The war ground we stood on

Camel Green, the Plage du Dramont

Directly below the villa — seen from the water on 23 July — 36th Infantry Division

The 141st Infantry waded onto this pebble beach at 08:00 on 15 August 1944, the 143rd followed at 10:30, and the 142nd at 15:00 after its own beach could not be taken. Some 20,000 men with tanks and artillery landed here in under ten hours; the beach, unusually, had not been mined. Offshore, a German Hs 293 radio-guided glide bomb hit the landing ship LST-282 as it waited to unload and destroyed it with about forty men aboard. The landing craft on the esplanade by the car park carries the number 282 in their memory, next to the monument, on a road now named Boulevard de la 36ème Division du Texas. It is the memorial the boat passed heading out to the Île d'Or.

For the record: did anyone walk down to the monument and the barge during the week?

Camel Blue, the Anthéor cove and viaduct

Under the railway viaduct beside the villa — crossed by the Monaco TER on 24 July

At the same 08:00 the 1st Battalion of the 141st, 860 men, landed in the little cove under the Anthéor viaduct to take the high ground on the villa's side of the bay. The viaduct had a war of its own before that: it carried the only rail line between Marseille and Genoa, about 100,000 tons of German supplies a week to Kesselring's armies in Italy, and RAF 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, attacked it three times from Britain and North Africa, in September and November 1943 and on the night of 12 February 1944 with Leonard Cheshire marking the target in a Lancaster, and missed every time. The failure persuaded Cheshire that low-level marking needed Mosquitos, which is how 617 did it for the rest of the war. The TER to Monaco on 24 July rolled across the same arches.

Camel Red, the Fréjus bay

Vieux-Port, Saint-Raphaël — the Saint-Tropez ferry left from here, 25 July

The one Dragoon beach the Allies could not take. Camel Red, the long sand of Fréjus-Plage facing the Argens plain, was the sector's main objective and the most heavily defended; the afternoon assault was called off under fire from the shore batteries and the 142nd Infantry was turned around and sent to Dramont instead. Fréjus fell from the landward side the next day. Les Bateaux Bleus sailed you out of this bay on Saturday morning.

Alpha Yellow, Pampelonne

The boat's long stop, 23 July — 3rd Infantry Division

The 3rd Division's 15th Infantry landed on Pampelonne at 08:00 (Cavalaire, round the point, was Alpha Red). The beach clubs came later: Club 55 began in 1955 as the canteen for the crew filming And God Created Woman.

Saint-Tropez

Ferry day, 25 July — liberated 15 August 1944

Freed on the first day by American paratroopers of the 509th who had been dropped miles off their zone and decided to take the town in front of them, together with the local Resistance. The citadel you can climb for the view over the port was the German strongpoint.

Le Muy, Grasse and Monaco

A8 westbound 27 July — Galimard atelier 26 July — casino day 24 July

Le Muy, 15 km inland from the villa and beside the A8 you drove west on the last morning, was the Operation Rugby drop zone, where the 1st Airborne Task Force came down in the dark to block the roads to the beaches. Grasse was taken in the last week of August by the same paratroopers pushing east toward Nice, which rose up and freed itself on the 28th. Monaco was occupied by Italy from November 1942 and by Germany from September 1943; the casino stayed open through all of it, and the principality was liberated on 3 September 1944.

Pisa, the Piazza dei Miracoli

29 June — Leaning Tower photos

On 27 July 1944, with the front on the Arno, Allied artillery set fire to the roof of the Camposanto, the cemetery cloister on the north side of the square, and molten lead from the roof ran down its fourteenth-century frescoes. The restoration took seventy years. The Germans had an observation post on top of the tower you were photographing.

Viareggio

29 June — dinner on the Versilia coast

Liberated in September 1944; the German Gothic Line reached the sea just up the coast at the Cinquale canal and the front sat there all winter. Twenty kilometres above the beach, at Sant'Anna di Stazzema, the SS killed about 560 villagers on 12 August 1944, the Italian Oradour and the subject of Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna.

