The secret tests in Scotland that saved the battle of D-Day

This 6th June, the Débarquement et la Bataille de Normandie is still within the living memory of French citizens in their late eighties and early nineties, who have been passing on their dimming recollections to school-age French students.

While the notorious killing beaches of Utah and Omaha, known from the movie Saving Private Ryan, and the beach names of Sword, Juno and Gold, commemorated in the film, The Longest Day, will remain the powerful places of pilgrimage for the Americans, the Brits, including the Scottish regiments, the Canadian and the Poles, there are many towns and communes in wider Normandy that are still coming to terms with the great destruction and killing during the Summer of Forty-Four.

Mortain-Bocage was originally taken by the GIs of the American First Infantry Division. The 30th Infantry Division was put in place to hold the town, before it was lost in a costly German counter-attack. It was then retaken by the 30th in desperate hand-to-hand fighting with the loss of hundreds of lives.  The struggle for the vantage point above Mortain-Bocage was no minor skirmish. It was a strategic battle which defines today’s free Europe.  German general Kurt Dittmar, reflecting on losing the war in 1945, said: “We lost the battle of the western front at Mortain with the failure of the Mortain-Avranches counter attack.”

While the D-Day landings is commemorated, it was only the prelude to an intense battle across this pastoral landscape etched by rivers, woodlands and deadly bocage – the dense hedgerows above deep country pathways – and almost every village was fiercely contested.

Several weeks after Operation Overlord, the initial landings on June 6, the whole Allied Normandy campaign might well have foundered in early August 1944. In these intervening weeks, British, including hundreds of Scots, Canadian, Polish and South African soldiers, sailors, and air force crew were killed or wounded in brave assaults on determined German defenders near the town of Caen. 

Then the German counter-attack in August at Mortain-Bocage put the whole Allied link-up strategy in southern Normandy in dire jeopardy. Adolf Hitler personally ordered Operation Lüttich to cut off Patton’s American armoured spearhead. Several hundred German tanks and crack SS divisions were piled in at Mortain and the town was retaken by the superior Tiger tanks, with forces attacking in the railway sidings at Mortain-Le Neufbourg station.

Then, for almost six days, about 950 men of the 30th Infantry Division, known as Old Hickory, and mainly from the southern US states, were surrounded on nearby Hill 314 by the elite German forces. The US troops, known as the Lost Battalion, held out on to the Mortain peak, assaulted by SS special troops.  The battalion’s radio batteries ran out, along with ammunition and rations. Attempts to resupply the cut-off men with parachutes packed with batteries and medical supplies missed the landing zone. The Germans offered a surrender, but the GIs refused. Only 376 of the Old Hickory battalion made it out alive.

Heather Newitt lives just outside Mortain in the nearby village of Barenton, liberated by the Americans in August 1944. Her mother was Scottish and she moved to Normandy with her husband, Paul, several years ago. They have become local historians immersed in the countless human stories in the area.

“The whole Normandy campaign pivoted on the Battle at Mortain. This episode is still very much part of the local lives. Like many small towns in this area, more than 80 per cent of the town was destroyed. It isn’t very well known but it was a fulcrum for the whole Normandy invasion,” she says.

“Failure in Mortain by the Americans against the pressing German assault might well have held the end of the war up for many more months, even years. The Allies had to fight their way through France before crossing the Rhine, they didn’t just stroll through Normandy. The rebuilding of many of these Normandy towns and communes is a testament to the reliance of the France people who have lived through this ordeal.”

On 12 August 1944, Mortain was officially liberated, and the townsfolk and the local museum will celebrate with various engagements including a re-enactment of the battle on Tuesday, 6th August at Mortain-Le Neubourg station.

Mortain is among dozens of villages and towns solemnly remembering the terrible carnage and killing which led to their nation’s freedom.

About 22 km north of Mortain, on the road to Bayeaux, famed for its Norman tapestry, and the D-Day beaches, is the market town of Vire. Here the American bombers and the RAF dropped hundreds of tons of bombs in the evening of 6th June 1944, along with bombardments on Caen, Saint-Lo, Flers, Carentan and other German garrison towns. Beside Vire’s tourist office, a granite memorial has the names of around 450 local French civilians killed in these bombing raids. The trapped citizens were unable to escape even though the RAF dropped leaflets urging them to leave.

These market towns on the Normandy peninsula, with their relationship to this region’s bountiful agriculture produce of milk, maize and fruit, still have an uneasy relationship with the Allied liberation. Vire has been completely rebuilt. A solid bell tower, part of its Mediaeval Norman gatehouse and wall, remains a focal point in the main square, while the nearby buildings are the austere functional concrete buildings of the 1950s.

On Vire’s outskirts there are the array of modern supermarkets including Carrefour and LeClerc, the gleaming car showrooms, and bowling alleys in busy malls off the main road. Yet Vire is remembering too and has the flags of France, Europe, the US and the Union Flag, blowing in the breeze as the citizens recently commemorated the 8th May 1945, the end of the conflict in Europe.

