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THE PEOPLE'S D-DAY |
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What did you do in the war, Daddy …and Mummy? It's the cliché of course. But for ordinary Radio 4 listeners who've contributed to THE PEOPLE'S D-DAY at 7pm on June 5th, the story of their war has been one long parade of the extraordinary....
Simon Elmes, executive producer of The People's D-Day outlines the forgotten aspects of D-Day that his programme will unveil. Read Simon Elmes' specially commissioned article in full.
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From the man who spent months making giant hinges, not knowing what they were for - It was only later that he discovered that they were part of the mammoth floating harbour, codename 'Mulberry' that had to be towed across the Channel to give the warships and supply vessels of the invasion force somewhere to unload their material. To the young Welsh schoolboy who used to enjoy flattening coins by placing them on the local railway track, and couldn't believe his eyes in late May 1944 to see the huge convoys of trains endlessly passing on the way south for days on end…
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Left image: Programme recording at Southampton Water (Royal Victoria Country Park) with Libby Purves, Neil George (producer) and Dr Adrian Smith (historian).
Right image: Programme recording at remains of Queen Victoria Hospital in Southampton with the same programme team.
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It was a massive undertaking - hundreds of thousands of troops marshalled ready to take to the ships for Normandy, plus all the ammunition and supply lines. How, for example, were they going to get fuel across to France for the tanks, lorries and armoured cars? Where were they going to moor all the vessels ready to sail in a single armada?
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Then and Now
American military vehicles and troops in Rockleigh Road, Southampton, on the eve of D-Day and Libby Purves standing in the same garden in 2004.
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The People's D-Day tells the stories of some of those thousands of men and women who contributed to or experienced the build up to D-Day first-hand. Not so much the vast battalions of servicemen who led the assault on occupied France, though we hear from some of them too, but from the people who helped make it happen.
Keeping the People's D-Day in one piece and on track is presenter Libby Purves who, accompanied by historian Dr Adrian Smith of Southampton University, anchors the programme from various key sites in and around Southampton - the docks, the site of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Hoglands Park and the village of Sway in the heart of the New Forest. Here, sixty years ago, were camped thousands of young British servicemen, waiting and hoping. Many were to lose their lives in the unprecedented attack on the heavily defended Normandy coastline. Many more were to be wounded, never fully to recover. Theirs is the story of June 6th 1944. The story of the People's D-Day is the warp and weft of those lives that watched and helped it happen…
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