Florence

30 June and 2 July — Accademia, the Duomo, the Frecciarossa from Santa Maria Novella

On the night of 3 to 4 August 1944 the retreating Germans blew every bridge in Florence except the Ponte Vecchio, spared on an order usually attributed to Hitler, and demolished the medieval streets at both ends of it to block the way instead. The Ponte Santa Trinita was rebuilt in 1958 with its own stones fished out of the Arno. Rossellini shot the Florence episode of Paisan in these streets a year after the fighting, and Sinatra's hijacked prison train in Von Ryan's Express ran through the Santa Maria Novella platforms you boarded from.

Siena

1 July — walking tour, the Lorenzetti frescoes

Spared. The French Expeditionary Corps, largely Moroccan and Algerian troops, walked into an undamaged city on 3 July 1944 after General Juin refused to shell it. The Palio was not run from 1940 to 1944.

San Gimignano

1 July — towers, Vernaccia, evening tour

Shelled in July 1944 before the French entered, with damage to the towers and the Collegiata. The finale of Tea with Mussolini, the expatriate ladies chaining themselves to the towers to save the frescoes, was shot in the Piazza della Cisterna.

Cerbaia and San Casciano in Val di Pesa

29 June to 2 July — Villa Feudo, the Tuscany hub

The hub sat on the German line of retreat to Florence. San Casciano, 3 km from the villa, was bombed in July 1944 before New Zealand and South African troops pushed up the Val di Pesa toward the city.

Rome, the open city

Via Ulpiano, Prati — Vatican, Colosseum, Pantheon, Campo de' Fiori, Trastevere

Declared an open city in August 1943, occupied by the Germans from September, and liberated on 4 June 1944, two days before D-Day took the headlines away. Four of its wartime places were within a few minutes of your route. Palazzo Venezia, on the piazza between the Colosseum and the Pantheon: the balcony from which Mussolini declared war on France and Britain on 10 June 1940. Via Rasella, ten minutes on foot from the Trevi Fountain: on 23 March 1944 a partisan bomb here killed 33 German policemen, and the next day 335 Romans were shot in the Fosse Ardeatine caves in reprisal. The Portico d'Ottavia, two streets from Campo de' Fiori: the Ghetto, from which more than a thousand Roman Jews were taken to Auschwitz on 16 October 1943; sixteen came back. St. Peter's Square, where Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty ran an escape network for thousands of Allied POWs and Jews from inside the Vatican while the Gestapo watched the border of the square. The Spanish Steps you passed on the Vatican day are the opening shot of Rome, Open City.

Bordeaux-Mérignac

6 July — landed on the Volotea from Rome

On the morning of 17 June 1940 Charles de Gaulle, an under-secretary in a collapsing government, flew to London from this airfield. That evening, in Bordeaux, Pétain went on the radio to ask the Germans for an armistice. The following day de Gaulle broadcast the Appel du 18 juin from the BBC.

Bordeaux, Place des Quinconces

10 July — Tour de France stage finish

For a fortnight in June 1940 the government of France ran the country from Bordeaux, not the first time the city had served as capital of last resort. The square where you watched the sprint finish was at the centre of it. The U-boat base the Germans built at Bacalan in 1941 to 1943, too massive to bomb or demolish, is now the Bassins de Lumières, the sister attraction of the quarry show you skipped at Les Baux.

Lascaux

9 July — 12:30 timed entry at Lascaux IV

Four teenagers and a dog found the cave on 12 September 1940, three months into the Occupation, in what was then the Vichy free zone. A beaten country got the best news it had all year, and the painted cave spent the war as one of the few things in France that could be unreservedly celebrated.

Rouffignac

9 July — the electric train into the mammoth cave

On 31 March 1944 the German Brehmer division burned the village of Rouffignac-Saint-Cernin to the ground in a sweep against the Maquis; only the church survived. The cave you rode into sits in the hills above the rebuilt village. Fifteen kilometres from your Sarlat hotel, Josephine Baker's Château des Milandes was where the American star worked as a courier for French intelligence, carrying notes in invisible ink on her sheet music.

