Military History | Fleury-sur-Orne — Fifteen Metres Under the Grass

The stone stands on a mown bank above the Orne, between the commune's war memorial and its Algeria stele, and it is dated to the day. The plaque bolted to it reads: "En hommage et en remerciement à tous ceux et à toutes celles qui ont contribué à la survie des réfugiés et des malades dans les carrières de Fleury-Sur-Orne du 6 juin au 27 juillet 1944." In tribute and in thanks to everyone who helped the refugees and the sick in the quarries of Fleury-sur-Orne stay alive. It names nobody.

The quarries are underneath. Fleury's nineteenth-century building-stone workings — Saingt, Fouquet, Pochiet and des Coteaux — were entered down a cart ramp, and from 6 June civilians from Caen and Fleury moved into the galleries to get out of the bombing and the fighting. The interpretation panel beside the stele puts one of them fifteen metres below the visitor's feet and says 500 elderly people were carried down into it in July to be nursed by lay and religious volunteers. German troops sheltered underground too, requisitioned labour among the refugees and forced people out.

How many were down there is unsettled, and the counts do not measure the same thing. Cyril Marcigny of INRAP, who directed the survey of the Saingt quarry, writes in one article both that several hundred sheltered there and that within days close to a thousand had; the commune's own two websites give six thousand and twelve thousand for the four quarries together.

The archaeologists recorded rather than dug. Laser scanning and photogrammetry mapped the Saingt floor as it was left — family plots beaten flat and edged with dry stone and planks, metal rods driven into the pillars to carry shelves and hang sheets between the mattresses. Canadian units reached Fleury on 19 July. The stone's period runs eight days past that, to the evacuation that followed. No quarry at Fleury is open to visitors; the Saingt entrance was filled in and built over.

📸 Cover: the stele to those who helped the quarry refugees survive, Fleury-sur-Orne, photograph by Dave osm, 5 October 2024, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.