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terrify- ing, thunderous explosions crashed upon us. Our poor little dining room shuddered, the chandelier fell onto the table, the door of the house was blown in from the force of the blast. The sounds of the neighboring hous-
    es, crashing down under the bombs, followed the great hammer blows from these horrible engines of death. All around us was nothing but violence and infernal noise…Clutching one another, we prayed.” Goupil, conscious of his duty, tried to return to his civil defense post in the rue des Carmes, but at 4:30 another wave of bombers struck the town and he ran for shelter in a stout eighteenth-century stone building. In the eve- ning he made it to his post, saw after the wounded, and helped transfer them to the Bon Sauveur hospital. In the eerie, smoke-filled evening, in the ruins of a burn- ing city, Goupil wondered if it was over: “ There were already enough ruins and victims. Hadn’t the allies at- tained their objectives with these savage bombings? Could they not now leave things to the ground forces? We hoped, in short, that the city would now be taken by the Allies a few hours after the landings.” It was not to be. At 2:30 in the morning of June 7 came the heaviest attack yet. “How can I describe with words my experi- ences in this infernal noise, the shrieking of the falling bombs, the incredible shaking of the ground and of the buildings? The explosions kept coming. Through the doors and windows we saw the flashes and felt the bru- tal blows. We felt nearby the falling of roofs and mate- rial of all sorts in a great deafening cascade. The walls against which we had gathered truly moved under the shock of the bombs.” Then at 3:00 in the morning, the
    bombers disappeared, the skies emptied, and a sinis- ter quiet settled upon the town. Quiet, except for the sounds of the wounded. 22

    One of the most powerful accounts of these two awful days was written by the deputy mayor of Caen, Joseph Poirier. “Nothing had prepared us for the swiftness of the attack,” he wrote six months after the liberation of the city. “ We knew well that our deliverance was at hand, that the hour of liberation had sounded, but self- ishly we thought that the landings would happen else- where and that our region would be spared. Providence had decided otherwise.” The first bombing raid at 1:30
    P.M. struck the central quarters of the city. “It was of an unprecedented violence…There was general conster- nation about the suddenness of the attack.” Despite later, and wholly ineffectual, attempts by the Allied command to warn the citizens of impending bombing, no warning had been given on June 6. “ The raid had lasted no more than ten minutes but the damage was enormous. The Monoprix stores were shattered and at least ten fires burned in the downtown.” The next at- tack, at 4:30 P.M., struck the prefecture headquarters, and other municipal buildings in the center of town as well as the church of Saint-Jean. Some of the build- ings of Le Bon Sauveur, the twenty-acre Benedictine hospital complex in the northwestern quarter of the
    city, were hit by shells; one nun was killed, trapped un- der falling stones. By now a quarter of the city was in flames.

    The attack of 2:30 A.M. on June 7 proved even more devastating. The first bombload fell on the central fire station, killing the chief, his deputy, and 17 firefighters. More than twenty bombs hit the town hall, in whose basement Poirier had sheltered. The hospital clinic of La Miséricorde, located on the rue des Carmes in the center of town, took a direct hit. Seventy-two people, mostly nuns and their patients, were killed, their bod- ies buried under the rubble; 171 others were wounded. Emerging into a nightscape illuminated by dozens of fires, Poirier saw dead bodies in feeble air raid trenches, body parts, dead children, the corpse of a close friend on the ground, headless. The electricity, telephone, and water lines were cut, making it difficult to