Gare Montparnasse

11 July — arrived on the TGV from Bordeaux

On 25 August 1944 General Leclerc set up his command post in the old station, and that afternoon General von Choltitz, the German commander of Paris who had declined Hitler's order to destroy the city, signed the cease-fire for his garrison here.

Île de la Cité: the Préfecture and Notre-Dame

11 July — Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame

The Paris uprising began next door to Sainte-Chapelle on 19 August 1944, when two thousand striking policemen seized their own Préfecture and raised the tricolour. A week later, on 26 August, shots rang out inside Notre-Dame during the thanksgiving Te Deum and the congregation went under the chairs; de Gaulle walked on up the nave without breaking step.

Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower

11 July

At dawn on 23 June 1940 Hitler made his only visit to Paris, three hours long; the famous photograph with the tower behind him was taken from the Trocadéro terrace. The lift cables had been cut, so he never went up. On 25 August 1944 firemen climbed the tower and raised the tricolour on top. The Vél d'Hiv memorial on the Quai de Grenelle, under a kilometre from the Bateaux Parisiens pier, marks the cycling stadium where 13,000 Parisian Jews were held on 16 and 17 July 1942 before Drancy and Auschwitz. You left Paris on 16 July, eighty-four years to the day.

Musée d'Orsay

12 July — the full day under the clock

Before it was a museum, and after it stopped being a main-line station, the Gare d'Orsay was the reception centre where prisoners of war and deportees coming home from Germany in the spring of 1945 were received and processed. Many families waited here for people who did not come.

The Louvre and Père Lachaise

13 July

The Louvre was emptied in the last week of August 1939: the Mona Lisa left in a padded ambulance for Chambord and spent the war moving between Loire and southern châteaux, with the curators keeping one step ahead of the German art commissions. Across town, the far corner of Père Lachaise, beyond Morrison and Wilde, holds the deportation memorials, one for each camp, and the graves of the Resistance.

Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe

14 July — the Bastille Day parade

The pavement you watched the parade from has seen the avenue's three other processions of the war. On 14 June 1940 a Wehrmacht band led the German entry parade down it from the Arc. On 26 August 1944 de Gaulle walked it, from the Arc to Notre-Dame, through a crowd of a million or more. On 29 August the US 28th Infantry Division marched down it twenty-four abreast on its way straight through the city to the front.

Rue Réaumur and the Grand Rex

11 to 16 July — the apartment

Five minutes from the front door, the Grand Rex on the Grands Boulevards was a Soldatenkino from 1940 to 1944, a cinema reserved for German troops, the real-life cousin of the one Tarantino invented for the end of Inglourious Basterds.

Versailles

15 July — the palace and the gardens

The Hall of Mirrors you walked through is where the treaty of 1919 lit the fuse. Across the park, the Trianon Palace hotel was Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, SHAEF, from September 1944, and the war in the West was run from there until the move to Reims. The Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde, the working pick for the farewell dinner, was requisitioned by the Germans in June 1940 and lost a column to tank fire on 25 August 1944 as the garrison shot it out with French armour on the square.

For the record: did the farewell dinner land at the Crillon?

Nantes, Carnac and Dinan

16 July — TGV in, Hertz out, the stones, the night at the Mercure

Nantes' main avenue is the Cours des 50-Otages: after the Resistance killed the German Feldkommandant here on 20 October 1941, 48 hostages were shot in reprisal. Thirty kilometres west of Carnac, the U-boat fortress of Lorient was besieged from August 1944 and held out until 10 May 1945, two days after VE Day. Thirty minutes from your Dinan hotel, Saint-Malo was 80 percent destroyed in the August 1944 siege and rebuilt in granite as it had been; the Netflix series of All the Light We Cannot See was shot on its ramparts.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Avranches

17 July — five hours on the Mont

A German lookout post through the Occupation, the Mont was liberated in the first days of August 1944 without a shot and promptly overrun by GIs on leave. The road you took there runs through Avranches, where on 31 July 1944 Patton's Third Army poured through the gap opened by Operation Cobra and out of Normandy into open France. The Patton monument stands on the roundabout.

