The first ship Ken Cooke ever saw was the one that took him from Southampton to the beaches of Normandy in the early hours of 6 June 1944. He was 18 and an infantryman in the 7th battalion of the Green Howards, known as the Yorkshire regiment, with six weeks’ basic training under his belt. “You could walk across the harbour without getting your feet wet, you know, that many ships,” he recalls.
Cooke, now 98, was one of 160,000 men sailing under dark skies on a vast armada of 3,000 landing craft, 2,500 ships and 500 ancillary craft and merchant vessels, tasked with launching the liberation of Europe.
