Cherbourg, and the port that had to be rebuilt in a hurry

Of all the ports on the Normandy coast, Cherbourg is the one the planners of D-Day cared about most, and the one they took longest to get. It sits at the northern tip of the Cotentin peninsula, a natural deep-water harbour sheltered by one of the longest breakwaters in Europe, and by June 1944 it was the only facility for many miles capable of unloading the tonnage of supplies, fuel and reinforcements an invading army would need once the beaches themselves had done their job. Everything else, famously, was improvised: the artificial Mulberry harbours towed across the Channel in pieces to serve the landing beaches directly. Cherbourg was meant to be the real one.

A city fought for, street by street

American forces reached the outskirts of Cherbourg in the third week of June 1944, a little later than planned, and then had to fight through the city itself against a German garrison ordered to hold it or destroy it trying. They largely managed both. General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben surrendered on the 26th of June, but not before German engineers had spent days systematically wrecking the port: cranes toppled into the harbour, quaysides mined, breakwaters blocked with sunken ships and the deep-water basins seeded with obstacles and explosives. When American naval engineers inspected the damage, one of the officers involved in the post-war assessment is widely quoted as having called it a masterpiece of demolition, and it was not really an exaggeration. Nothing on this scale had been so comprehensively put out of action anywhere in the war.

What followed was one of the less celebrated feats of the invasion. Naval construction battalions, the Seabees, worked through the summer clearing wrecks, rebuilding quays and salvaging cranes, and by late July the first Liberty ships were unloading again. By the autumn Cherbourg was handling a meaningful share of the supplies keeping the Allied advance across France moving, exactly the role it had been fought for in the first place. The city itself, badly damaged in the fighting, was largely rebuilt in the decades after the war, and Cherbourg today is a working ferry and naval port rather than a memorial site, which suits its history rather well: it was always valued for what it could do, not for how it looked.

A harbour older than the war it is remembered for

Cherbourg's strategic value long predates 1944. Napoleon began work on the enormous breakwater that still shelters the roadstead, seeing in Cherbourg a naval base that could threaten Britain from the Channel's western end, and the project, expanded through the nineteenth century, eventually produced one of the largest artificial harbours in Europe. The city was also, more happily, the last port of call for the Titanic before it crossed the Atlantic in 1912, tendering passengers out to the liner by small boat because Cherbourg's harbour, for all its scale, was never quite deep enough for the largest ocean liners to dock directly.

Calling at Cherbourg today

Cherbourg turns up on a wide range of cruises along the Channel and Atlantic coasts, usually as one call among several rather than the reason for the whole itinerary, which suits a city more interesting for what happened there than for its present-day skyline. Ambassador's Classic French Escapes, twelve nights from Liverpool, pairs it with Bordeaux, Brest and Honfleur for a fuller tour of the French Atlantic coast, while the Coasts & Canals Easter short break from London Tilbury adds it to a brisk look at the Netherlands.

Historic Harbours of Normandy & Brittany, nine nights from Dundee, takes a slower route along the same stretch of coast, calling at St Malo and Honfleur either side of Cherbourg and giving a fuller sense of the region the Allies fought their way through that summer.

A day ashore is enough to walk the harbour front and get a sense of the scale of what was rebuilt here in a matter of weeks; the landing beaches and the museums built around them lie further along the coast, a trip for another day rather than a single call.