These four casemates held German 152mm naval guns dating from 1928 and specially designed for firing on naval targets. If this sounds obvious, funnily enough, not all the coastal batteries were equipped with guns designed for coastal defence. A great many had field guns commandeered by the Germans from the arsenals of armies defeated by the Wehrmacht. Defending the Bay of the Seine were Skoda 210 cannon, French 1916 model 155 guns and Russian 1931 model 122 field cannon. In the words of Swedish artillery Officer B. Stjernfelt, “The Atlantic Wall was armed little by little with guns anything up to fifty years old from 10 different nations with 28 different calibres ranging from 406 to 75mm. Any standardisation was therefore impossible. There was a shortage of spare parts and fittings and sometimes these had to be made. The Longues battery is unique in Normandy in that the guns that fired on the Allied landing forces on the morning of June 6th 1944 are still to be found in situ. Weighing in at around 20 tons, each gun had to be dismantled to get it into the casemate through the gun aperture in two sections first the carriage and then the barrel. The barrel is eight meters long with a diameter of 152mm and had a firing rate of six 45kg shells per minute. The guns range was nearly 20km (13 miles) which put them within striking distance of the future landing beaches of Omaha to the west and Gold to the east. As we shall see, their aim was so accurate that they were to threaten certain Allied ships anchored off the French coast on D-Day. The guns had initially been intended as auxiliary artillery for German warships.
Picture of a casemate at Longues
