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The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy
Ferrying troops to the beaches wasn’t the only contribution sailors made during the Allied invasion of Normandy. As we mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Nick Hewitt reveals how the Allied navies ended up fighting one of the most overlooked campaigns of the Second World War
On 30 July 1944, nearly two months into the Allied invasion of northern France, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay reflected on his command of the naval operations so far. “It may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing,” he wrote in his diary. “[But] nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution.” Ramsay died in 1945 without leaving a full memoir, but thousands of sailors could testify that nothing about their lives was “easy and plain sailing”. As late as 8 August 1944, with Allied troops poised to smash the German army in Normandy, sailors were still fighting to protect the beachhead. On that same day, the German submarine U-667 torpedoed both the US freighter Ezra Weston and the Canadian corvette HMCS Regina, the latter attack claiming the lives of 30 men. Ramsay’s words were prophetic. Today, discussions regarding sailors during the Normandy campaign mainly focus on their actions during the first day of the invasion: 6 June 1944, or ‘D-Day’. They are often absent from the wider story, despite the exhausting and dangerous campaign they fought to seize, exploit and defend the waters around Normandy throughout the summer of 1944. Read more | The road to D-Day: the masterplan The focus of the campaign was the Baie de la Seine, or Seine Bay, the huge inlet of the English Channel stretching nearly a hundred kilometres along the coast of Normandy from Le Havre in the east to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula at Cape Barfleur in the west. Within the bay lay the five assault areas or so-called ‘beaches’: Utah and Omaha for the Americans, and Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians. Through this highly congested and vulnerable body of water passed a constant stream of transport ships carrying supplies and reinforcements, without which the military could not hope to win the more widely recognised battle of Normandy on land. Defeat was unlikely, but any setback could have prolonged the war for months. As the Allied commander-in-chief, General Dwight Eisenhower, recognised in his final report: “For the successful maintenance of the armies in France… we were dependent upon the ceaseless work of the Allied navies, assisted by RAF Coastal Command.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-3068867webready-3256be6.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The invasion’s supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower (centre), with his deputy, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder (left), and ground forces commander General Sir Bernard Montgomery (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" title="The invasion’s supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower (centre), with his deputy, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder (left), and ground forces commander General Sir Bernard Montgomery (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" /> Normandy had been confirmed as the site for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe at the Quebec Conference, codenamed ‘Quadrant’, in August 1943. Two months later, Ramsay was appointed Naval Commander-in-Chief, Expeditionary Force, with the rest of the command team appointed in December. The overall commander-in-chief was Eisenhower, and the military and air commanders were General Sir Bernard Montgomery and Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. The countdown to D-Day With the leadership structure in place, Ramsay then issued his Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune, the invasion’s assault phase, on 28 February 1944. While the planners worked, extraordinary efforts were made to assemble the huge fleet required for the invasion. Royal Navy officer Christopher Clitherow, for instance, commissioned a new Landing Ship (Tank), or LST, which would help transport men and vehicles across the Channel. Created using innovative mass production methods in the US, the vessels resembled welded steel shoeboxes, and offered very little in the way of comfort. “She reacts to a bump like a diving board off which one has just jumped,” Clitherow later recalled. “Every conceivable piece of the ship rattles as if its teeth were about to fall out.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/ulls287509webready-438e073.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="British tanks and trucks are transferred from a Landing Ship (Tank) to a motorised raft known as a Rhino Ferry. Huge numbers of vehicles were transported across the Channel for the push inland (Photo by ullsteinbild/TopFoto)" title="British tanks and trucks are transferred from a Landing Ship (Tank) to a motorised raft known as a Rhino Ferry. Huge numbers of vehicles were transported across the Channel for the push inland (Photo by ullsteinbild/TopFoto)" /> Meanwhile, the sheer number of men required to deliver Neptune meant that most new British recruits were posted to Combined Operations, which had been founded in July 1940 to plan and carry out amphibious warfare. They were put through their paces at special centres across the UK, before joining their units and taking part in huge pre-assault exercises. Exercise Tiger, held on 26–28 April, saw the most significant setback of the training cycle, when a convoy of American LSTs making a practice landing at Slapton Sands, Devon, was attacked by German motor torpedo boats (also known as ‘E-boats’), killing 749 US servicemen and wounding more than 300 others. Yet despite this tragic turn of events, Operation Neptune officially began at 11.30pm on 25 May, when commanders opened Ramsay’s sealed orders and military camps in southern England were closed off to the outside world. D-Day itself was scheduled for Monday 5 June, but after an unseasonal summer gale, it was determined that the invasion would instead be pushed back to Tuesday 6 June. The Normandy landings in numbers 7,016 Ships and major landing craft that participated in Operation Neptune. Approximately 79 per cent of the vessels were either British or Canadian 195,701 Naval personnel involved in Operation Neptune 917 Allied ships and major landing craft lost or seriously damaged between 6 and 30 June 1944 509 German mines, of all types, swept in the Allied assault areas between 4 June and 3 July 1944 183,540 Vehicles landed in the British and US sectors by 4 July 1944 – the day after Operation Neptune officially came to an end After setting out on the 5th, the armada passed along the south coast and turned out into the Channel, with most of the ships passing Area Z, a buoyed patch of water south-east of the Isle of Wight nicknamed ‘Piccadilly Circus’. From there, the vessels then passed down the ‘Spout’ – 10 marked and mine-swept channels – into their designated assault areas. Sweeping and marking this huge stretch of sea was fraught with danger. When the US Navy minesweeper Osprey struck a mine, caught fire and sank, the five sailors and one officer who lost their lives became Neptune’s first deaths in action. Arriving off Normandy, bombarding warships subdued the German coastal defences while soldiers got ashore. Warships provided an overwhelming advantage on the battlefield, but bombardment was exhausting work – and quite different to the stop-start nature of conventional naval action. Gordon ‘Putty’ Painter, a 20-year-old gunlayer aboard the cruiser HMS Belfast, would later recall firing broadsides that rocked the ships “backwards and forwards” for hours on end. In fact, such were the demands of the operation that the only time that Painter and his comrades could leave the turret “was if nature called”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/2T1K4GGwebready-7d3bc56.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Men on board HMS Sirius stand alongside the casings of shells fired from the ship’s 5.25-inch guns. The light cruiser provided vital gunfire support in the Sword area (Photo by piemags/archive/military/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Men on board HMS Sirius stand alongside the casings of shells fired from the ship’s 5.25-inch guns. The light cruiser provided vital gunfire support in the Sword area (Photo by piemags/archive/military/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Naval bombardment would prove instrumental to ensuring D-Day’s success, particularly within the American Omaha area, where destroyers operating dangerously close inshore helped the army establish a precarious beachhead. But the fire support came at a cost: two destroyers, the Norwegian Svenner and USS Corry, were both sunk with heavy loss of life, the former by German torpedo boats and the latter by coastal defence guns. Meanwhile, more sailors carried assault troops to the shore in landing craft – and their experiences were often extraordinary. George Kirkby, for example, was the coxswain of a Landing Craft (Assault) launched from HMS Prinses Astrid, one of several converted Belgian ferries that was tasked with delivering British commandos and US Rangers. Later, he would describe a beach “strewn with dead and wounded bodies, the air thick with smoke and the water around us spraying up into the craft through concentrated mortar and machine gun fire”. After D-Day: the remarkable logistics that kept the fight going The initial follow-up forces also landed in assault craft, but from 10 June onwards, the focus of Operation Neptune switched to methodical logistics, with at least eight convoys of merchant ships sailing across the Channel every 24 hours. The process was remarkably efficient: allowing for loading and unloading, any individual ship could make a round trip from England to France in just four days. They not only brought in fuel, vehicles, ammunition and reinforcements, but they also took out wounded Allied soldiers and German prisoners of war. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-141556290webready-189a081.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A wave of US troops lands on Omaha beach, several hours into D-Day. Sailors were responsible for guiding landing craft to the shore, often under heavy fire (Photo by Mondadori/Getty Images)" title="A wave of US troops lands on Omaha beach, several hours into D-Day. Sailors were responsible for guiding landing craft to the shore, often under heavy fire (Photo by Mondadori/Getty Images)" /> Once the ships had arrived, there were several methods of getting supplies into the beachhead itself. The first was to bring everything over the beaches or from anchorages offshore, using assault craft and barges, while the second was to make use of the small harbours captured in the landings. The third option, meanwhile, was to utilise the two huge artificial harbours known as ‘Mulberries’ that the Allies constructed off Saint-Laurent in the Omaha area and Arromanches in Gold. Assembly of the harbours began as soon as the beaches were secured, with sailors playing a leading role. Able Seaman Kenneth Bungard, for example, crossed the Channel riding on one of the prefabricated concrete caissons used to create the harbours’ walls. Crawling along on a slab-sided monster with the seakeeping qualities of a house brick was far from pleasant. “If we were hit with a torpedo, that would be the end,” he recalled. “It was all concrete [and] it would just disintegrate.