December 31, 2017
During tonight’s New Year’s Eve celebrations, few of us will likely think of Jacques Cartier, born December 31, 1491 in St. Malo, France. (If your memorized list of New World explorers barely extends beyond Christopher Columbus, Cartier was the one who claimed Canada for the French.) You might value the date for its historical trivia, but the place is a gem on Brittany’s Emerald Coast.
Granted, overnighting in St. Malo seems less appealing than the historically significant Normandy Beaches or Loire Valley or nearby Mont St. Michel, but we travelers on an escorted tour have little choice in the matter. St. Malo offers plenty of shopping and local cuisine, but I preferred an afternoon’s walk on the city walls and promptly succumbed to St. Malo’s mystique.
The tide at St. Malo is mesmerizing and truly awesome. Rising a total of 43 feet – that’s about 3 feet every 30 minutes – it creates isolated islands from connective land masses in just a few hours’ time. Beaches wide enough for sand yachting at lunchtime are, by dinnertime, ambushed by waves violently bashing against the fortified sea wall. At certain times of the year, the waves crash a height equivalent to a four-story building.
Check the tide tables before any trek across the exposed reefs. Fort National (17th C) offers a panoramic view of the walled city where pirates – or privateers, depending upon legal interpretations – settled into lives of leisure, surrounded by the enchanted waters colored by a mermaid’s legendary emerald ring dropped there. The famed rue Chat Qui Danse (the Dancing Cat) is difficult to view from the fort. The name references Britain’s 1693 plot that floated 25 tons of gunpowder towards the St. Malo’s munitions tower, but stupidly forgot about the ebb tide and submerged rocks. Sparks from the explosion burned 300 thatched wooden houses. Nobody was killed…except for one cat.
The charming view of St. Malo today belies its wartime scars. Look a little more intently; the walls are original, but nearly 80% of the buildings therein were destroyed in WWII. According to our guide, this was the fault of needlessly bad military intel, as Allied armies focused their assault on St. Malo, which contained only 400 enemy soldiers in anti-aircraft (AA) bunkers, when 2000 Germans were headquartered 3 km down the peninsula. Indeed, wartime photographs of St. Malo testify to the extensive damage done August 6-14, 1944.
For a glimpse of Cezembre Island, look approximately 1 mile across the bay past Fort National. The island was a stronghold on the western edge of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, withstanding Allied bombing three weeks longer than mainland did. But here, too, the
Q: Did the Allies needlessly destroy St. Malo?
Q: Did the Allies bomb Cezembre to half of its pre-war height?
Sources vary on the numbers of German soldiers actually billeted in the area – some say merely 100, some 1000, some far more than that. However, none dispute Hitler’s order that his troops fight to the last bit of ammunition fired by the last man. “Therefore, as long as there is one shell and one cartridge left in St. Malo, there cannot be any yielding.”[1] Resistance, then, forced a continuance of Allied bombing.
What the tour guide neglected to mention was napalm. Napalm? Like the stuff used in Vietnam? According to napalm “biographer” Robert Need, napalm was first introduced during the Sicilian campaign in 1943. Other types of incendiary bombs had already been in use, such as those dropped on St. Paul’s Cathedral during the worst night of the London Blitz (Dec. 29, 1940), when broken water mains forced firefighters to pump what they could from the ebbing tide of the Thames River. But Napalm proved more effective than phosphorus in burning out bombed structures. During the summer of 1944, the Eighth Air Force dropped 157,000 gallons of the flammable gel to break the Nazi stronghold in Normandy and its environs.[2] Had the Germans resisted less, or the Allies bypassed the area altogether, or the use of incendiaries been prohibited, St. Malo might have been relatively preserved. Sadly, St. Malo bore the brunt of the assault in the region.
Compared to the city’s losses, the distant island’s demise seemed rather inconsequential, but I still wondered whether the guide’s claim was correct. Did Allied bombing pound the island to half of its pre-war elevation? The claim lacks conclusive evidence. According to a pre-war Navy publication North Coast of France Pilot Including the Channel Islands (1915), Cezembre Island “rises to a height of about 118 feet above high water.”[3] But official post-war elevations of the island are surprisingly difficult to obtain. Unofficial on-line sources disagree on the post-war numbers: some put the island’s elevation at 62 feet, while others at 121 to 124 feet.
In the aftermath, the Marshall Plan funded much of St. Malo’s restoration. To save time and costs, new buildings were made of concrete then covered with a stone veneer for pre-war aesthetics. Private donations from Quebec, Canada, paid for the stone-by-stone renovation of St. Vincent’s Cathedral, the burial site of Jacques Cartier.
You can access the Island of Cezembre to enjoy its small beach and seasonal restaurant, but know that 90% of the island is still prohibited due to safety precautions. Ironically, the extensive bombing that caused such massive upheavals to the landscape had relatively little impact on the German bunkers, now deteriorating with age.
If scheduling a stop at St. Malo, be sure to plan around the tides. Trek the island forts and play on the beach at low tide then marvel atop the higher city walls as the waves rush in below. St. Malo is a place of enduring natural wonder and human history…and, for me, still a bit of WWII mystery to solve.
[1] https://archive.org/stream/wardiarygermann601944germ/wardiarygermann601944germ_djvu.txt
[2] https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/lib/apus/detail.action?action=releaseDoc&asJson= 1&docID=3301248&dt=1514695221624
[3]https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt/search?q1=cezembre;id=umn.31951001997647b;view=1up;seq=7;start=1;sz=10;page=search;orient=0
TIPS:
DID THE ALLIES ERR?
1. Look at a map of wartime occupied France to answer the following question:
- Which heavily German-occupied community is approximately 3 km from St. Malo?
2. Research the role of that community in WWII. Research the WWII role of St. Malo more thoroughly.
- Was the tour guide correct in saying that the neighboring community was a greater threat and that the Allies should have bombed there, instead?
3. Consider the following quotes:
- Churchill: “[The Germans] were pressed into their defensive perimeters of Saint Malo, Brest, Lorient and Saint Nazaire….Here, they could be penned and left to wither, thus saving the unnecessary losses which immediate assaults would have required.”
- Hitler: “Therefore, as long as there is one shell and one cartridge left in St. Malo, there cannot be any yielding.
4. Answer the following question based on the previous research and the quotes provided:
- To what extent might St. Malo have been able to avoid wartime damage?
THE MARSHALL PLAN: REBUILDING
1. Facts
- The Marshall Plan funded $13 billion for economic recovery in post-war Europe altogether.
- France received approximately $2.2 billion (or nearly 18%) of that funding.
2. Provide students with primary source photographs to compare St. Malo before the destruction caused by WWII and after the destruction caused by WWII. Divide students into small groups. Inform students that they serve on the local city board in St. Malo. They must determine the best use of Marshall Plan funding to stimulate economic recovery to the region. They should consider:
- Should the city rebuild? If so, in what manner? (i.e. Rebuild the appearance as it was before? Modernize?) Consider and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of possible decisions.
- If the city board could choose only three industries to receive funding, which three should those be, and why? How would those three industries provide an extended benefit that other industries might not?
History Is My Travel Bag 