80 years ago this month, the Allies launched Operation Overland from UK shores. Julian Humphrys reveals the best D-Day sites to visit
1 Secret code breakers Bletchley Park, Bucks
Now the subject of numerous films and documentaries and visited by tens of thousands of people a year, this rambling late Victorian country pile and the huts and buildings in the surrounding grounds once housed an organisation so cloaked in secrecy that it would be decades before most people knew anything about it.
Bletchley Park was home to the Government Code and Cypher School – the secret organisation that decrypted coded enemy radio messages, firstly by hand and later with the help of the world’s first computers. By 1944, around 7,000 people were working here, three-quarters of them women, and they were handling an astonishing 5,000 intercepted messages a day.
The information supplied by Bletchley had already been crucial in helping the Allies counter the U-Boat threat during the Battle of the Atlantic; it would now prove to be of immense value during Operation Overlord. The signals decrypted here helped confirm the success of the plan to mislead the Nazis over where the landings would take place, enabled the Allies to build up a picture of the forces opposed to them, and gave their generals advance information about what the German commanders were planning. General Eisenhower would later write that the information supplied by Bletchley saved thousands of British and American lives.
Today, Bletchley is an evocative place to visit, with restored 1940s rooms in the house, and exhibitions explaining the work completed here. bletchleypark.org.uk
2Anti-tank target practice Hankley Common, Surrey
Knowing that an Allied invasion of Western Europe was only a matter of time, Nazi Germany set about fortifying the coastline of Europe from Norway to the Pyrenees with a series of defences that they dubbed the Atlantic Wall.
This so-called wall was far from complete on D-Day and the defences in Normandy were not as strong as those in the Calais area. Even so, they were still formidable obstacles and the Allies developed a variety of ways to deal with them. Specialist mine-clearing, bridge-laying and bunker-busting tanks were created, and intense training took place to perfect the techniques needed to neutralise the defences.
Tucked away in the woods at Hankley Common in Surrey is a remarkable relic of that training – the remains of a 91-metre-lon