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-3287605webready-04a1a4b.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Allied troops in an amphibious truck (known as a DUKW or ‘duck’) alongside the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches. Such vehicles could reach the beachhead quickly and efficiently (Photo by Leonard McCombe/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Allied troops in an amphibious truck (known as a DUKW or ‘duck’) alongside the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches. Such vehicles could reach the beachhead quickly and efficiently (Photo by Leonard McCombe/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> All this vulnerable shipping had to be protected. In the Eastern (British) Task Force area, the defence was largely static to reduce the risk of collisions and friendly fire. Defence Line A, consisting of anchored minesweepers, ran along the assault area, six miles offshore, to guard against attacks from the north, while a line of armed landing craft and Coastal Forces craft (later christened the ‘Trout Line’) ran south to the shore, watching the German naval base at Le Havre. Elsewhere, in the Western (US) Task Force area, destroyers, patrol craft and British steam gunboats patrolled the ‘Dixie Line’, which ran parallel to the coast to meet Defence Line A. Radar-equipped destroyers patrolled south of this, and more Coastal Forces craft watched the ‘Mason Line’, which ran up the Cotentin Peninsula to the northern edge of the Utah area. Timeline: how the Allied navies turned the tide in Normandy 17–24 August 1943 The Quebec Conference (codenamed ‘Quadrant’) takes place in Canada. Allied leaders decide that the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe, Operation Overlord, will begin with an assault landing in Normandy. 25 October 1943 Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay is appointed Allied Naval Commander Expeditionary Force. 28 February 1944 Ramsay issues the Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune – the initial assault phase of Operation Overlord. 28 April 1944 Nearly 750 men are killed in a German E-boat attack at Slapton Sands, Devon, during Exercise Tiger – one of the final rehearsals for the seaborne invasion. 25 May 1944 Operation Neptune officially begins at 23:30. Ramsay’s sealed orders are opened and military holding camps on the south coast of England are closed off. 6 June 1944 The Allied invasion of Normandy begins. Known as D-Day, the first day of the campaign sees 132,715 British, Canadian and American soldiers coming to shore across five landing beaches, with a further 23,400 airborne troops dropping further inland. 25 June 1944 The US-led Task Force 129 bombards Cherbourg in support of a US Army assault on the city. 3 July 1944 Operation Neptune comes to an end. The last of the senior officers leading the assault are withdrawn and new headquarters are established ashore. 5/6 July 1944 Human torpedoes of the German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände (small battle units) launch their first attack on the Allied assault area. Two minesweepers and the British frigate HMS Trollope are sunk. 12 September 1944 With much of the fighting now moving further inland, British troops finally take the German naval base at Le Havre. Three months and six days after D-Day, combat operations for the Allied navies in the Seine Bay come to an end. Despite these formidable lines of defence, enemy attacks continued apace. E-boats and other German warships frequently sortied from Le Havre and Cherbourg, trying to strike the supply ships or lay mines, while the Luftwaffe carried out bombing and torpedo attacks almost every night. On one particularly bad day, 8 June, three US warships went down to mines, while the British lost the frigate HMS Lawford to a remote-controlled glider bomb. Another Luftwaffe raider hit a huge petrol and ammunition stores dump in the Sword area. On 14 June, an increasingly concerned Admiral Ramsay asked for RAF strategic bombers to strike Le Havre, and they duly responded, sinking three of the German Navy’s large torpedo boats and 10 E-boats. Yet there was more turmoil to come. A few days later, the worst summer storm in living memory swept through the Seine Bay, halting the fighting and delivery of supplies until late on 22 June. The Mulberry harbour at Saint-Laurent was smashed beyond repair, while more than 800 vital ferry craft were left stranded. The churning water also triggered the sensitive detonators on German pressure-operated ‘oyster’ mines, which blew up unexpectedly across the assault area. The assault on Cherbourg Once the storm had passed, the US Army attacked Cherbourg on 22 June, while a naval task force bombarded the defences on the 25th in support. This time, the German gunners were ready to respond, and all but one of the seven battleships and cruisers taking part were hit. US Rear-Admiral Carleton Bryant’s flagship USS Texas came under particularly heavy fire, with one shell smashing the battleship’s bridge structure, killing the helmsman and wounding several others. “Having 11-inch shells fired at you is no fun,” Bryant later recalled. “When the salvo hits the water there is the most ungodly smack you ever heard.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/BAL2945330webready-4a5c07c.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="German prisoners of war are marched out of Cherbourg in late June 1944. The US Army’s assault on the city was accompanied by a major Allied naval bombardment (Photo by Everett Collection/Bridgeman Images)" title="German prisoners of war are marched out of Cherbourg in late June 1944. The US Army’s assault on the city was accompanied by a major Allied naval bombardment (Photo by Everett Collection/Bridgeman Images)" /> Cherbourg surrendered on 26 June, but the submarine and air attacks continued, as did the minelaying, and July saw the arrival of the Kleinkampfverbände – the German Navy’s ‘small battle units’. The first weapons to turn up at Villers-sur-Mer near Le Havre were explosive motorboats and craft known as ‘human torpedoes’, ridden into action by young volunteers whose confidence was boosted by cocaine and amphetamines. Twenty-six human torpedoes attacked on the night of 5/6 July, and although 10 were lost, they succeeded in sinking two minesweepers and the frigate HMS Trollope. Two nights later, the Kleinkampfverbände returned and sank the old Polish cruiser ORP Dragon with the loss of 37 officers and men. Despite the constant pressure from sea and air, the vital supply build-up continued at an impressive rate. By 14 July, a million tons of stores and nearly 300,000 vehicles had been put to shore, and on 25 July, the US First Army was able to break out of the beachhead and race into France. The western flank of the assault area was now secure, and the fleet started to operate further west, blockading German bases in the Bay of Biscay and destroying evacuation convoys. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-webready542896213-a6e7725.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände arrived in the Seine Bay in July 1944, using hard-to-detect craft such as human torpedoes, like this one, to attack Allied ships (Photo by ullstein bild/Getty Images)" title="The German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände arrived in the Seine Bay in July 1944, using hard-to-detect craft such as human torpedoes, like this one, to attack Allied ships (Photo by ullstein bild/Getty Images)" /> On the eastern flank, however, Le Havre remained an enemy stronghold. On the night of 30/31 July, German E-boats struck the Allied convoy FTM53 with long-range pattern-running torpedoes, hitting five freighters. Although only one of the freighters, SS Samwake, actually sank, none of the others went to sea again. Samwake’s captain, Owen John, described his ship’s end in a melancholy report: “She dipped by the head, the stern reared up vertically and held for a few minutes, then very slowly she rolled over to starboard and disappeared at 0545 in a small fountain of water.” End of the Normandy's naval campaign Alarmingly, there were more losses to come. As well as the aforementioned HMCS Regina, further Allied casualties included the hospital ship Amsterdam, which was mined and sunk on 7 August, claiming the lives of 55 patients, 10 Royal Army Medical Corps staff, 30 members of the crew and 11 prisoners of war. Among the dead were military nurses Mollie Evershed and Dorothy Field, the only women named on the British Normandy Memorial in the village of Ver-sur-Mer. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/BAL490068webready6-6cc9d8a.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Le Havre lies in ruins after being bombarded and captured by the Allies on 12 September 1944. The port city had been a key German naval stronghold (Photo by Usis-Dite/Bridgeman Images)" title="Le Havre lies in ruins after being bombarded and captured by the Allies on 12 September 1944. The port city had been a key German naval stronghold (Photo by Usis-Dite/Bridgeman Images)" /> Later, the cruiser Frobisher was torpedoed and damaged on the 9th, and the valuable repair ship HMS Albatross was torpedoed on the 11th with the loss of 67 naval and military personnel. It wasn’t until 12 September, with the land fighting far away, that the British captured Le Havre and the complex infrastructure of the Seine Bay was dismantled. More than three months after D-Day, the naval campaign was finally over. Looking back at the events nearly 80 years on, the sailors who served should not be remembered as mere taxi drivers, ferrying men and supplies to the shore, but as active combatants who guarded the vital coastal waters and Allied assault areas until the very end. Whether by day or by night, they maintained a ceaseless watch against all manner of threats – and in some cases, ended up paying with their lives. Counting casualties is not an exact science for a campaign that has never been studied coherently, but nearly 3,000 Allied sailors are known to have died in the operations in and around the Seine Bay – and possibly many more. As General Sir Bernard Montgomery would write in May 1945, “any success achieved by the British Armies has been made possible only by the magnificent support given us by the Royal Navy”. This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Winston Churchill: is he still the greatest Briton in history?
