Gaffers Abroad: WWII Tour of England & France

 EPILOGUE: LESSONS LEARNED AND IMPRESSIONS GAINED The Dunkirk Jerks at the remnants of the Crested Eagle  In the prologue to this blog I said that that our expedition undertaken by 3 old college friends was a true bucket list trip. We spent almost a year planning to build a journey of about 10 days centered on Dunkirk and Operation Dynamo. For some of the planning and reservation-making we used a travel agent I had used on previous trips to Europe. She was most helpful, as always. We wanted to make our own calls in general, however, to be sure that our itinerary included sites that were important to understanding WWII in general and Operation Dynamo in particular. We knew what we wanted to see and learn, and we knew that because of our time limitations that we would miss some places in England and France that most tourists would want to see. Also, importantly, we knew that we'd been friends for about 60 years, but had spent time together sparingly as gaffers, to use the Britis...

  AU REVOIR AND BON VOYAGE May 8  Well, maybe a little less fanfare than "Lucky Lindy" enjoyed Today there was nothing left on our itinerary to see and do except take the car to the airport and fly back home. We enjoyed one of the staples of our trip, which we had begun to take for granted, the complimentary hotel breakfast, which we found universally good -- in some hotels excellent -- and darn convenient. (Those coffee machines that disperse enough varieties of fancy coffee to make a Starbucks barista green with envy helped fortify us for a hard day of sightseeing daily.) These days the airlines and other travel industry professionals encourage arriving at airports 3 hours before international flights (and on our trip over we found out why!), and we took that advice. We were ready to get home, see our wives, and have no place we had -- or even wanted -- to go.  Our driver taking us to ginormous CDG was on time and accommodating ... Jerry was flying a different airline...

  A BAD NEIGHBORHOOD May 7 One of the most powerful images of WWII,  a Frenchman watching French troops leaving Marseille for French African colonies to escape surrender Before I tell you about our day, please permit me to reflect a little on the 20th Century military history of our French friends. We've covered the historic bad blood between France and England, which seems to have been put aside for the past century. It's the opposite fence that was the issue for France during more recent times. Living next door to Germany meant France had some really bad neighbors during the first half of the 1900's. In 1914 Germany attacked France with designs on capturing Paris. As a consequence, during WWI France suffered: 1.4 million military deaths 500,000 civilian deaths 620 municipalities literally wiped off the map and 1,300 having been over 50% destroyed. Damage and reconstruction costs of 34 billion gold francs, which translates into $135 billion in U.S. dollars today. In the e...

 LAST TRAIN TO GARE DU NORD May 6 Last day in Dunkirk for the Jerks Supposedly bad luck comes in 3's. As we told you way back on Day 1, Frog and I started strong on the first of the three -- the very first leg of our flight to begin the trip was postponed 3 times, the last of which resulted in our missing our scheduled flight to London. But we made it fine a couple of hours later and had time to take the Thames cruise we had planned for that first afternoon, so no biggie. Then the boat cruise in Dover that would give us the vantage point of seeing the White Cliffs from the water was canceled due to anticipated bad weather. But that cancellation enabled us to see the Fan Bay Deep Shelter tunnels, a true diamond in the rough ... and we saw the White Cliffs from the ferry as we were leaving Dover. No harm, no foul there. To complete the  troika on   the last day in Dunkirk we received an email saying that our train to Paris the next day had been canceled, and we had been boo...