After leaving Mont Canisy, return to the D 513 and continue westwards to Houlgate, Cabourg and finally Franceville-Plage. Blonville-sur-Mer lies in the sector ‘Villers-sur-Mer, and was designated as Wn Vill 016. When you enter Blonville, you will notice, on the left side of the road, one of the German bunkers camouflaged as a house. A few meters before that you pass a small bunker on the right side (maybe a handy marker?)

There are still many former ‘bunker-houses’ to be found around Normandy, but this one is one of the easy ones to find. On the beach is a casemat of the type H612. It contained a 7.62 cm cannon that swept over the beach.

Villerville is yet to be described by me (I’ll keep you posted). A nice boulevard to take a stroll is at Houlgate. Here are some lovely houses. Fortunes of war kept this beautiful place almost unharmed. A lot of former strongpoints around here are removed, but for a nice walk I can recommend Houlgate.

In the former pages, I spoke of the so called Widerstandneste (Wn), but now I have to bring your attention to the Stützpunkt (Stp). A Widerstandneste was mainly built to pin down the invasion troops on the beach, a Stützpunkt was (hence the word) an extra support point. Stützpunkt 05 Franceville West (Stp 05) was built to fight tanks that tried to break out from the beach. Therefore, this complex was placed around 150 meters behind the beach in the dunes.

Coming from Cabourg follow the coastal road D 514 heading for Merville and Franceville-Plage. Merville was made famous for the night attack on D-Day by a small unit of the British 6th Airborne Division (see Pegasus/Merville). Near the stop-light, where you normally would go left for Battery Merville, you take the right, leading to the centre of Franceville an drive on to the car-park near the beach. When you feel up to it, take a walk on this beach to the west. After one kilometer move into the dunes. Out of season is this area a quiet place to be. Don’t be alarmed if you stumble into a naked ‘gentleman’, who is looking for something else than bunkers.

At this point are three casemats which contained 4,7 cm Skoda 36 cannons, of which two were placed in Type H506 bunkers.

Head back to the D514 and continue westwards. After about a kilometer you are forced to take a long bent in the road to the left. Just before entering this bent, there is a ‘dance-hall’ established in a former German H634 MG bunker. The bunker is painted white and is called appropriate 'The Bunker' (before that it was named 'Le Surfer', until 1997 and till last year 'La Noche').

The H634 had a cast iron turret with six loop-holes from which two MG 34 could give fire. The turret was removed after the war.

An example of such a turret you may find at the Omaha Beach Museum in Vierville (see picture above).

Here ends (for now) the tour in the east with the forgotten complexes. And as you have seen, there are a lot of interesting places to visit on this site of Normandy.