Over two decades ago, a BBC poll named the wartime British prime minister as the Greatest Briton. Now, on the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s birth, David Reynolds ponders whether he deserves to remain as top dog in the pantheon of British history
In a much-publicised poll in 2002, the BBC asked viewers to rank figures from British history, as part of the television series 100 Greatest Britons. The poll was in no way scientific, but simply reflected votes – more than 1.6 million of them – from people who chose to contact the BBC, following presentations championing famous individuals ranging back in time from the 20th century to William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. As is well known, Winston Churchill came out a clear first, garnering close to 457,000 votes. Two decades later, as we mark 150 years since he was born, it’s interesting to revisit that moment, and to reflect on how perceptions of Churchill have changed over time – and also on what is meant by historical ‘greatness’. Because Churchill’s craving to make himself ‘great’ lies at the heart of his extraordinary story. In the run-up to the BBC poll, politician Mo Mowlam – Churchill’s advocate – insisted that “he was the greatest Briton because he showed the determination and courage to protect Britain from invasion, and without his inspiring leadership the outcome of World War II may have been very different”. Let’s unpack that claim a bit. Did Churchill really make such a difference in 1940 – and, if so, how? The answer to the first part is surely: yes – most of all through his energy and drive. Although the tempo in Whitehall would have intensified anyway with the end of the ‘Phoney War’ and the German invasion of France, Churchill’s appointment as prime minister had a galvanising effect, dramatically symbolised by his famous red labels stuck on urgent documents: ACTION THIS DAY. Equally important, Churchill took a firm grip on military strategy. Mindful of the confusion and infighting of 1914–18, he appointed himself minister of defence. There was no ministry – that did not come until the 1960s. Churchill simply wanted the authority to deal with the chiefs of staff directly rather than via their politician ministers. He yearned to be a war leader, unlike Neville Chamberlain – his predecessor as PM – or Lord Halifax, the alternative when Chamberlain lost the support of the Commons. Neither of them had any appetite for such a role, whereas Churchill – a soldier by training – had dreamed of it since childhood. Read more | Neville Chamberlain is underestimated, argues author Robert Harris Churchill was also an accomplished communicator. Often he’s remembered for his soundbites – ‘fight them on the beaches’, ‘finest hour’, ‘special relationship’ – but these were only the icing on the cake. Churchill regarded his speeches as tools of public education, helping the British population understand what became known as ‘the people’s war’. When Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Churchill gave a radio address on the BBC about what he called “the Fourth Climacteric”, connecting it to three earlier turning points in the war. He spent hours preparing his speeches in a way that may seem inconceivable now in the days of tweets and social media. There isn’t space here to do full justice to Churchill’s impact, but one other point should be mentioned. Most British premiers had received a classical education, informed by Latin, Greek and philosophy; few had any grasp of science and technology. By contrast, Churchill loathed the classics but was fascinated by gadgets and science fiction – by the world of HG Wells. That’s why he quickly grasped the value of Ultra – the operation to intercept enemy signals intelligence – and ensured that the codebreakers of Bletchley Park were provided with an abundance of money and gifted personnel. Read more | Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory The people’s war Yet there’s another side to the story of 1940 that was not voiced by Mo Mowlam. More important than Churchill’s “courage and determination” in protecting Britain from invasion after France fell were decisions during the 1930s by governments of which he was not a part. Key among these was the development of a new generation of fast monoplane fighters – Hurricanes and Spitfires – linked to the Chain Home system of radar stations giving crucial early warning of when and where enemy bombers were crossing the Channel. Churchill was aware of these developments, and contributed to some of the discussions, but these were his ‘Wilderness Years’ when he was out of office. The decisions were made while the ‘appeasers’ were in power – and they were vital in winning the Battle of Britain. That highlights a deeper point. Technological innovations such as radar and Ultra could have been developed only by an advanced industrial state – by what historian David Edgerton has called the ‘warfare state’ – often neglected in accounts of modern Britain because of a preoccupation with the welfare state. The war that Churchill waged was possible only because of a long series of decisions and developments going back to the industrial revolution. This provides a salutary reminder that an intense focus on individual leaders can blind us to structural factors that also shape historical change. Victory or bust Surviving 1940 was one thing; winning the war was very different. Three days into his premiership, Churchill told the Commons that his goal was “victory at all costs”. Yet after the French signed an armistice with Germany on 22 June, that sounded like fantasy. France had been Britain’s principal ally throughout the First World War, its army anchoring the western front. Britain was now alone – and there was no western front on the continent of Europe. Britain and its empire – from Canada to India, from the Caribbean to Australasia – made a major contribution to the war, but eventual victory over Hitler and the Axis depended substantially on the Soviet Union and the US. Put simply, the Soviets provided the manpower, the Americans the firepower. Read more | 1942: Churchill's darkest hour Between June 1941 and June 1944 – from the opening of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union until D-Day – more than 90 per cent of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners) were inflicted by the Red Army. The US was the ‘arsenal of democracy’, producing an abundance of munitions and supplies, much of which was shared with its allies through Lend-Lease aid. And the arrival of the US and Soviet armies in Germany in 1945 was a prelude to the Cold War division of Europe between these two superpowers. Read more | Churchill's evolving perspective on D-Day Of course, Churchill was no mere spectator in all of this. The stereotype of the ‘bulldog’ can easily blind us to his remarkable skills as improviser. Even before the fall of France, he was assiduously courting president Franklin D Roosevelt with messages, later followed by personal visits to the US. He did the same with Joseph Stalin from 1942, becoming the essential intermediary between the White House and the Kremlin. During a photo shoot at the Tehran conference in November 1943, when someone remarked that the ‘Big Three’ looked like the Holy Trinity, Stalin responded: “If that is so, Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies around so much.” The PM’s improvisations in shuttle diplomacy helped keep Britain in the diplomatic game – but by 1945, nothing could obscure the fact that the Big Three was more like the Big 2½. Strategy for greatness All that being so, the reason why he looms so large in accounts of the war, almost obscuring anyone and anything else, is because of Churchill the historian. We remember him in part because he was utterly determined not to be forgotten. That had been true all his life. Right from the start, he had a clear strategy for greatness: hit the headlines as a soldier or a politician, then be sure to write your own account. Deeds and words: both were essential to ensure that his story became history. That’s what he did in the Second World War – a hefty six-pack of volumes published between 1948 and 1954, less than a decade after victory was won. No other war leader was a serious competitor. Roosevelt died before the war ended; Stalin published no autobiography; and the trilogy of war memoirs by Charles de Gaulle did not appear until 1954–59. So Churchill got into print quickly and in formidable detail, determined to shape the public narrative before others could do so. He was careful to say that his work was not history but “a contribution to history which will be of service to the future”, told mainly from the vantage point of Number 10. But the heavy ballast of quotation from his own minutes, memos and telegrams, and the absence of replies (partly to avoid long wrangles about copyright), had the effect, as the cabinet secretary put it, of “creating the impression that no one but he ever took an initiative”. Read more | Did Churchill and Hitler ever meet? And the choice of title – The Second World War rather than War Memoirs – enhanced the sense that Churchill’s personal story enfolded the whole global conflict. The hardback sold 2 million copies in Britain and a similar number in the US. And Churchill’s take on the war reached even larger audiences around the world through book translations and newspaper serialisations. That was not the end of Churchill’s history-making – only the end of the beginning. Before his death in 1965, he commissioned an official biography, based on privileged access to his papers. His son, Randolph, authored the first two volumes before his own death in 1968; the work was completed by the Oxford historian Martin Gilbert, with the eighth and final volume appearing in 1988. The furrows that Churchill had dug through the war were deepened further by 23 volumes of documents, a project started by Gilbert and rounded off by wealthy acolytes in the US. Screen portrayals of the 1930s and the war also kept him centre-stage, initiated by Robert Hardy in the ITV series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years in 1981, for which Gilbert was co-scriptwriter. Read more | Books interview with Boris Johnson: "Churchill was a tremendous bully in some ways, but we needed a bully" Later depictions featured Albert Finney (The Gathering Storm, 2002), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009) and Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour, 2017). Popular biographies took the same approach, encapsulated by Boris Johnson’s entertaining contribution, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (2014). Creating an icon As historians Allen Packwood and Warren Dockter have observed: “Churchill the writer played a key role in creating Churchill the icon,” adding that “ironically, in doing so he also raised his own profile to such a level that challenges to his reputation became inevitable.” Even before Churchill died, an edited version of the diaries of Lord Alanbrooke, wartime chief of the Imperial General Staff, revealed some of the challenges of working with this volatile genius. Within a year of Churchill’s death his doctor, Lord Moran, went into print with Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, provoking a storm of controversy about the ethics of a physician writing about his patient. And in 1970, Robert Rhodes James, formerly one of Randolph’s research assistants, published a biography of Churchill up to the Second World War. In it he argued that, had Churchill died in 1939, his life would have been deemed A Study in Failure. Seen that way, the war premiership stood out as an aberration. Like any historical personage, over time Churchill was becoming a figure of controversy, and the mass of documents published by the Churchillians fed the debate, both for and against. In any case, historical perspectives inevitably shift with time. Mo Mowlam, his BBC champion in 2002, was born in 1949. For people of that generation, and for those who lived through the war, the conflict still seemed all too present – not least in the urban wastelands and prefab housing that bore witness to the Blitz in many cities, and in the emotional power of Remembrance Sunday. Yet for ‘Gen Z’, born in the late 1990s and 2000s, the Second World War can seem almost prehistoric. Britain today is far more ethnically diverse than the predominantly white country led by Churchill in 1940–45, largely the result of postwar immigration from the former British empire. Read more | “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation Earlier statistics are not precise, but census returns for the past few decades show that the proportion of people in England and Wales identifying themselves