Warriors return to nerve centre of D-Day

EXACTLY 80 years ago, these warriors were about to take a giant leap into the unknown.

- Giles Sheldrick

Stationed in camps along the South Coast, they were among tens of thousands of fresh-faced soldiers who knew little, if anything, about the deadly mission they were about to undertake.

D-Day saw 156,000 troops cross the Channel as part of a giant armada, storming beaches along the northern French coast as part of history's greatest military invasion.

Some 22,442 soldiers under British command were slain on June 6, 1944, and during the bloody three-month battle of Normandy that followed, heroes who sacrificed their lives in the fight for freedom.

Portsmouth was the headquarters and main departure point for military and naval units.

And yesterday veterans of the campaign mustered at Southwick House, the nerve centre of D-Day, ahead of their departure to France for this week's 80th anniversary commemorations.

Eight decades on, the band of brothers and sisters who survived through fate, fortune and sheer good luck relived the moments before the battle cry rang out and the pandemonium that followed.

Among them Peter Smoothy, 99, serving on Landing Ship Tank 215, who said: "We loaded at Gosport eight days before D-Day, with several hundred Canadian and British troops, maybe 30 Sherman tanks on the upper decks and ammunition, food and water.