Saint-Lô, the Capital of Ruins

17 to 19 July — La Capelle, Saint-Georges-Montcocq, the Normandy base

Your base was 95 percent destroyed in June and July 1944, bombed on the first night of the invasion as a road junction and then fought over for six weeks of hedgerow war. When the 29th Division finally took it on 18 July, the body of Major Thomas Howie, killed the day before on the last approach, was carried into the town on the hood of a jeep and laid on the rubble of the Sainte-Croix church so that he could enter first, as he had promised his men. Samuel Beckett drove an ambulance for the Irish Red Cross hospital here in 1945 and 1946 and named it the Capital of Ruins.

Chartres Cathedral

19 July — the Rose Window, the Veil, the light show

On 16 August 1944 Colonel Welborn Griffith of the US XX Corps, told the cathedral tower was being used by German observers and that it was to be shelled, climbed the bell tower himself to prove it was empty and had the order cancelled. He was killed in action in Lèves, north of the city, that afternoon. The medieval glass you saw had been taken down in 1939 and spent the war in an underground quarry at Fongrenon in the north Dordogne, an hour from the roads you drove on the Lascaux day.

Aix-en-Provence and Arles

27 July — lunch in Aix, the amphitheatre at golden hour

Eight kilometres from your Aix lunch, the Camp des Milles tile factory is France's only intact internment camp, where Max Ernst and Hans Bellmer were held in 1939 and 1940 and from which Jews were deported in 1942. In Arles, Van Gogh's Yellow House on the Place Lamartine was wrecked by Allied bombing on 25 June 1944 and demolished; the Café Terrace on the Place du Forum survived, which is why you could stand in the painting.

Carcassonne and Toulouse

28 July — La Cité, cassoulet, the airport hotel

Carcassonne was in the Vichy zone until November 1942; the German garrison pulled out on 19 and 20 August 1944 and the Cité was untouched. France's best fighter of 1940, the Dewoitine D.520, was built and first flown at Toulouse, on the ground that became the Airbus works beside the Residence Inn.

Reims

29 July — the cathedral, sabrage at Pol Couronne, biscuits roses

The cathedral where 25 French kings were crowned had been shelled to a ruin in the first war and reopened after the Rockefeller-funded restoration in 1938, a year before the next one; it came through 1939 to 1945 largely untouched, and Reims was liberated on 30 August 1944. In February 1945 Eisenhower moved SHAEF forward from Versailles to a technical college here, and in its map room at 02:41 on 7 May 1945 General Jodl signed Germany's unconditional surrender. The room is preserved exactly as it was, maps on the walls, as the Musée de la Reddition, ten minutes on foot from the boutique where you sabred the bottle. Twenty-five kilometres east at Camp Mourmelon, Easy Company was resting when the Bulge broke and left for Bastogne in open trucks on the night of 17 December 1944. Berlin appointed a Weinführer to requisition champagne by the trainload; the houses hid arms and airmen in the cellars.

For the record: the surrender room was within the minute-math of the day. Did anyone get there?

Oradour-sur-Glane

Planned for 7 July — dropped for distance

On 10 June 1944, four days after D-Day, a company of the SS Das Reich division on its way north to Normandy surrounded this village near Limoges and killed 643 people: the men shot in barns and garages, the women and children locked in the church and burned. Six survived. De Gaulle ordered the ruins kept exactly as they were, and they have stood that way for eighty years, rusting cars, sewing machines, tram wires, with the Centre de la Mémoire beside them. The plan was built for it, and it was the opening half of the trip's throughline, occupation and atrocity before liberation and sacrifice. From the Graves hub, where the GPS put the house, it was about two hours forty-five each way; the plan had assumed Montguyon, which is an hour closer. It was the right call for an eleven-person day, and it is the one site on this list worth a return.