as ‘white’ fell from 91.3 per cent in 2001 to 81.7 per cent in 2021, by which time 9.3 per cent of residents described themselves as Asian, 4 per cent as black and 2.9 per cent as mixed race. Although many of these people had been born in Britain, they often had a different sense of their heritage from Mowlam’s generation, influenced by parents or grandparents who grew up in the Caribbean or south Asia. In recent years, there has been a passionate debate about India’s war. For that nation, the focal wartime trauma was not the Blitz but the Bengal Famine of 1943–44, which killed perhaps 3 million. Causes and contributing factors are complex and hard to balance, including floods, crop disease and wartime inflation in Bengal, the disastrous fall in rice imports after Japan’s conquest of Burma, the slow reaction of the British authorities, and the shortage of shipping in 1943–44 because of the Allied build-up for D-Day. But in Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (2010), Indian-American journalist Madhusree Mukerjee blamed much of the policy failure on the PM. Churchill’s contempt for what he called (privately) in February 1945 the “foul race” of Hindus was noted by many British politicians and officials of the time, and drove his conviction that Indians were not capable of self-government. Read more | The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war The debate was fanned anew by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and the UK after 2019. Accusations of genocide were levelled at Churchill, and his statue in London’s Parliament Square was daubed with “was a racist”. Churchillians offered robust defence, but the anti-Churchill polemics – often based on ignorance of the detailed story – remind us that heroes can easily be turned into villains as perspectives change. A rival perspective It’s often said that Churchill’s attitude to India was just part of the mental baggage of Victorian England. A glance at Clement Attlee, his successor as PM in 1945, offers a useful corrective. In fact, examining Attlee’s rise to power provides an intriguing perspective on Churchill’s world view. Born in 1883 – thus also a Victorian, though eight years younger than Churchill – Attlee grew up in a prosperous professional family in the south-west London suburb of Putney. Whereas Churchill’s imperialist ideology was shaped by service as a soldier on the frontiers of Victoria’s empire, Attlee’s crucible was London’s East End. Attlee lived in a social work settlement for nearly a decade before the First World War. This opened his eyes to urban deprivation, but also to the potential of many adolescents in London’s docklands if given discipline and motivation. He became a lifelong socialist. Read more | Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line Unlike many Labour men of that era, Major Attlee was no pacifist. He served as an officer in the Gallipoli campaign and on the western front. But he was not an imperial diehard like Churchill, who never set foot in India after the 1890s. Two extended tours around the Raj with a parliamentary delegation in 1928–29 convinced Attlee that India must follow Australia and New Zealand along the path to self-government and eventual independence. And he acted on that conviction as prime minister in 1945–51. With the death of Churchill in January 1965, Attlee penned a reflective tribute, judging him to have been “the greatest leader in war this country has ever known”. Not because he was the greatest warrior or strategist, but because “he was able to solve the problem that democratic countries in total war find crucial and may find fatal: relations between the civil and military leaders.” Attlee had in mind the 1914–18 feuds between ‘Frock Coats’ and ‘Brass Hats’, but maybe also the ‘Bonapartist’ tendency of successful war leaders to seize political power. When Churchill put himself before the electorate in 1945 and was resoundingly defeated, he accepted their verdict, despite deep resentment at being kicked out. Read more | Churchill: the ‘cry-baby’ war hero Attlee regretted the fact that Churchill did not retire from politics in 1945. “I had seen enough of him during the war to be sure that, unless there was a war on, he would not make much of a prime minister,” he wrote. Instead, “what Britain required when the war was over was an architect, somebody who could build new parts into our society, and repair damage.” Attlee was, of course, positioning himself as the architect trying to repair the damage of two world wars and rebuild British society on socialist lines. Both Churchill and Attlee were deeply patriotic, but they differed about the essence of national greatness. For Winston it was the empire, whereas Clem saw imperial overstretch as an outdated burden. Despite the eventual bloodbath over the partition of India, Attlee was proud of bringing the Raj to what he saw as a long-overdue end, and of helping transform empire into Commonwealth. At home, what mattered for him was the concept of social security he had evolved in the East End, and “the duty of the state to act as the coordinating factor in making all individual effort work for the good of the citizen”. Commonwealth and socialism defined his sense of what it meant for Britain to be great. In this piece I’ve emphasised the importance of seeing Churchill in context – against the wider dynamics of the Second World War and in relation to his contemporaries. Back in the 1890s, Rudyard Kipling rebuked those who held a myopic view of English history: “What should they know of England who only England know?” Adapting Kipling, we might ask today: “What should they know of Churchill who only Churchill know?” By definition, a biography tends to isolate its subject as good or bad. Placing a leader in context is surely the task of any historian. For me, the question of who was the greatest ever Briton makes no sense. But I’ve no doubt that, in his ‘finest hour’, Winston Churchill did win the immortality he craved. David Reynolds is emeritus professor of international history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him (William Collins, 2023) This article was first published in the Christmas 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Who was the greatest President of the United States in history?
Seven historians put forward their nominations for the most accomplished leader to have sat in the White House
George Washington In office: 1789–97 Party affiliation: none Nominated by: Thomas Kidd, historian and author of Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale, 2022) George Washington was the first president in US history – and I’m nominating him as the best, too. I am basing this on his success as a leader, his ability to negotiate conflict in his administration, and most importantly the example he set for future presidents. Americans at the time of the Revolutionary War were enamoured with the ideal of the virtuous republican leader, in the model of the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus. Washington was no perfect man, of course, and like many elite southern Americans he was a slaveholder. But in politics he came the closest to manifesting the republican ideal of any American president. Washington became president after serving as the commander of the Continental Army during the fight for independence from the British. His leadership of the army was not uniformly positive, but his tenacity ultimately led to a successful outcome. Many suspected he might simply remain in the position as a kind of benevolent autocrat, but he resigned from the army in late 1783, returning to his Mount Vernon home in Virginia. Befitting the respect that he commanded, Washington was chosen to preside over the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where the US Constitution was drafted. Then he became the first president to be elected under that Constitution in 1789, in a unanimous vote of the electoral college. Washington dealt with major political conflicts in his administration, especially between the treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who bitterly disagreed over economic policy and the direction of the new republic. Washington was largely (if not completely) able to rise above the partisan bickering, and always believed that the republic and its leaders needed to manifest consensus for the public good. He assiduously reached out to minority religious groups, such as Jews, to assure them of their place in the republic. Washington was not constitutionally required to step down after his second term, but he did so once again to manifest the ideal of the public servant who did not want or need to hold onto power indefinitely. Read more | Did George Washington have wooden teeth? Abraham Lincoln In office: 1861–65 Party affiliation: Republican Nominated by: Richard Carwardine, historian specialising in politics at the time of the American Civil War. His latest book is Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Alfred A Knopf, 2025) In his own era, Abraham Lincoln acquired a mythic status as the ‘Saviour of the United States’ and ‘Great Emancipator’. His death, from a shot fired on Good Friday, saw him canonised as the martyr of the glorious Union. Yet even stripping away the myth, most scholars still rank him the best American president. When Lincoln took office, seven slaveholding states had already launched a separate Confederacy. The American Civil War followed. Inexperienced in executive and military leadership, the wartime president faced sustained criticism but drew on formidable self-reliance and indomitable physical strength. He grew in office. Essential to his power were his tenacious nationalism, strategic wisdom, political shrewdness and skill in communication. The American republic’s unique mission, Lincoln insisted, lay in its ideological freight of liberty and equal opportunity. During the war, his nationalism fused with a deepening religious faith. He came to see that preserving the Union’s cargo demanded emancipating the enslaved, a constitutional amendment ending human bondage, and giving the vote to black soldiers. Read more | The Emancipation Proclamation: Abraham Lincoln's declaration that helped bring about the end of slavery Lincoln shrewdly calculated the Union’s strategic priorities: controlling the rich resources of the upper South; securing international support; pursuing a military plan that played to the Union’s strengths while exploiting the enemy’s limitations; and mobilising the human and natural resources of the country. Leadership demanded the deft handling of the levers of power. He controlled his party and broadened the coalition of Union loyalists. He mastered his cabinet and congress, though he was initially less confident with the military. A strong sense of self-worth meant he rarely stood on his dignity. Equally, his mental fortitude – forged through dark passages of depression – gave him resilience in extreme adversity. Sensitive to public opinion, Lincoln recognised that growing war-weariness threatened the Union cause. In the wiry prose of his memorable public addresses (he used no speechwriter), and in the skilful use of a natural sense of humour, he touched the nerve of ordinary people, believing in their educability through reason. Lincoln is the only president to have wrestled with civil war. Could any other have done it so well? Read more | Alternate history: what if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been assassinated? Teddy Roosevelt In office: 1901–09 Party affiliation: Republican Nominated by: Jennifer Wright, popular historian and author of Glitz, Glam and Damn Good Time: Mamie Fish and the Gilded Age (Hachette, 2025) There were dull presidents… and then there was Teddy Roosevelt. If he had not been the president, he would merely have been one of the most interesting men to ever live. The 26th president was a cattle rancher, a taxidermist, a Brazilian explorer, an amateur boxer, a historian who wrote The Naval War of 1812, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his help in bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Admittedly, he did not end the American Civil War, like Lincoln. But Lincoln did not take a bullet to the chest and still finish a campaign speech, as Roosevelt did. Prior to being president, he was a war hero known for his prominent role with the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. This group of volunteer cavalrymen were comprised of anyone who could ride a horse well. That meant that polo-playing scions of New York families served alongside coal miners and Native Americans. The notion of a country in which all people could thrive, work together and have great open spaces in which to ride would go on to become defining aspects of Roosevelt’s presidency. After succeeding to office in 1901, he increasingly promoted the idea of “a square deal for every man, big or small, rich or poor”. That meant breaking up some of the big business monopolies that had dominated the gilded age and mediating a coal worker strike to ensure the public’s interest was protected (Roosevelt was on the side of the workers). A square deal also meant protecting consumers. