Hello and welcome to Battleground 44 with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Today we're discussing the little-known battle and massacre at the village of

Grainia in Normandy between the 10th and the 12th of June 1944. And I have to confess, Patrick,

that I hadn't heard about this horrific, but also in some ways, uplifting story. Most of us are

aware of the better-known massacre at Orador-sur-Glan in West Central France on the 10th of June four days after D-Day, perpetrated by the aware of the better known massacre at Orador Sir Glan in west central France on the 10th of

June four days after D-Day, perpetrated by the men of the second SS Panzer Division Das Reich

and the subject of a book some of you might have read by Max Hastings, but not Grenier. So how do you

come across it, Patrick? Well, I used to have a house not far away from Kenya in kind of, you know,

very bucolic, lush part of Normandy. When I bought the house, it was a sort of family kind of holiday

home. I had no idea about the massacre. And it came as a bit of a shock, I must say. So when I was

kind of driving around the countryside,

which is the last place in the world,

you'd expect some horrible thing to happen.

It's full of bird song.

It's in this kind of marshy area.

Our house was up on a hill.

They were looking at the marshes.

And in the winter, they get flooded naturally

by the sort of rising tides and all the rest of it.

So it's a kind of quite magical landscape.

Anyway, one day I was driving along and I saw this rather impressive looking monument on a hill.

They looked like a church tower.

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