The Guns of Longues Sur Mer

[Flying10uk]

Does anyone which ship/s or which class of ship these guns are off. I'm thinking that they have the look of, perhaps, the secondary armament rather than the main armament from a warship.

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[Gil Boyd]

Certainly the secondary armament on a cruiser on port and starboard sides of WW1.

From what relatives tell me ALL these gun implacements were called Bettungsschiessgerüst firing positions.
These were all manual powered mounts rotated on a pivot at the front of the mount and the rear was supported by rollers resting on a semi-circular rail, and crewed by up to 9 Sailors.

All were equipped with a gun shield and capable of all-around fire as seen on Geoffs images.
Every gun position along the Normandy coastline was manned by sailors from the Naval Artillery Regiment called the Matrosen Artillerie Regiment. They were deemed as experts.

The reason apparently was, firstly their expertise which could not be surpassed, but secondly as Rommel wanted so much doing on the orders of the Fuehrer in such a short time to repel an invasion from England, they used every spare cannon they could find which had not been scuppered at Scapa Flow and after.

These involved a lot of captured French and Belgium cannons as they took the countries.

As an aside, Merville Battery was always a misnoma. It was believed by British Intelligence that each of the casements there, overlooked all the landing beaches and were ready for action and capable of reaching ALL the beaches and causing devastating results.

This was so far from the truth when the 9th Battalion The Parachute Regiment attacked it in the early hours of the 5/6th June and lost a lot of good men, only to find postions empty and what cannon was there was only capable of a 1000 metres at best and old stock.

Point du Hoc was the same. Intelligence said one thing, but once the Rangers had finally achieved their aim from the sea, and lost a lot of good U.S. soldiers climbing the sheer wall of the cliff, the implacements were empty, or had been recently vacated!!

Tragic if you start looking at each of these locations and the stories surrounding them. So much unecessary death on all sides through very bad intelligence.

So in short, the ship guns were there to basically have a barrel pointing out to sea, in the belief that only serving soldiers and sailors would know what was really inside the casements. I am sure some historian will tell us what they were and where they initially came from when Rommel waved his magic stick!!