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt lobbied for congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts — the meat portion of that perhaps a nod to the fact that Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle [which depicted unsanitary standards in the US meat-packing industry] had been serialised the previous year before being published as a book in February 1906. Read more | 8 facts you might not know about the White House, home of the president of the United States It was also at Roosevelt’s behest that the Forest Service was created. Roosevelt, who is known as ‘the Conservation President’, was passionate about nature. He used his presidential powers to establish 230 million acres of public land that could not be exploited. His presidency was defined by the notion of creating an America wherein the common man might find prosperity, safety and pleasure. It’s not essential that a president’s personality matches his accomplishments. Plenty of dull presidents have accomplished great things. But Teddy Roosevelt was a rare case where the magnetism of the man matched the grandeur of the office. And look, your kid doesn’t go to bed hugging a James K Polk bear. Franklin D Roosevelt In office: 1933–45 Party affiliation: Democrat Nominated by: Iwan Morgan, emeritus professor of United States studies at University College London, and author of FDR: Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America (Bloomsbury, 2022) In guiding the US through the Great Depression and Second World War, Franklin D Roosevelt, or FDR as he was known, transformed the presidency, hitherto a relatively small institution, into the modern office that is the fount of national leadership. Having to overcome physical disability after polio left him paralysed from the waist down at age 39 made his achievements all the more remarkable. Assuming office in 1933 amid the US’s worst slump, FDR failed to effect full recovery until war spending renewed prosperity, but otherwise enjoyed unmatched domestic success. His New Deal programme rescued the banking system from meltdown, enabled industrial workers to form unions that bargained for better pay and conditions, and created a new welfare state. It forged a working-class coalition of urban, multi-ethnic voters that helped FDR to win an unprecedented four terms in office (a two-term constitutional limit was ratified in 1951) and transformed the Democrats into the majority party for the next half-century. Roosevelt’s judicial appointments precipitated a constitutional revolution whereby the Supreme Court eventually accepted federal regulation of private enterprise as valid. An outstanding communicator, he uplifted national spirits through his speeches and broadcasts. Finally, he formed a memorable political partnership with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idealism offset his pragmatism. As wartime commander-in-chief, FDR set spectacularly high production goals for America’s defence industries that ensured the Allies were far better equipped than their Axis enemies. He overruled his generals’ plans for a 1943 invasion of France as premature, then prodded a reluctant Winston Churchill into agreeing the D-Day invasion in 1944. HistoryExtra Academy | Take our four-week course, where you’ll discover everything you need to know about the Normandy landings The driving force behind the creation of the United Nations Organisation in 1945, he nevertheless regarded great power collaboration as essential for sustainable peace. Accordingly, he accommodated Josef Stalin’s demands for Soviet control of eastern Europe to maintain good relations. For critics, this encouraged Stalin’s insatiable expansionism, but FDR saw no alternative with the region already under Red Army occupation. Roosevelt’s sudden death while still in office in 1945 meant that history would never know if he could have pre-empted the wartime alliance’s rapid disintegration and descent into Cold War. FDR’s record has some significant shortcomings, notably his limited advancement of African-American civil rights and his complicity in the worst federal abuse of citizen rights in history in signing an executive order in 1942 authorising relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Nevertheless, his positive accomplishments were arguably far more significant. They justify his remembrance as America’s greatest president. Lyndon Baines Johnson In office: 1963–69 Party affiliation: Democrat Nominated by: Clifford Williamson, a lecturer in modern British and American history at Bath Spa University “Power is where power goes,” was the mantra of Lyndon Baines Johnson from his early days as a New Deal bureaucrat and teacher through to his time as president of the US. LBJ, as he was often known, was a commanding and intimidating figure who handed out the ‘Johnson treatment’ in his pursuit of power and change in America. A tall man, he loomed over whoever he was seeking to impress, frighten or cajole into supporting him or his policies. He was a member of Congress from 1937 until 1961; he graduated from the House to the Senate in 1948 and became a majority leader in 1955. His time in Congress would be key to his effectiveness as a president who used procedure, patronage and his powers of persuasion to break the entrenched opposition of, in particular, the southern Democrats. LBJ was selected as the running mate to John F Kennedy in 1960, and was raised to the presidency following the assassination of JFK in November 1963. Almost immediately he proved his effectiveness by breaking the Congressional logjam over tax cuts – and, importantly, a Civil Rights Act which was passed in 1964. Read more | US civil rights movement: 5 landmark events In May he launched his ‘Great Society’, a wide-ranging legislative programme where he claimed, “no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled”. There then followed a slew of initiatives that rivalled in scope the New Deal of his hero, Franklin D Roosevelt, and in many cases surpassed it. Following the violent attacks on the peaceful Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, he would propose the 1965 Voting Rights Act that finally ended the poll taxes, literacy tests and Grandfather clauses that had hindered African-American political participation and enfranchisement. However, following a series of riots across the US (starting in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965), a growing white backlash would soon be palpable. It was something that not even the formidable political talents of LBJ could stem. The crisis was exacerbated by the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, where it was becoming increasingly evident that the US had become embroiled in an unwinnable war, despite sending hundreds of thousands of US troops. Then, in 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese shocked the US by launching the Tet offensive, a major escalation in the conflict. In the face of spiralling opposition to the war among the American people, Johnson decided not to seek re-election in that year’s presidential election. It was a muted end to what had been a brilliant political career. Ronald Reagan In office: 1981–89 Party affiliation: Republican Nominated by: Jeremy Black, author of books including The Cold War: A Military History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and A Brief History of America (Robinson, 2024) Ability and achievement come in many forms. The innovators and the explorers of the possibilities of politics and government win the most praise. But it is also necessary to honour the stabilisers, and Ronald Reagan, the much-mocked elderly ex-Hollywood actor from California, was one of the greatest. America and the West were in grave difficulties at the end of the 1970s. The Vietnam War and Watergate had hollowed out confidence in American power and politics, and the two oil shocks of the 1970s had destabilised the economy and public finances, contributing to a sense of decline. At the end of the decade, the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan took this malaise further. What might have come next was a matter of hazard – and, indeed, in 1983, war between the Soviets and the west came very close. Detente had fallen and the Cold War reheated. Read more | Opinion: the conservative legacy of Ronald Reagan Reagan proved an adept responder. Though castigated as a warmonger for his reference to a Soviet ‘evil empire’, and for the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles, he believed in negotiations from strength – a stance that eventually bore fruit in the move towards a reduction of tension from 1985. Just as Richard Nixon had reached out to Chairman Mao, so Reagan responded to Gorbachev. Earlier crises over Poland and Afghanistan were handled through measures short of war – so, for instance, the US supplied armaments to the Afghan resistance but didn’t commit ground troops. The same policy of subversion rather than invasion was employed in Central American countries such as Nicaragua. The fall of the Soviet system suggested that the pressure of trying to match American military expenditure and economic development was potent, more so than the repeated moves into war and use of troops frequently employed by presidents from 1991 onwards. In light of this, Reagan appears more viable as a model than contemporary criticism often allowed for. In domestic policy, Reagan pushed growth and deregulation. The American economy provided a clear contrast with the Soviet one, and was thus a more attractive partner for China. In social terms, Reagan was a libertarian, which would have jarred with the intolerance of many members of the modern Republican party. Charismatic, a great communicator, able to take the pulse of the nation, a good delegator, and a man with a heart… Reagan was an attractive head of state and an accomplished leader. Barack Obama In office: 2009–17 Party affiliation: Democrat Nominated by: Rebecca Brückmann, associate professor of history at Carleton College and author of Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Barack Obama became the nation’s first African American president, 390 years after the first documented slave ship arrived in the continental British colonies. Obama’s identity should not eclipse his effectiveness: he oversaw the passage of urgent economic reforms and the first comprehensive healthcare law since Lyndon B Johnson signed the 1965 Medicare and Medicaid Act. Obama expanded civil rights, reconfigured US foreign policy, and emphasised the fight against climate change. Read more | American presidents: 9 things you (probably) didn’t know Obama’s 2008 ‘Yes We Can’ campaign centred his charisma and rhetorical skill. He tapped into widespread dissatisfaction with George W Bush’s administration amid the Iraq War and a worldwide economic recession, promoting a hopeful and inclusive vision of the country. Once elected, he confronted the longest economic downturn since the 1930s. One month after Obama took office, in addition to offering financial ‘bailouts’ for banks and the automotive industry, Congress passed an $800bn stimulus package, investing in infrastructure, education and renewable energy. By the time Obama left office, unemployment had been cut in half. The Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’), his landmark achievement, outlawed health insurance discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and halved the number of uninsured Americans. The Obama administration strengthened civil rights by bolstering equal pay provisions, repealing the anti-LGBTQ ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ military policy, supporting marriage equality, and offering a path to work authorisations for undocumented minors. Confronted by an obstructionist Republican Congress that rebuffed attempts at bipartisan coalition building, the Obama administration increasingly relied on executive orders to effect political change. Obama raised the federal minimum wage, designated national monuments under an Indigenous commission, and cut federal greenhouse gas emissions. Obama’s foreign policy saw the continuation of his predecessors’ military interventionism in the Middle East, which made critics question the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 2009. However, he re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba after 54 years, and he brokered a new agreement on nuclear weapons development in Iran. Most constructive of all was his spotlight on the climate crisis, which enabled the breakthrough 2016 Paris Agreement. In the face of racist threats, birtherist conspiracies and a conservative countermovement, Barack Obama was a remarkably effective president during socio-politically challenging times in the 21st century. Read more | Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Churchill's evolving perspective on D-Day
