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Stp108 HKB St Martin de Varreville

German army gun batterie inland of Utah Beach

Stp108 HKB St Martin de Varreville site overview

What to see

Little remains of the Heers Kusten Batterie at Stp108 St Martin de Varreville just over 3km inland of Utah Beach, but it was once a formidable gun position.
Although not as powerful as its neighbours at Azeville and Crisbecq to the north, in 1942 HKB St Martin featured four captured First World War French field guns of 10.5cm calibre – more than capable of defending the beach area to the north east.
As with many field positions, over the next year the site evolved with the French guns replaced by four captured Russian guns of 12.2cm and saw the building of four open emplacements, personnel shelters, ammunition stores, defensive Tobruks, and a series of minefields and a series of trenches.
Work had begun on the construction of four R669 casemates to house the guns but was never completed. The site was subjected to heavy bombing raids in the run up to the D-Day landings and when Allied forces arrived in the morning of June 6, 1944, the site had been abandoned and the guns absent from their emplacements.
Today the site is difficult to access, the gun emplacements standing heavily overgrown in fields used by cattle (they’re big ones too!) and the rear shelters either destroyed or hidden away in private gardens.

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