Read more: D-Day at 80, how a tiny Scottish isle was key to Operation Overlord

Read more: D-Day veteran urges children ‘not to make same mistakes we made in going to war’

While many in Scotland might think that the Second World War is something to be consigned to the history books, here in large parts of Normandy, away from the tourist beaches, young people are still learning about the value of freedom and the sacrifice of those who died.

Up on the D-Day coastline, preparations are being made for the cavalcade on the 6th June when international leaders will gather in Normandy once again for sombre reflection. The small coastal roads are already jammed with tour coaches, camper vans, and the occasional American Jeep.

The concrete battery and network of bunkers at Longues-sur-Mer, where its massive guns were trained on the advance on Gold beach also houses the remains of the forward observation post, where a shocked German officer first observed the Allied armada on the dawn of June 6th. 

In Arromanches-les-Bain, known as Port Winston Churchill, the town is festooned with flags, and the souvenir shops filled with anniversary mementos, the T-shirts, fridge magnets, the baseball hats, and ready for the major gathering. This is where you’ll find the outstanding Musée du Débarquement, inaugurated in 1954 by René Coty, the French President, but with a state-of-the-art new display in 2023, with its interpretations of the D-Day invasion in the British sector.

Here the massive contributions made by the French Resistance in their sacrifices in the days leading up to D-Day is well told. There is also a stunning tribute to the conception and building of the Mulberry Harbour, the remainder of the massive Phoenix caissons can still be seen jostled by the waves outside on the beach.

On video, Scottish voices talk about how the prototype was built and tested in Wigtownshire. In March 1942, Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, called for a floating harbour that “must float up and down with the tide”. This would be used instead of a direct assault and capture of an established European port after the debacle of the Dieppe raid in 1942. 

A secret location in Scotland was used for this Mulberry test, which must be classed along with Barnes Wallis’ Bouncing Bomb as one of the greatest inventions of the Second World War. In Garlieston Harbour in May 1943, central prototypes were built and flooded in Rigg Bay and Cairn Head. The Swiss Roll, designed by Roland Hamilton, and the Hippo and Crocodile, designed by Hugh Eos Hughes, a Welsh civil engineer, were tried and tested, battered by an incredible storm in the Solway Firth. 

Brigadier Sir Bruce White wrote: “It was necessary to test the components for the artificial harbours. I tried out any proposal, whether it was made by my own staff, by another service or even by individuals.

“A testing site had to be found in the UK for these trials. A search of various areas resulted in the selection of a location in the Solway Firth where the rise and fall of the tide — about 24 feet — was similar to that off Normandy. It was also subject, at times, to very rough seas.

“Above all, however, its remoteness from London decided the issue, as interested visitors were reduced to the minimum. Police protection was provided, when I approached the Scottish authorities, and a small unit was established at the experimental site.”

The work of these ingenious British engineers is commemorated in the Arromanches museum. It took 200 British and American tugs to haul the floating prefabricated roadway over the sea to Normandy, before the gigantic concrete blocks of the Phoenix caissons were flooded in position.

The floating supports, called Beetles, resembling mini Forth Bridges, weighed 20 tonnes and floated until flooded with sea water. Mulberry B installed at Arromanches by the Royal Navy and Royal Engineers was responsible for the unloading of the vast majority of the D-Day men, provision, and materiel. Its sister harbour, Mulberry A, floated in for the American section, was buffeted and destroyed by storms. Mulberry B survived the June storms, fully operational on 14 June, and saved the invasion.

Further along the Calvados coast at Ouistreham Riva-Bella, and near the famed Pegasus Bridge, where the first engagements took place in the British sector to secure a bridgehead over the Caen canal, there is Le Grand Bunker: Musee Le Mur De L’Atlantique. Here is the German observation post, part of the concrete and steel Atlantic Wall, stretching from Norway to the south of France, built and ready to repeal the invasion.

Here there is a haunting tableau of how the Field Marshall Erwin Rommel prepared the defences with massive planning, ruthless efficiency and a withering field of fire for machine guns. It had perfect sight along the whole stretch of Sword beach.

This camouflaged bunker, still intact today, was not on the advanced maps of the Allied officers landing on the beach on 6 June.  In Ouistreham, now a smart beach resort, beside the ferry port link to Portsmouth, there will be a traditional D-Day parade with military vehicles, bagpipers and a celebration of 1940s popular music, on Saturday 8 June. Locals are being encouraged to wear costumes of the times.

Back in Mortain-Bocage, also on the 8th June, a parade with the US Army, and detachments of the French National Guard, followed by an American Air Force flyover, will honour the dead at an official ceremony at La Petite Chapelle. It is unlikely that any of the Old Hickory survivors, only a handful in their 90s, will now be able to attend.

Even after 80 years, there is still so much to learn about the greatest invasion in history and the freedoms that it brought to Europe.