Richard Dannatt and Allen Packwood discuss the prime minister's role in one of the major moments of the Second World War
D-Day was one of the key episodes in the Second World War. But what did Winston Churchill make of the plans for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France? Was, as some have suggested, the British prime minister really reluctant to get involved? And how fraught were relationships between the Allied leaders? Speaking to Matt Elton, Richard Dannatt and Allen Packwood, authors of new book Churchill's D-Day: The Inside Story, discuss the decisions and tensions behind the operation. Listen on the HistoryExtra podcast D-Day: was Churchill really against the operation? What context do we need to understand about Churchill – and Britain – in the early years of the Second World War to make sense of what was to happen in the run up to D-Day? Richard Dannatt: The first thing to consider is the circumstances of how Churchill became prime minister in May 1940. He had recently been present at a parliamentary debate to defend a disastrous campaign in Norway that had taken place in the months beforehand. It had been Churchill’s idea to try and hobble German industry by cutting off the supply of iron ore from Sweden through Norway into Germany – and it had been a disaster. Everything you can think of that could go wrong, had gone wrong – and it's one of the illustrated examples that we use in the British Army staff college about how not to conduct an operation. This – among other things – would continue to play on Churchill’s mind. Allen Packwood: We must remember that Churchill is not elected prime minister in May 1940. He is there, really, because of a Westminster coup to remove Neville Chamberlain. Churchill then had to construct a national coalition government, which meant he had to put together a war cabinet containing people who – until recently – had been his rivals or political opponents. This meant he did not enter the war as prime minister in a strong position – and he had to consider carefully how he was going to respond to that. We then had the Dunkirk evacuation, and Churchill very famously said that wars are not won by evacuations. But it must have been very clear to him – in 1940 – that the road was going to be a very long, hard one before Britain could return to France. Read more | Churchill and D-Day: did the prime minister oppose the Normandy landings? One of the things that has often been said to have influenced Churchill’s approach to D-Day is his experience in the First World War, specifically the Dardanelles campaign (1915-16). Do you think this is overstated? RD: I think the Dardanelles campaign had a major impact on Churchill. He was the Lord of the Admiralty at the time, and he had come up with the campaign’s concept, which was a bold attempt to try and break the deadlock of the extended trench warfare on the Western Front. You must give him marks for trying to find a new initiative, but – and this is the sadness – although the strategic thinking might have been reasonable, the operational delivery was woeful. Read more | Dardanelles: 5 reasons why the First World War campaign was a failure There was also a huge loss of life in the Dardanelles campaign. This, in addition to the Norway campaign, sat heavily on Churchill’s mind in the run up to D-Day. I think it played very much into his overall thinking. AP: The lesson that he took away from Dardanelles was that if you were going to attempt an operation of this scale and complexity then you needed to do it very carefully – and at the right time. You needed to make sure that you had control of all the moving parts, politically and militarily. We tend to think of Churchill as this bellicose war leader, but actually he was keen to avoid the huge losses of life that had occurred in the First World War. This certainly influenced his strategy and thinking when it came to D-Day. To what extent is it right to say that Churchill was sceptical of D-Day? RD: Churchill knew at some stage that there needed to be re-entry into Europe, but he was very keen on it not being premature. So on the one hand, he was sceptical. But on the other hand, he knew it was inevitable. The big thing was to get the timing and preparation right. AP: This idea of Churchill being sceptical about D-Day developed quite quickly after the end of the Second World War. Eisenhower, when he published his memoirs, described how at one of the big conferences in May 1944, just before D-Day, Churchill had told the gathering that he was hardening on this enterprise, which the Americans immediately took to mean that he had been soft on it up until that point. This view has been taken up more recently in popular culture by the movie Churchill (2017). The film starts with Churchill walking on a British beach and recoiling as he has a vision of the sea running red with blood. The implication is that history is going to repeat itself; it’s going be the Dardanelles campaign all over again. The movie then proceeds to show Churchill attempt to obstruct the operation with 48 hours to go – which of course was not the case. Read more | Churchill: the ‘cry-baby’ war hero Churchill was also keenly aware of this idea that he was sceptical of D-Day – and he tried to respond to it in his own war memoirs. The key point is that he always knew we were going to have to go back into France, but he knew it should only be contemplated at the right moment when all the necessary preconditions have been met (so when we had the tactical experience, expertise, strategy and equipment required for what was going to be an incredibly difficult operation). Do we know what Churchill felt about D-Day in the run up to the day itself? RD: I think once Churchill had agreed in his own mind that it was going to happen, then he was determined that the operation should be given the best chance of success. He leveraged his convening power as prime minister to make sure that all these different elements were in place – from technical innovations… to planning… to even putting a lockdown in place in the south of England to maintain the security of the operation. But we know that Churchill’s had doubts and fears about D-Day. Hence the remark to his wife, Clemmie, the night before, in which he mentioned the possibility of enormous casualties. AP: Another of Churchill’s big concerns in the weeks running up to D-Day was the risk of French civilian casualties. The bombing scheme that Eisenhower and the military commanders had settled on was one that targeted the French railway system and marshalling yards. These tended to be in areas of high civilian population density. Churchill raised this issue multiple times with the defence committee and the war cabinet. He raised it with Eisenhower and President Roosevelt. His fear was that if the French take these very large casualties, then this might turn them against the Allies. He was also thinking of the political ramifications of this course of action, which are that in the post -war world, this might drive a wedge between Britain and France. Ultimately, of course, he didn’t overrule the military commanders, but he did everything he could to try and limit the effect of that bombing on French civilians. What did Churchill do on the day of 6th June? AP: Churchill was in Downing Street in the Treasury Annex on the morning of D-Day, poring over the latest maps and charts and receiving the latest reports on what's happening on the beaches. At 12 noon, he moved to the House of Commons to make his first statement. At that point, there was not much he could say; the operation was still shrouded in the fog of war and it was not clear how it was developing. So Churchill left to have lunch with the king, and then visited some of the headquarters on the outskirts of London before coming back and reporting to parliament. The really interesting fact, of course, is that this was not where Churchill wanted to be at all – he wanted to be in the centre of the action itself and had tried unsuccessfully to get himself on board a British cruiser What were the repercussions of D-Day? How did it affect Churchill's relationship with, for example, the US? RD: Churchill began to realise – once the operations ashore were fully developed – that this was now the beginning of an inevitable switch from British influence to American influence. This meant that his ability to influence subsequent military strategy and higher-level operational objectives were no longer in his control. It was no longer solely a British operation. It was a realisation that the British position was changing and that the Americans position of supremacy was frankly becoming a reality. Read more | Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line Tim Benbow at King's College London has written that the D-Day landings showed Churchill at his best and at his worst. Is this a view that you have sympathy with? AP: This is probably a view that I would have some sympathy with. I think one of the things that Churchill did well – but isn’t often credited for – is the political work that he did behind the scenes in maintaining the national coalition. In the months before D-Day, he spent a lot of time preparing the country for this huge operation using the convening power of the prime minister to knock heads together, to ensure that production targets are met, to ensure that the artificial harbours needed for the operation are being built, to ensure that the right equipment and tanks are in place. I suppose the worst of Churchill might be a certain sort of selfishness and stubbornness, which was certainly evidenced in his insistence that he wanted to accompany the troops across the channel, even though that was clearly not where he should be. I think he found the months leading up to D-Day personally very difficult because he was one of those people who liked to be at the centre of the action. I think he also found it difficult to accept the transition to secondary status in the Anglo-American relationship. How would you like people to understand D-Day and Churchill's role within it as we mark this anniversary? RD: I think Churchill's role in D-Day illustrates most effectively Britain's role in D -Day and Britain's role in the new Europe that was created at the end of the Second World War. Let's face it, if D-Day had failed – and if we had not been able to defeat Nazi Germany and some kind of pact had been formed between Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union – Europe would have looked a very different place today. AP: For me, it's all about complexity and nuance. Too often when we talk about Churchill, we tend to just see that famous image of Churchill as the ‘bulldog warrior’ with his V for Victory salute and a cigar. We think of his speeches. But Churchill was an incredibly complex character; the decisions that he – and others – were taking were incredibly difficult and it's impossible to know if they got it right. In many of these decisions, there was not one right answer, just some incredibly tough choices. But I think if you want to understand the world that we inhabit today – and the Europe that we inhabit today – then you must understand the decisions that underpin this and got us to where we are now. Allen Packwood is director of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College in Cambridge Richard Dannatt is former Chief of the General Staff and member of the House of Lords This interview was taken from an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast: D-Day: was Churchill really against the operation?
D-Day: was Churchill really against the operation?
Today, 6 June, marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, one of the key episodes in the Second World War. But what did Winston Churchill make of the plans for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France? Was, as some have suggested, the British prime minister really reluctant to get involved? And how fraught were relationships between the Allied leaders? Speaking to Matt Elton, Richard Dannatt and Allen Packwood, authors of new book Churchill's D-Day: The Inside Story, discuss the decisions and tensions behind the operation.
D-Day beaches map: where were the D-Day landings?
