CAEN, France — The memories are 64 years old but retold with the clarity of yesterday: a young boy lowered by rope into a deep dark cave, watching the sky above shrink to a small and distant patch of blue.
That hole was home for a month for Gerard Mangnan, his family and dozens of others. And it likely saved their lives. While they huddled underground, Allied and Nazi troops above were waging one of the toughest battles of the D-Day invasion.
Now, generations later, the story of how caves and quarries became bomb shelters during the 1944 battle for the Normandy city of Caen is being brought alive by an amateur archaeologist, his photographer colleague, and the memories of survivors like Mangnan.
Most remarkably, the cave enthusiasts — Laurent Dujardin and Damien Butaeye — have rediscovered quarries that had lain largely undisturbed since the war, mysterious and eerie worlds frozen in time.
A shoe. A rusty bike. A child’s coloring book. Jewelry. Cough mixture bottles. A box of Ridgways Finest Darjeeling Tea (“Grown at the altitude of 3,000 feet,” says the still visible lettering).
Souvenir hunters with metal detectors have long picked over Normandy’s battlegrounds, but underground, in these virtual time capsules, “You have the feeling that people were still there 24 hours beforehand and, most important, it has never been manipulated, picked up, moved,” historian Stephane Simonnet, of Caen’s war museum, told The Associated Press.
Butaeye and Dujardin guided AP journalists through one cave where several hundred people sheltered. It sent shivers down the spine, and not just because of the cold and damp. In a site so well preserved it was easy to imagine the hacking coughs of people packed together, children wailing, and old men groaning, the stink and discomfort, everyone wondering whether the relentless Allied bombing would bring down the caverns and bury them alive.
“They lived with the cold, with fear. Some were sick. There were a lot of respiratory diseases. So conditions were very difficult. There was the lack of food, the stress. Those who went outside to get food risked getting hurt or killed,” said Dujardin, 55.
Caen, straddling the River Orne and garrisoned by German troops, was a key objective for the Allies’ attack on Adolf Hitler’s heavily defended Western front.
At dawn on D-Day, June 6, 1944, the bombing and shelling began and would last more than two months. Allied planes sometimes dropped leaflets before a raid, warning: “Leave now! You don’t have a minute to lose.” British troops liberated one bank of the Orne on July 9; Canadians liberated the other on July 19. About 2,000 of Caen’s inhabitants were killed.
