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Joe Steinbring

Caen

Broken furniture and heaped masonry behind a rope barrier, below wartime photographs and a map.
A ruined room recreated at the Mémorial de Caen.2019 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring
Static offline map showing Caen in France with a location pin.

My Mom and I started our day trip to Normandy on October 31, 2019, at the Mémorial de Caen, before lunch and an afternoon on the coast at Pointe du Hoc in Cricqueville-en-Bessin, Omaha Beach at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, and Arromanches-les-Bains. Caen was meant to fall on D-Day but held out until July 1944, and much of the city was destroyed in the fighting. The museum, which opened in 1988, covers the Second World War well beyond D-Day, from the fall of France in 1940 to the Eastern Front.

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  • An olive-green rocket-launcher truck with a hammer and sickle on its door, lit blue from below.

    A Soviet Katyusha rocket launcher, from the war on the Eastern Front.

    2019 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

  • A wooden grave cross in a museum case against an orange wall, topped by an Iron Cross.

    The grave cross of Werner Scharfschmidt, a German lieutenant killed in France on June 18, 1940.

    2019 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

  • A finned bomb standing nose-down before a huge black-and-white photo of a city being bombed.

    A bomb and an aerial photograph of an air raid.

    2019 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

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