a coalition force, especially on June 6th, coming into that into Normandy and onto the Cotentin Peninsula.

So.

absolutely take that ball and run with it.

well-liked within the squadron from the accounts that come out later on from it.

But what happens is, we're the 24th of May, and this is a two-squadron attack against the radar station at Cap de la Hague, which is on the Cherbourg Peninsula.

So we're right at the far end of what will become the battlefront.

So again, much like we were describing earlier, 609 Squadron come in first, they do a high attack, so they come after the radar site there, which funnily enough is still there as a French army d'air radar station, so you can go and see it.