How many troops were involved in D-Day? Which country suffered more casualties, Britain or America? And why was Normandy chosen as the location? Our D-Day infographics explain the numbers…
The invasion of Nazi-occupied France was codenamed Operation Overlord and took place on Tuesday 6 June 1944, having been delayed by 24 hours because of poor weather. Allied forces launched a combined naval, air and land assault in what was the largest seaborne invasion in history. D-Day marked the beginning of the campaign to liberate north-west Europe from German occupation. What were the five D-Day beaches? American, British, and Canadian troops landed on five different beaches across the Normandy coastline. The five D-Day beaches were Utah, Omaha, Gold Beach, Juno, and Sword. The Americans landed at Utah at the base of the Cotentin Peninsular and at Omaha at the western end of the northern Normandy coast; the British were to land at Gold Beach, east of Omaha; then the Canadians at Juno; and the British again at Sword, the easternmost invasion beach. D-Day: Land, Air and Sea | A HistoryExtra podcast series Member exclusive | Discover the story of 6 June 1944 from the perspectives of the soldiers, sailors and airborne troops who served. Featuring interviews with WW2 experts Saul David, Nick Hewitt and Giles Milton, as well as gripping eyewitness testimonies. Listen to all episodes now Why were the Normandy beaches chosen for the D-Day landings? The initial decision to land in Normandy was made by the chief of staff to the supreme allied commander (COSSAC) in 1943, Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan. His team ruled out the Pas-de-Calais region and saw a landing between the Cotentin peninsula and near to Caen as being the most suitable, says military historian Paul Reed. Brittany, Dieppe and Pas de Calais were all considered as alternative landing locations, but none were as attractive as Normandy. At this stage in the war, due to lack of men and equipment, Morgan recommended landing on three beaches along the Normandy coastline, but this was later expanded to five. The work of the French Resistance had indicated that there were fewer defences in Normandy than in the Pas-de-Calais, with many bunkers containing antiquated firepower from the First World War. Indeed, some of the bunker complexes were only partially completed. The mapping had also demonstrated good roads to get landing troops off the beach area and inland, and to take them beyond on the long road to liberation, says Reed. Read more | Churchill and D-Day: did the prime minister oppose the Normandy landings? Where did British troops depart from? What happened in the days and weeks after D-Day? Despite fierce German resistance, the Allies secured footholds at all five beaches within 48 hours of D-Day, and by 12 June had succeeded in linking all of the beachheads into one continuous front. In the weeks the followed, the Allies made gradual progress into German-occupied France, liberating Paris on 25 August 1944. Read more | From the USA's 'good war' to Britain's 'great hurrah': how is D-Day remembered around the world? D-Day and the Normandy Campaign | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | In this four-week course, you’ll discover everything you need to know about the Normandy landings, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Taylor Downing. Explore the course now To read more about the successes and failures of D-Day, visit our D-Day hub
The women’s work that made D-Day a success
From identifying weather windows for invasion or creating plans to – quite literally – foil the enemy, the roles of women surrounding D-Day were varied and vital. Elisabeth Shipton explores the jobs women held during the planning and execution of the invasion, and how they can be remembered, 80 years on…
“I was sent with a team of other Wren officers, to a strange secret hideout in the cellars of the old Barclays hotel, where we sat down in front of huge sheets of statistics, with columns and columns of figures,” former WRNS meteorologist Paulina Nichol recalled. “And all we had to do was add the figures up.” Nichol was talking about a particular assignment covered by the Official Secrets Act; the plan for when the invasion of Normandy known as D-Day would take place. Women, she says, were used “as calculators”, just one of the vital ways that women’s labour shaped the events of 1944 and beyond. The enormous degree of planning and detailed work that made Operation Overlord and the subsequent battle for Normandy a success is rightly well-remembered, and D-Day is widely commemorated each year. Perhaps less often foregrounded is the role of women, who were involved at almost every level of the operation well before 6 June 1944 – whether as members of the Allied military services or as civilians. Read more | How is D-Day remembered in Germany? This year, the 80th anniversary of the operation, offers a chance to delve a little deeper into the varied ways that women took part. The women who planned D-Day RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire was home to the RAF’s Central Interpretation Unit. Using photographs from reconnaissance missions, the unit constructed three-dimensional images of key targets. Between 1941 and 1944 the staff grew from 231 to over 1,700, going on to provide key intelligence reports and monitoring the railways around the Normandy area to assess the impact of bombing raids, in a bid to delay German reinforcements. The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) undertook many roles at Medmenham, one being photographic interpreters, who included in their ranks Sarah Oliver – the daughter of Prime Minister Winston Churchill – and Mary Harrison, who crafted physical models of major targets, including the Normandy beaches. Precision was essential, using photographs and maps to recreate every contour and building accurately with papier mâché, plaster of Paris and lino. Mary explained: “You looked for guns and artillery and defence and they were marked usually in red… all the time you were looking for things… that the army or the landing troops could look for.” This three-dimensional view of the beaches allowed military staff to visualise the landing site, identify landmarks and strategic goals, assess potential enemy strong-points, and plan their progress inland. The women who trained for D-Day When preparing to land on the beaches of Normandy, the troops had to practise with the landing craft, and training exercises were timed to the second. Margaret Seeley of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, and officially known as the Wrens), was stationed at the signals office, HMS Squid in Southampton. She described her role in a major exercise: “I had to cancel my leave, and I was told to go down to the Hard, which is down in the harbour, and it was the only time in the war I had to wear my tin hat. “We had to look out the window and see every landing craft that came in, note its exact time, how long it took to load and when it sailed. And then report this over the phone back to head office,” she said. There’s a sense of their work as being essential. “I was told that when the actual thing happened, I would be able to do this job and I was thrilled”. You might also like | Emily Davison: the suffragette who stepped in front of the king’s horse To Margaret’s disappointment, though, when the time came for invasion, she wouldn’t get any closer to the operation. “Towards the end of the exercise they decided it wasn’t the place for women, so I had to hand over to a naval rating, who was a young lad. “He didn’t even know how to use a telephone and I had to show him how to do this job. I was rather disappointed, but, you know, one just obeyed orders and that was it.” The women who prepared the landings at D-Day After the initial invasion and once the Allies had formed a bridgehead into Normandy, gaining important territory, they installed artificial ‘Mulberry Harbours’, temporary portable harbours that allowed more troops and equipment to arrive. Ahead of D-Day, Elizabeth Rowell was one of the many factory workers manufacturing different components of the harbours. Working in Sunderland, her job was to splice ropes. It was heavy, dirty manual work. Groups of eight women stood in a circle, winding wire coils, over and under around a cable base. They would then insert hooks and thimbles (rings) at either end. These heavy wire cables were then used to hold the Mulberry Harbours together, although many of the factory workers didn’t know this until after the war. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/06/GettyImages-613462200-25e0167.jpg" width="1024" height="437" alt="Women work at waterproofing Allied field guns for the massive Normandy invasion of June 1944. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="Women work at waterproofing Allied field guns for the massive Normandy invasion of June 1944. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> The woman who chose the date of D-Day D-Day was initially earmarked for May 1944 – and meteorologists were tasked with selecting the best exact date, tracking the moon, tides and the most unpredictable element, the weather. Wren Officer Paulina Nichol, a meteorologist, explained how it worked: “They were constantly trying to discover how best to choose the day for invasion. And this was to do with phases of the moon, it was some slightly crack-pot theory. Read more | Why must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day “This being before the days of calculators, they used us as calculators.” Ultimately, 5 June 1944 was selected for D-Day, but with just 36 hours to go, Maureen Flavin, an Irish postal clerk in County Mayo, was the first to forecast a storm approaching from the Atlantic. As a result, D-Day was pushed back 24 hours until the weather was sufficiently improved. The woman who fooled the Germans To confuse the Germans, the Allies created ‘windows’ where RAF planes dropped strips of metal foil over the English Channel. This fooled German radar by giving the false impression that a large Allied fleet was sailing for the Pas de Calais area of northern France. This technique had been devised by Joan Curran, a Welsh physicist who had been a PhD student when the war broke out. The women codebreakers Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes was home to Britain’s codebreakers, and over three-quarters of the staff were women. Intercepting transmissions and breaking codes, the staff at Bletchley gathered information on enemy movements, monitoring whether deception tactics were working, and whether the Germans anticipated the Allied invasion. After 6 June, Bletchley relayed information about German counter-attacks. The women intelligence agents Special Operations Executive (SOE, established in 1940) deployed both male and female agents in occupied Europe, to gather intelligence and galvanise the local resistance Gradually, SOE occupied several buildings on Baker Street in London, with Colonel Maurice Buckmaster leading ‘F section’, overseeing agents in France. Many of the Baker Street staff were female. Odette Brown, an officer with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry described her role as secretary: “One of things I did… was type out the personal messages that went out on the BBC radio, and especially the D-Day messages. I knew them by heart, which message applied to which circuit. There were two lots of messages, there were ‘A messages’ and ‘B messages’. Brown’s messages relayed crucial information across the network, she explained. “Now the agents had been warned as D-Day approached, they had to listen to the BBC on the 1st and 15th of every month and that if they heard the A messages, then they knew the invasion would happen within the next two weeks. So, then they had to listen daily until they heard the B message, which meant the invasion would start the next day.” SOE agent Lise de Baissac was in her hometown of Paris when she heard the BBC broadcast. Lise had fled the German invasion, eventually arriving in London in 1941 and was recruited by SOE in May 1942. Four months later, she parachuted into occupied France and worked as a courier for her brother Claude’s network in Bordeaux, before setting up her own network in Poitiers. After a period back in England as a liaison officer training other SOE agents, Lise returned to France in April 1944 to support her brother’s new network in Normandy. “There were groups of Maquis (French resistance) and I had to pass on orders from one to the other. What my brother couldn’t do for himself, I did for him.” Recruiting in Paris when she heard the BBC broadcast, Lise raced back to Normandy, avoiding large Germany military formations. For the next three months, Lise and Claude’s network sabotaged German reinforcements and sent critical intelligence reports to the Allies. The women who oversaw the operation Before the days of computers, the WAAF at Fighter Command HQ at RAF Bentley Priory plotted out air force positions in real time on a large map. Overlaid with a grid, the map extended from the South of England across the Channel to the Normandy coastline. On the eve of D-Day, plotter Joan Seaman recalls how the map table was suddenly transformed: “On the table, we plotted convoys, just a circle of card with the convoy name on it… That was all the ships going over. There was so much… the whole plotting table was just a complete mass of coloured arrows, a complete mass of it.” As the invasion began, the female plotters marked out the Allied positions. It was fast and frantic work, but Joan remembers it as “extremely exciting… to give a complete picture of everything that was going on around the shores of the British Isles”. Read more | Churchill and D-Day: did the prime minister oppose the Normandy landings? Elsewhere, General Dwight D Eisenhower oversaw the Allied Invasion from Southwick House near Portsmouth. Deep underground there, Wren Marie Scott was a radio operator, alongside other women from the WRNS, the WAAF and Auxiliary Territorial Service. On landing day, Marie was relaying messages directly to the men on the beaches. To her alarm, the sounds of warfare filled her ears. “In my earphones, I was on the beaches of Normandy, I heard everything… Machine gun fire, cannon fire, bombs, men shouting orders, men screaming… it was the chaos of war.” With no conflict training, the female radio operators had no preparation for this, but they had no option but to continue their work. The women nurses of D-Day Some of the first women to arrive in Normandy after the landings were military nurses. Amy Dunnett served with No 3 Casualty Clearing Station. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/06/GettyImages-1185933553-278d7c2.jpg" width="787" height="1024" alt="Some of the first women to arrive in Normandy after the landings were military nurses. (Photo by US Army/PhotoQuest/Getty Images)" title="Some of the first women to arrive in Normandy after the landings were military nurses. (Photo by US Army/PhotoQuest/Getty Images)" /> Taken out on a landing craft, Dunnett recalls nurses scrambling down the nets, wearing heavy army boots and tin hats, packs on their backs, landing on Gold Beach in mid-June. They went to a tented hospital in a field full of tall grass and flowers. “It was very primitive”, but they had to make do as casualties came in thick and fast. “I worked in the operating theatres, on one occasion working for 56 hours without a break.” The women of D-Day, both military and civilian played a crucial role in the Allied victory. Their tireless work contributed to the success of Operation Overlord and helped pave the way for the liberation of Europe. Elisabeth Shipton is a military historian, television and radio documentary researcher, and author. Her books include Female Tommies: The Frontline Women of the First World War (The History Press, 2014)
From the USA's 'good war' to Britain's 'great hurrah': how is D-Day remembered around the world?
