RIFLEMAN TOURS NEWSLETTER
Summer 2013
Our Recent Tours
Summer finally arrived with beautiful sunshine and a lengthy heat wave to boot. We had a number of tours running consecutively over June and July and the weather was extremely kind to us other than a brief blip during our June Somme and Ypres tour. Our first tour in June was a five day private tour for Robin and Sally Bailey. We toured the Western Front paying particular interest to Ypres, the Somme, Vimy Ridge and finishing the tour at Cambrai which was especially significant to Robin. His Grandfather had served in the Howe battalion of the 63rd Naval Division and had been taken prisoner at Flesquieres, Cambrai during the German spring offensive. The final part of this tour included a night’s stay at Cambrai and a visit to the Flesquieres Salient. It now sits in a barn at Flesquieres and we were delighted to visit this impressive piece of military history before departing for Calais and our trip home. Within days we were back on the road with a small group heading to Normandy and a tour of the D-Day beaches. This group consisted six gentlemen of whom four had been on tour with us before. George Lowe and Aidie Bond were on our very first Rifleman tour back in 2010 and it was great to have them along again. We visited the five landing beaches and the American and British drop airborne drop Above: the ‘Easy zones. No trip to Normandy would be Boys Company’ complete without a visit to Pegasus Bridge and Sainte-Mère-Église. We stayed at our usual hotel, the Kyriad in Caen, where Briac the manager and his staff took excellent care of us.
Left: Bernie laying a wreath at Bayeux Cemetery on behalf of the group
Above: the Baileys and Tony of Rifleman Tours with the Deborah tank Below: the front of the tank
We stayed at the Hotel Beatus whose owner Philippe Gorczynski, as well as being an inn keeper, is a military historian who specialises in the Cambrai area. He is also the man who discovered the D51 (Deborah Tank). This relic of the Battle of Cambrai was rolled into a pit and buried after being incapacitated in the battle. Philippe traced the area where the tank was buried and in 1998 excavated it.
Below: George on the landing craft used in the film Saving Private Ryan
The group got on so well together they formed their own company ‘Easy Boys Company’ and are planning a tour together next year of the Western Front.