Of the British and Canadian troops who took part in D-day on 6 June 1944, two-thirds set off for the beaches of Normandy from Southampton’s docks.
The on England’s south coast was sealed off by the allies, with permits required in and out, and the civic centre – the first in the country, completed in 1939 in brilliant white Portland stone – was taken over by the US army 14th Major Port Transportation Corps.
A total of 3.5 million British, Canadian and American troops would pass through Southampton between the first hours of D-day- eighty years ago this Thursday- and the end of the second world war.
In short, the town – it was made a city by royal charter in 1964 – played arguably the most significant role of any in the launch of Operation Overlord and the liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation.
Yet Andy Skinner, 36, who is conducting 80th anniversary D-day walking tours on behalf of the city council, admits he does not have a great deal to work with.
“It is disparate,” he says of the local commemorative efforts. The same could, arguably, be said of Britain as a whole.
In Southampton, there is a small metal plaque – left by the Americans – at the front of the civic centre, while a second plaque can be found just inside by reception, and there is something similar – again, left by the Americans – on the Mayflower Pilgrims Memorial down on the quay.
Then, in the bowels of the civic centre, on the wall of a neon-lit corridor, there is an embroidery of an imagined view of the town on D-day, with columns of British and American troops on the high street and fighter planes in the sky.
It was the idea of Elsie Sandell, a local historian, in 1947. The first stitch was made in 1950 and it took 76 embroiders to complete. But it rarely leaves the gloom of its corridor for fear of light damage.
After the Southampton blitz of November 1940, there were reports that the glow of the firestorm could be seen from as far away as Cherbourg on the coast of France. The war left horrific scars, with 2,300 bombs and 30,000 incendiary devices damaging 45,000 buildings.
But D-day itself has left peculiarly little mark.
“I think people were just ready to move on,” said Skinner of the lack of commemoration. “I wonder whether it is also that there was a lot of secrecy about D-day and people didn’t realise the importance of Southampton at the time and so there isn’t a collective memory of it.”
Portsmouth, the headquarters of the Royal Navy, will be hosting the main D-day commemorative events in Britain this week. It has had a dedicated museum since 1984. But even that, at 13,000 sq ft, is dwarfed by the nearby 48,728 sq ft Mary Rose museum, home to the flagship of Henry VIII.
Nicholas Witchell, who retired last year after 25 years as the BBC’s royal correspondent, said he believed the desire of the wartime generation in the UK to move on was also one reason that Britain was until recently alone among the principal allied nations in not having a memorial at Normandy.
For the first time this June, the British Normandy Memorial overlooking Gold beach, one of the two where British forces landed, is hosting the major anniversary commemoration.
The memorial near Ver-sur-Mer records the names of the 22,442 servicemen and women under British command who lost their lives on D-day and during the Battle of Normandy in the summer of 1944.
Built at a cost of £27m, it only came to being after Witchell, while working in Normandy for BBC radio, was introduced to George Batts, formerly a soldier in the Royal Engineers, at the 70th commemorations in 2015.
“He’d been trying to do something about it for several years, but hadn’t really got anywhere and he asked if I would help,” said Witchell, 70.
He joined forces with the architect Liam O’Connor, who designed the British armed forces memorial in Staffordshire and the Bomber Command memorial in London.
The site was formally inaugurated by Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron on 6 June 2019 – the 75th anniversary – but few could travel for its public opening in 2021 due to the Covid pandemic.
Witchell said Batts, who died in 2022, had only started campaigning for the memorial in his final years, and that this was typical of the wartime generation.
“After the war, Britain was bankrupt, and the British people, I think, wanted to move on. We just didn’t have the resources or the willpower by the late 40s. And then the moment had gone, really, and it has perhaps been for the postwar generation to pick it up again,” Witchell said.
“I think it has required the postwar generation to reach a stage in their lives where they have the capacity and the wherewithal to do something about it. To, as it were, make amends. And I think they [the veterans] too, you know, as they reach their 80s and 90s having led fulfilled lives, I think they’re more inclined then to revert back and to think about and to relive these most significant events in their lives.”
Southampton will also be marking the events this week. Skinner, whose grandfather was private secretary to Winston Churchill, is looking forward to a proclamation by the town crier and a march by soldiers through the city centre. But few on the high street had heard of the plans. “Because it’s a modern working port, that’s the focus, I think”, said Ross Fleming, 27, an infrastructure engineer.
“The town today is very different to what it was,” added Skinner. “In some ways it might as well have been 800 years ago rather than 80.”
