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intensified throughout the spring of 1944, making life a constant misery for millions of people in towns from the Pas-de- Calais to Normandy. Rouen, a city on the Seine and a rail junc- tion that Allied planners knew the Germans would use to reinforce Normandy, was devastated by repeated at- tacks: on April 19, 1944, there were 900 people killed in Rouen by British bombing, and in the first week of June a series of attacks by American bombers killed an additional 200 people there. In Calvados, the prefect’s reports reveal the constant and enervating presence of Allied aircraft in the skies: air attacks struck the de- partment on March 2, 13, 26, 27; April 9, 11, 20, 23, 25,
    27 (twice), and 29; May 9, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, and 27; and June 1. The ostensible targets were railway junctions, barracks, airfields, and crossroads. But these prepara- tory attacks killed many French people. The attack of April 27 on the coastal village of Ouistreham killed 17 people and wounded 40. Between March 1 and June 5, 130 people were killed in Calvados by these bomb- ings. 15 It is perhaps no wonder that the Normans, who yearned for liberation, had the appearance of a broken, tired people when the Allied soldiers splashed ashore on June 6, 1944.
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    HEN LIBERATION DID arrive, it came not all at once but in a series of devastating, prolonged, murderous blows, delivered by
    air, sea, and ground bombardment and by the lethal weapons of the Allied soldiers. On D-Day, 1,300 civil- ians were killed in Calvados alone; on June 7, another 1,200 died. Added to the deaths in other Norman de- partments, it appears that 3,000 civilians were killed on June 6–7. Thus, roughly the same number of French civilians died in the first twenty-four hours of the inva- sion of Normandy as did Allied soldiers. And the kill- ing had only just begun: between June 6 and August 25, Normandy would be chewed into a bloody, unrec- ognizable mess. In the five northern departments that saw the most fighting— Calvados, Manche, Orne, Eure, and Seine-Maritime—19,890 French civilians paid for liberation with their lives. 16

    Calvados got its first taste of liberation a few min- utes before midnight on June 5, when 946 aircraft of the Royal Air Force (RAF) struck targets along the coast of the landing beaches. The RAF dropped five thousand tons of bombs on German defensive posi- tions in ten towns, seven of which were in Calvados: Maisy, Saint-Pierre-du-Mont (the location of the mas-
    sive guns perched on the promontory of la Pointe du Hoc), Longues-sur-Mer, le Mont Fleury, Ouistreham, Merville, and Houlgate. This was the largest tonnage of bombs yet dropped in a single night in the entire war. 17 Fortunately, these sparsely populated towns had been largely evacuated in the weeks before the landings by order of the Germans and of local authorities. The Ger- mans wished to defend against any Resistance activity by the local population, while many civilians, after the bombings of the early spring, had fled of their own ini- tiative. Even so, these initial bombardments killed at least forty civilians. At dawn on the 6th, 1,083 B-17s and B-24s of the United States Eighth and Ninth Air Forc- es took their turn, hammering the general vicinity of what was to be Omaha beach. Many of the bombs were dropped too far inland, leaving the coastal batteries on Omaha untouched, while Port-en-Bessin, the coastal village on the far eastern flank of Omaha, was struck hard, as were most of the surrounding hamlets. Na- val gunnery joined in, aiming at German batteries but inevitably hitting the surrounding villages. Vierville, Bernières, Courseulles, Saint-Aubin, Lion-sur-Mer, Ouistreham: These are towns that ring down the ages as the site of great heroics by invading Allied soldiers who wrested them from the Germans on June 6 and af- ter. Yet they also ran with the blood of at least 100 non- combatants. 18 Throughout the two days of June 6 and
    June 7, many Norman communities received