On the morning of Tuesday, 6 June 1944, Allied forces began landing on the northern coast of Nazi-occupied France. The first airborne troops arrived by parachute and glider just minutes after midnight; by dawn, a vast seaborne assault force was fighting its way ashore. The Normandy landings, the largest, most complex and ambitious operation of their type ever attempted, were a turning point in the Second World War. The long-awaited Second Front had opened and the liberation of Western Europe had begun.

Drawing on the Sound Archive records of London’s Imperial War Museum, this book is concerned with the British contribution to D-Day. It is a compilation of eyewitness testimonies and impressions, of personal and personalised accounts of episodes that occurred on that day and during the long months of preparation that preceded it.

One of the greatest strengths of the museum’s vast collection is that it includes accounts from men and women whose experiences are not widely known yet are rich in unusual and unexpected detail. So, against Lord Mountbatten’s memories of the early problems faced by the most senior of planners, we have the recollections, for example, of a young WAAF aircraftwoman who packed parachutes in the run-up to D-Day and worried about the consequences of doing too many too quickly. Royal Navy seamen speak of the disastrous night in April 1944 when German E-boats caused havoc and heavy casualties among American landing craft training off Slapton Sands in Devon: a hushed-up episode that remained little known for decades. A conscientious objector describes his work as a parachute medic who dropped before dawn into Normandy. Here, too, is the modest account of the only man to win a Victoria Cross on D-Day.