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Nicholas Witchell

Those who travel to the Normandy beaches to pay their respects around the anniversary of D-Day have been able since 2021 to visit a new memorial, the British Normandy Memorial – close to the village of Ver-sur-Mer, at the eastern end of Gold Beach – which records the names of more than 22,000 servicemen and women under British command who fell on D-Day and during the Battle of Normandy in the summer of 1944.

The Memorial itself owes its existence in greater part to the initiative of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s former Royal Correspondent Nicholas Witchell, who, in 2015, was astonished to discover that the UK – alone among the principal Allied nations of WW2 – did not to have its own D-Day memorial near the landing beaches. This is Nicholas's story, as recounted in Radio 4's Sunday Worship.

They waited in line to board the ships and aircraft of the greatest invasion force ever assembled. Behind lay months of planning. Ahead lay a task of almost unimaginable importance.

Nicholas Witchell at the British Normandy Memorial

Upon the shoulders of those young soldiers, sailors and airmen rested the fate of Western Europe and the hopes of the free world.

As the Allied forces set off in the early hours of D-Day, they received a message from the commander of all D-Day Land Forces, Britain’s General Bernard Montgomery. It contained these words:

“To us is given the honour of striking a blow for freedom which will live in history and in the better days that lie ahead men will speak with pride of our doings.”

That blow was struck. It does live in history. Freedom was restored to Western Europe. And in the eight decades since the end of the Second World War we have spoken with pride about what that indomitable wartime generation achieved.

And yet speaking about it isn’t enough. If we are to be true to the memory of the many thousands who lost their lives opposing tyranny in Europe we must surely do everything we can to ensure that new generations not only know what was done but that they understand its significance to our lives today.

Nine years ago, in the summer of 2015, I was contacted by a Normandy Veteran by the name of George Batts. I’d met him the previous year as part of my then ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ duties as the radio commentator at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.

George explained that for years he had been trying to engage the interest of politicians and British companies to build a national memorial, in Normandy, to those young servicemen and women who fought and fell on the beaches and in the fields of Normandy.

He’d got nowhere. Every plea had been ignored.

How could this be, I wondered, that the United Kingdom was alone among the principal Allied nations of the Second World War not to have a D-Day memorial in Normandy?

Partly, I think, it was because Britain was essentially bankrupt by 1945. There simply wasn’t the spare cash to build a national memorial. Neither was there the will to do it. As is often stated: “People just wanted to get on with their lives.”

But on 6th June the great majority of people will, I believe, speak with pride and recall with profound gratitude what those young men and women did on behalf of every one of us in the summer of 1944.