It’s 80 years since Allied Forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, but they practised first on the sands of Dorset.
TUESDAY 6TH JUNE 1944 is better known as D-Day. Operation Overlord, to use its official title, was the mass invasion of Nazi-occupied Western Europe by the Allies. The assault on the Normandy coast of France (Operation Neptune) was the largest seaborne invasion in history, with infantry and armoured vehicles coming ashore on the beaches via landing craft, while 24,000 American, Canadian and British troops parachuted or landed in gliders inland, hours before the main attack. The weather played a huge part in events, postponing the original landing date and causing havoc on 6th June. An artillery barrage from a fleet of warships a few miles out to sea softened up Hitler’s defences before, at 6.30am, the landings started in earnest. Events that day went well enough for the Allies to gain a toe-hold on France’s northern coast. Then agruelling battle raged for months throughout Normandy, before the real breakout began at the end of the summer. This saw the Allied Forces pursuing a retreating German army, in a series of very bloody battles, all the way back to their homeland and the eventual end of the war in the west on 8th May 1945.
D-Day doesn’t exist in isolation. It was a huge event which needed a monumental amount of planning, all in secret, because to alert the enemy to your intentions is never a good idea. From the top of Norway right down to France’s border with Spain, the Nazis had built a vast defensive system known as the Atlantic Wall, involving bunkers, barbed wire, mine fields and hedgehogs (I’ll explain later).
Part of the Allied preparations for that fateful day were large-scale practice attacks, which took place on Britain’s southern shores. It’s one of these events, at Studland Bay, that allows the inquisitive walker to set foot on land which, with a bit of knowledge and imagination, is little changed in 80 years.
Studland Bay is a four-mile crescent of sandy beach and shallow sea. Its make-up isn’t identical to the Normandy shores the Allies were planning to invade, but its sheer scale, isolation and practical advantages made it suitable for training whole divisions of troops in landing and fighting. Thanks to daring nocturnal miss
