A previously forgotten German gun battery - part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall in Normandy near Omaha Beach - has been uncovered and it is about to re-write the story of D-Day.

Military enthusiast Gary Sterne came across the buried 40 acre site a few years ago whilst studying a wartime officer's map of the area marked 'Area of High Resistance'. "Not knowing where I was going or what I was looking for, I continued walking across the fields until to my amazement I found I was standing on concrete. I followed the concrete to the edge of the tree line and discovered a bunker entrance... then a tunnel, an office, store rooms, headquarters buildings, radio rooms, bunkers … and most importantly mounts for 155mm cannons," he recalled.

Thus began a four year project to buy the land from its various owners, and to uncover the largely untouched bunkers and tunnels. After the war it had been buried beneath a metre of top soil and farmed. The virtually impenetrable Normandy hedgerows had covered the evidence and the site, which had housed hundreds of German soldiers, was forgotten by the locals and ignored or overlooked by historians. “After studying the RAF reconnaissance photographs it was clear that the site was of major importance - it was not just another little gun battery but a major complex - a similar size to that at Pointe du Hoc but virtually undamaged."

Further research in the Washington and Berlin archives revealed that in 1944 the Maisy Battery was a headquarters complex for the coastal defence of Omaha Beach and its guns included four 10.5 cm cannons – three in casements and one in a field, it had six 155mm howitzers in open emplacements, a British 25pdr cannon captured at Dunkirk, two 50mm KwK anti-tank cannons, two Renault Tank turret tops mounted into casements – not to mention many machineguns, mortars and rifles.

Nearby Pointe du Hoc had 3 x 20mm anti-aircraft guns guarding it - along  with a wooden false battery in the field next door – Maisy was guarded by 8 x 88mm anti-aircraft canons (8 in front and 4 in the fields behind). As well as its usual personnel who had manned it since it was built in 1942, it was guarded by infantry from the 352nd & 716th Infantry Divisions and a flak battalion arrived on the 3rd of June and was ordered to defend it. This flak battalion was commanded by Colonel Kistowski and in his original interviews with Longest Day writer Cornelius Ryan he provides graphic details about the Allied planes flying over Maisy on D-day and how the Germans kept up the pressure to repel the invasion by shooting them down. He reported that they captured 12 US paratroopers at Maisy on D-day alone.

On D-Day and for two days afterwards, the Maisy Battery fired on American soldiers landing on Omaha Beach - 'Bloody Omaha' -  as it has been ever afterwards known. During the landings men from the US Rangers scaled the 60
ft high cliffs at Pointe du Hoc near Omaha to put out of action the gun battery there. Those who have watched the film ‘The Longest Day’ will recall that when they reached the casemates there were no guns there. Since then the question has been asked by historians – where were the guns from Pointe du Hoc?