Without the huge underground stone quarries that sheltered thousands of people in and around the city of Caen the civilian toll of roughly 20,000 French dead in the battle for Normandy might have been steeper still.
CAEN, France — The emotion of being liberated from Nazi occupation was so sweet and intense that the French refugees burst into song, a spontaneous rendition of"La Marseillaise" that echoed around the underground network of dank, dark tunnels where they had been sheltering for weeks since D-Day, amid filth, fleas and the rumble of bombs.
Without the huge underground stone quarries that sheltered thousands of people in and around the city of Caen, a major objective of the Allied force that landed on beaches to the north on June 6, 1944, the civilian toll of roughly 20,000 French dead in the battle for Normandy might have been steeper still.
"It will enable the public to understand what happened in the quarry, to visit it without actually going down," says Laurent Dujardin, a Caen historian who has documented the quarries' wartime role and is working with the archeological teams."The aim is to make what happened here understandable." Caen was heavily bombed and shelled and some 2,000 of its inhabitants were killed. D-Day planners expected Allied troops to quickly take the strategic city but German resistance was so furious that its liberation instead took six weeks. A saving grace for Caen were the quarries from which its famous creamy limestone had been extracted for centuries, for churches and castles and faraway monuments such as the Tower of London and Cologne Cathedral.
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