But eventually Sword segued into Juno, the second landing beach, and we found ourselves riding past the resort of Courseulles-sur-Mer. After finding my grandad’s diary, my parents also unearthed his copy of the 1st Assault Brigade Royal Engineers 1943-1945 commemorative book, which reveals that 82 Squadron was concentrated near Courseulles in early August 1944, to undertake training for advancing on the Seine. Jim doesn’t give details.
The story at Juno is more a Canadian one, anyway – 14,000 Canadian troops landed here. It’s now home to the Juno Beach Centre, which preserves the Canadian legacy of D-Day, focusing on education and engaging younger visitors. Exhibits tell age-appropriate stories via technology and gamification, and Canadian student guides lead tours into the German bunkers outside. However, it was the centre’s film that hit hardest, especially the words of D-Day veterans: “We’d never felt so alone”; “Arms, legs, the dead, the drowned”; “I wanted to cry but I had no time”.
We left, sombre despite the sunshine, and almost immediately cycled past a Churchill AVRE, marooned behind the dunes at Graye-sur-Mer. It was fitted with a petard mortar, a wide, stubby weapon, nicknamed the ‘flying dustbin’, designed to fire at low velocity, short range, to take out bunkers. Jim’s tank was fitted with one of these.