Embarkation From England

This morning we drove from London down to Portsmouth on the southern coast of England. This was one of the major sailing ports for the ships to sail across the channel on D-Day, 6 June. Our first stop was the D-Day Museum .. it was excellent! At the entrance is an exquisite and very detailed embroidery of Operation Overlord, the attack on Normandy. It was begun in 1968, is 272 feet in length with 34 separate panels depicting various phases of the preparation and landing at Normandy. It took 5 years and 20 seamstresses to put this together. The museum had many original items including a Top Secret copy of Operation Neptune upon which Overlord was built, one of the deception dummies that was parachuted into the area North of the landing, and a wonderful replica of a C-47 with paratroopers and Horsa Glider as it had just crash landed. After lunch we visited Southwick where Eisenhower established his headquarters 60 days prior to D-Day. It is now a military base headquarters and closed to the public on weekends so we were fortunate to get in. The picture above is of the "Map Room" that was used in the planning and monitoring of events on D-Day. You can see quite vividly the ports of debarkation, the cleared lanes that had to be followed, the Nazi mine areas in white, and the attack lanes for the various beach objectives. Next door was the meeting room where Ike made the monumental decision to "OK, let's go" on the morning of June 5.

Tomorrow morning early (up at 5 AM) we cross the channel to Cherbourg and go to Utah Beach. Two special events take place which we will describe in the next blog.