Wrecks of the D-Day Landings

History of scrapping in Lower Normandy

The military events of the summer of 1944 left a lasting wound on Norman soil. Whether in print or digital form, numerous media explain in detail those long months of total war that came to a temporary end on the banks of the Seine. They leave us with the vague impression that we know the subject, while an entire dimension of this formidable operation remained overlooked for many years.

What do we really know about the maritime dimension of the Allied Landings? What do we know of those discreet sinkings, those insidious mine explosions, or the reckless nocturnal torpedo attacks that bequeathed us a dramatic inventory of steel sleeping beneath the waves? And what of those strange, ghostly alignments of abandoned cargo ships stretching from Sword Beach to Utah?

It is this strange story — the fate of these silent sentinels — that this book sets out to tell. From the long period of abandonment (1944–1948), documented by a handful of rare postcards, to the era of systematic ship-breaking that came to an end around 1960, the reader plunges into the closed world of post-war maritime scrap dealers, where Scottish, Flemish and above all Italian was spoken on a Normandy shoreline witnessing the rise of a new kind of tourism. A world of adventurers hunting the windfall of a few tonnes of copper wrested from the bowels of sunken ships; a world of deep-sea divers on generous wages; a dangerous world too, where hoped-for fortune rubbed shoulders with ruin and sometimes death — the Norman scrap trade is today forgotten. It is this adventure, as much human as economic, that the author recounts, drawing on the precious testimonies of those who were there, richly illustrated with their personal photographs.

Table of contents

MILITARY MATERIEL DURING THE BATTLE OF NORMANDY

THE FIRST SCRAPPING OPERATIONS: A SHADOWY WORLD

THE HOLY GRAIL OF DESTROYED ARMOUR: THE TRUN DEPOT IN THE ORNE

MARITIME WRECKS: THE CASE OF THE BLOCKSHIPS — TRACING THE SCRAP DEALERS (1946–1970)

MARIO AND GABY SERRA: LA SIRENE, NORMANDIE METAUX, ARROMANCHES