On 6 June 1944 a massive Allied invasion force descended on Normandy in France. In recent decades, ‘D-Day’, as this event is commonly known, has been the subject of persistent commemoration, with major anniversaries – like the 50th in 1994 and the 75th in 2019 – marked with televised international ceremonies. But does everyone commemorate D-Day the same way? Or does the memory of the Allied invasion look different depending on exactly who is doing the remembering?
This June, on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, there will be ceremonies in Normandy and heads of state will deliver speeches. And while these speeches will undoubtedly emphasise Western unity, they will also reveal that over the years D-Day has come to mean different things to different nations over the years... D-Day in the United States: a good war D-Day looms especially large in American memory of the Second World War. American forces played a key role on 6 June and when news of the landings broke back home President Roosevelt took to the radio to lead the nation in solemn prayer. In later years, Cold War tensions only further consolidated American commitment to D-Day. Here was an eminently ‘useable’ story of freedom versus tyranny. This was certainly the subtext to the popular Hollywood film The Longest Day (1962), which depicts an American-led armada descending on the French coastline in a heroic quest to bring liberation to the oppressed. American interest in the legacy of D-Day further intensified in the late 20th century. President Ronald Reagan gave a celebrated speech during the 40th D-Day anniversary in 1984. Speaking from Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, scene of a fierce D-Day battle involving American Army Rangers, Reagan recalled the landings as a heroic endeavour in which “the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history”. In the 1990s, the D-Day histories of Stephen Ambrose – which often focused on the valour of ordinary American soldiers – sold in enormous numbers and Stephen Spielberg’s blockbuster Saving Private Ryan (1998) met with critical and commercial acclaim. In 2000 a National D-Day Museum was opened in New Orleans (since re-named the National World War II Museum), followed a year later by the dedication in Bedford, Virginia, of a National D-Day Memorial. Today, 6 June’s position in the American memory of the Second World War remains unrivalled. It is remembered as the battle which perfectly encapsulates the moral clarity of America’s ‘Good War’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/06/GettyImages-2431133-4c9b04e.jpg" width="1024" height="681" alt="US president Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy on the 40th anniversary of the Normandy Landings. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)" title="US president Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy on the 40th anniversary of the Normandy Landings. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)" /> D-Day in Great Britain: a last hurrah D-Day has similarly drawn engaged interest in Britain. British leaders were key architects of the Normandy operation; its troops took charge of two of the five invasion beaches (Gold and Sword), and on 6 June itself the Royal Navy provided the vast majority of the warships. Little wonder that the first D-Day Museum established in Normandy was built in the British invasion sector (at Arromanches). It was opened by the French president, René Coty in 1954. A national D-Day Museum followed in Portsmouth in 1984. But when compared to its American ally, British memory of D-Day has also often had a more elegiac tone, something apparent in British films. Take, for instance, the rather enigmatic Overlord (1975) as well as the more recent production The Great Escaper (2023). Both tell stories of D-Day that linger on loss rather than celebrating victory. Why is this? Read more | The women's work that made D-Day a success By September 1944 the balance of power in the Anglo-American alliance (in terms of boots on the ground in France) had shifted very firmly to the United States, and this imbalance would only grow into 1945. Herein lies the significance of D-Day to the British. It is remembered as a last hurrah, the redemption of Dunkirk, and a final moment of parity with their American allies (who were soon to be a superpower). It continues to draw national attention as such. In June 2021, a new British D-Day Memorial was unveiled in Normandy at Ver-sur-Mer. D-Day in Canada: overlooked and overshadowed Although the Americans and British often get the lion’s share of the attention, Canadian soldiers also played a crucial role on 6 June. Tasked with landing at Juno Beach (one of the five invasion beaches, sandwiched between the British at Gold and Sword), they are commemorated in a dedicated museum at Courseulles-sur-Mer as well as in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at nearby Beny-sur-Mer. In recent years, too, Canadian prime ministers have been regular attendees at the major anniversaries, and a docudrama telling the Canadian story of D-Day – Storming Juno – was released in 2010. Nonetheless, the nation’s important role on D-Day (and at Dieppe, in 1942) is still often overshadowed by the enormous sacrifices made in the First World War by the Canadian Expeditionary Force. In short, it is Vimy Ridge on the Western Front (scene of a battle involving Canadian forces in April 1917), not Juno Beach in Normandy, which looms most prominently in Canadian memory. D-Day in France: liberation at last For the French, D-Day – or le débarquement (the landing) – occupies a complex place in national memory. It is recognised as the necessary preamble to national rebirth after four years of Nazi occupation and as such returning Allied veterans have long been given a hero’s welcome. But it is also remembered for the destruction it brought with it – the city of Caen was almost entirely obliterated during the fighting in the summer of 1944. Unlike the British, Canadians, and Americans, and although Free French troops were involved in the landings, D-Day also casts the French in a more passive role: the recipients of liberation. As a result, the French State has on occasion kept some distance from the annual commemorations. In 1964, President Charles de Gaulle – the famed wartime leader of the Free French – even refused to attend the 20th anniversary events in Normandy (his relationship with the Americans and British was often strained). More recently, though, the French have fully embraced the major anniversaries as invaluable opportunities for international diplomacy. This will again be apparent during this year’s commemorations, as too will be the esteem in which Allied veterans are held by the people of Normandy. D-Day in Germany: a blessing in disguise Despite being a key Western ally (and a member of NATO since 1955), D-Day anniversaries have understandably proved rather awkward for German leaders. Things began to change though following German reunification (1990) and the end of the Cold War (1991), with historians Gunter Bischof and Michael Maier suggesting that German media now began seeing in D-Day a “blessing in disguise” – the beginning of German liberation from Nazism. Even so, it was not until 2004 that a German Chancellor – Gerhard Schroeder – was invited to attend the official commemorations in Normandy. Today, D-Day is remembered in Germany as the fire from which the phoenix of a prosperous and progressive democracy later took flight. D-Day in Russia: long overdue Russian memory of the Normandy landings is distinct in several ways. As historian Olga Kucherenko has explained, it all comes down to a matter of perspective: when seen from the embattled Soviet Union, D-Day appears as welcome but long overdue (the Western allies had been promising to open a second front against Nazi Germany since 1942). In later years, Cold War tensions only further distanced Russians from D-Day, with the memory of the Allied invasion often seen from Moscow as something exploited by Western leaders to score propaganda points. By the 1990s, though, the world was very different. The Cold War was over and the new agenda was to integrate Russia into the international order. In 2004 – the 60th anniversary – President Putin was invited to the commemorations in Normandy. He also attended in 2014. There will be no such invitation this year (and nor was there one in 2019, the 75th anniversary), with the Russian invasion of Ukraine recently returning East-West tensions to the fore. Putin will no doubt declare indifference and focus instead on a key and on-going domestic policy: commemorating the heroism of the Soviet Red Army in the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia). Dr Sam Edwards is a historian of war, memory, and of transatlantic relations
HistoryExtra Academy D-Day and the Normandy Campaign quiz: week four
HistoryExtra Academy D-Day and the Normandy Campaign course
How much did you learn about the events of D-Day this week? Test your knowledge in our quiz
View Riddle on the source website Discover more learning from the fourth and final week of the HistoryExtra Academy course on D-Day and the Normandy Campaign HistoryExtra Academy video lecture: launching Operation Overlord – watching time 19 mins D-Day: 24 hours that changed the world – reading time 10 mins History explorer: D-Day beaches – reading time 6 mins D-Day: the WW2 battle through the eyes of the men who were there – reading time 14 mins “Free people everywhere should remember them": the Canadians' role in D-Day – reading time 10 mins Your guide to D-Day: what happened, how many casualties were there, and what did it accomplish? – reading time 7 mins Podcast series: D-Day The battle for Normandy: what happened after D-Day? – reading time 11 mins
HistoryExtra Academy video lecture: launching Operation Overlord
Historian and broadcaster Taylor Downing explores the highs and lows of D-Day, and examines how more than a year of top-secret planning and preparation finally came to fruition
View Green Video on the source website Discover more learning from the fourth and final week of the HistoryExtra Academy course on D-Day and the Normandy Campaign History explorer: D-Day beaches – reading time 6 mins D-Day: the WW2 battle through the eyes of the men who were there – reading time 14 mins “Free people everywhere should remember them": the Canadians' role in D-Day – reading time 10 mins Your guide to D-Day: what happened, how many casualties were there, and what did it accomplish? – reading time 7 mins Podcast series: D-Day: Land, Air, and Sea The battle for Normandy: what happened after D-Day? – reading time 11 mins