D-day: 75th Anniversary

Lord Craig of Radley Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Craig of Radley (CB)]

My Lords, it is fitting to remember the 75th anniversary of D-day, not just because it was an amazing feat of arms by the allied forces involved but because it gives the nation a chance to honour those still alive who fought at the time, and to remember with everlasting gratitude the thousands who lost their lives making the supreme sacrifice or who have since died, some facing and coping with life-changing injuries.

It is sobering to realise that the deaths and casualties on each side were in the many thousands, each one a deeply personal tragedy for a family, a fiancée or a girlfriend. War is a brutal endeavour, no less so now than in years gone by. Today, individual families and partners still suffer and bear the same sense of grief and loss, just as much as those in World War II, but we have been saved the horrors of massive casualties because the nature of recent conflicts has been far more contained. Modern trauma treatments and rapid casualty evacuation have also saved hundreds of lives; in earlier generations, those people would not have survived. Modern medicine helps even the severely wounded to make remarkable physical recoveries. Sadly, success with mental illness is still elusive.

While it is fitting to celebrate the anniversary, it should be a celebration of an extraordinary allied effort in which all involved played their full part. It irritates me to see claims that either the Americans or the British made the greater contribution to D-day. It was not a football contest with one team scoring more than the others. All the many nations involved, including the Commonwealth, the colonies of the day, the Free French and other Europeans, were playing a team game together. To claim that more troops were put ashore, more attack missions were flown or more barrages were fired from ships as a means of arguing who did the most on D-day is ridiculous. Normandy was not the only theatre of war in 1944; all allies were engaged in fighting elsewhere as well as in France. It was a collective effort to which all contributed massively, not least in blood and treasure.

Like other noble Lords, I have been involved in events helping to mark the 75th anniversary of D-day. Last Saturday, I formally opened a special heritage event at Langham, near Blakeney, in Norfolk. A small, dome-shaped building was the centrepiece of the event. It was used to train anti-aircraft gunners in how best to shoot down enemy aircraft. Indeed, more than 40 of these secret trainers were built during World War II. After the war, they were all decommissioned and almost all were bulldozed into hardcore for new motorways or building sites. Although a listed building, the one at Langham was just left to decay. It escaped the bulldozers, slowly deteriorating as all neglected buildings will do.

Then, in 2010, a group of enthusiasts, recognising the historic value of this near-unique building, raised funds to refurbish it to its original role as an anti-aircraft trainer. However, they did much more. The building is now a speciality museum and visitor centre, recording and demonstrating not only its trainer role but a host of information and displays about the Royal Air Force, the airfield at Langham, and the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal New Zealand Air Force squadrons of coastal command, which were based there in 1944, operating mainly against enemy shipping off the coasts of Norway and Holland. There is information there about individual Australian and New Zealand air crew. Many had travelled from home via Canada to train before joining their national squadrons at Langham. There is information about the loss of life and the deaths of more than 150 air crew from this one airfield. Many have no known grave but are remembered on the memorial at Runnymede. Others lie in graves in Norway, Holland, Germany or this country. One is buried in Sweden.

All this information, and the information about the subsequent Cold War use of the airfield until it was closed in 1958, gives a most interesting and telling account of Langham’s war. What particularly impresses me is the effort to tell the story of those years with contemporary touch screens and other devices in ways to interest and attract all ages. Special efforts have been made to excite and engage the interest of the younger generations. As the Friends of Langham Dome team say, they want to make it clear to all what fathers and grandfathers—indeed, mothers and grandmothers too—did then to ensure that we live in peace and freedom today. This mini-museum and visitor centre has just been awarded the exclusive and prestigious Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service, and the unique facility has been much praised on social media, TripAdvisor and the like. If your Lordships are ever on a visit to Norfolk, spare an hour or two to visit the Langham Dome; you will be impressed.

Many other venues and imaginative schemes about this period in our nation’s history are to be found all around the country. Their great achievement and attraction is to help to bring life to history, to explain and pass on to today’s generations what their predecessors did and thought and felt. As a mark of respect for all those who fought on D-day, these efforts deserve universal praise and support.