I correspond with a wonderful ninety-plus year old lady in Australia, born in England, was a Land Girl during WW2, after the war married an Australian and lived the rest of her life in Australia — Daphne Murray. Her husband was governor of New South Wales for a number of years. She wrote me of her memories of D-Day a few years ago:

“I am never going to forget D-Day in June 1944. My father commented at breakfast that there were a lot of planes about and when he went outside he came back indoors shaking. He thought we were being invaded. My mother, always practical, said, ‘Don’t be silly George, they’re ours, they’re going out to sea’. I can still see that great armada heading East, NEast and South East, all at different levels, but moving slowly, a most menacing sight, and the radio was on all day. I had four brothers in the war and three brothers-in-law, we were a fighting family, lots of cousins too.”

I could quote her letters all day but this was important for today.

And as I said last year, I will put up old photos for D-Day of Germans surrendering, because that’s what it was all about.