Military History | Longues-sur-Mer — The Official Count Is Three

Just after dawn on 6 June 1944 the four casemates on the cliff at Longues-sur-Mer opened on the ships lying off Gold and Omaha. The battery's most consequential shooting was at HMS Bulolo, the headquarters ship for Gold, straddled closely enough that she shifted anchorage. The cruisers HMS Ajax and HMS Argonaut answered; the French cruisers Georges Leygues and Montcalm and the American battleship USS Arkansas engaged the position later in the morning. How much came back is not agreed — the figures in circulation run from a little over a hundred rounds to about a hundred and fifteen, with one account giving a hundred and seventy. It was silenced in stages, one gun still firing intermittently into the evening. The next morning C Company of the 2nd Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment, took the position with almost no fighting, and a plaque on the ground records the date.

The pieces were 15 cm naval guns of a pattern Rheinmetall designed in 1936 for destroyers, set into concrete instead of carried to sea. They are still in the embrasures, which is what brings people here, and the French heritage record is exact about how many: of the four casemates, three intact "which have kept their artillery piece", the fourth in a state of ruins. The easternmost is generally said to have blown up by accident after the capture. Anything promising four guns is counting emplacements.

The battery was classified a monument historique in October 2001 and belongs to the Conservatoire du littoral; the ground is open and free. The fire-control post stands forward of the guns at the cliff edge, and since cliff falls in early 2023 its seaward front has been closed while the rest of it stays open.

📸 Cover: a casemate at Longues-sur-Mer with its 15 cm naval gun still in the embrasure, photograph by Jebulon, 30 April 2015, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: a gun casemate at the same battery, photograph by Andrew Gray, 25 April 2010, CC BY-SA 3.0.