In the most poignant D-Day tributes ever staged, there’s a sense of a final farewell: ROBERT HARDMAN joins 100 ‘lucky ones’ and Princess Anne in Normandy to hear tales of lost loves and heroism that reshaped the War

Surrounded by the illuminated graves of 4,140 men who would never see the liberation for which they gave their lives, the Princess Royal last night recited the words of a heartbroken mother inscribed on one headstone: ‘He is not dead whose memory lives in hearts that know and loved him.’

The Princess was leading the advance party for today’s Royal mini-invasion of Normandy, when the King, Queen and Prince of Wales will also be here for the big set-piece events to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

Yesterday was a moment for reflecting on the enormity of what lay ahead for all those young men packed into their ships and aircraft this time 80 years before.

Speaking at last night’s D-Day vigil at the Commonwealth cemetery in Bayeux, the Princess quoted the memoirs of Sub-Lieutenant Keith Symons, the uncle of her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence. 

At the age of just 20, his job was to lead three landing craft in the first assault on Gold Beach come dawn. ‘Everyone was quite subdued, but it was all very matter-of-fact,’ he had written. ‘After supper we sat around making light conversation and listening to the chaplain playing his violin.

‘My cabin companion was a Captain in the Green Howards, a charming man who had been a solicitor before the war. We talked about what we would do when the war was over. Sadly he was killed in France only a few weeks later.’ The captain, Raymond Chambers, was buried a few yards from where the Princess was speaking.

Young Symons survived the war, finished his Oxford degree, married and became a headmaster. Like all the veterans, no doubt, he would have regarded himself not as a hero but as one of the lucky ones.

This week’s scenes are perhaps the most poignant D-Day commemorations ever staged here. Every June 6 brings the veterans and the families of the fallen back to the beaches and the bocage where the Allies began the painful and bloody task of liberating Western Europe.

However, as the dwindling band of veterans are the first to tell you, this will almost certainly be the last time they come back in any significant numbers. That sense of a final farewell lends even more emotion to what are always very powerful events. There are thought to be up to 100 veterans here, including around 45 from the United States. In future, though, it will be the families — the children of D-Day — who ensure the torch of remembrance keeps burning.

I met many of them here yesterday, at some of the many enchanting little ceremonies ahead of today’s big international set-piece occasions.

In the Commonwealth cemetery at Ranville, I spoke to Peggy Eckert, 92, from Hounslow. She should really be among the VIPs today, yet she has not been invited to any official event and has come at her own expense on a coach tour with her nephew, Keith. She has done so to honour her brothers, Cyril and Stan, both Paras who lie just eleven graves apart.

Proudly wearing a Parachute Regiment scarf, she placed a cross in tribute to her two big brothers. ‘I do this for my parents. They never got over it,’ Peggy explained, holding a photo of the two boys and a copy of the letter which Stan, just 19, wrote to his mother in the early hours of D-Day.

Dropped in the wrong place behind enemy lines and holed up in a ditch, he had scribbled: ‘Do you know mum dear, I have never realised how much you meant to me until now. If I ever get home again, you will see a very different Stan. The same goes for dad.’ The letter was found with his body and eventually made its way back home.

Peggy, a child evacuee at the time, treasures the original, just as her mother did. It was months before they learned that Cyril, 22, had also been killed, in August at Pont L’Eveque. ‘His comrades had carried him to the medical station on a door but they couldn’t save him.’ Peggy doesn’t know how much longer she will be able to keep coming back but will do her best. ‘It still affects me in different ways,’ she says.

A couple of hours later, I watched the Eckert brothers’ successors, today’s Paras, jumping over the very same terrain at Sannerville — to happy applause instead of gunfire.

Nearby at Pegasus Bridge, the first piece of France to be liberated thanks to a textbook feat of arms by Major John Howard and the men of the Ox & Bucks, the grounds of the Memorial Pegasus museum were packed for a stirring drumhead service. Buglers from The Rifles sounded the Last Post from the top of the original swing bridge, now the centrepiece of the museum.

Serving members of today’s Parachute Regiment were there to honour their forebears, including an ill-tempered regimental mascot. 

Called Pegasus, he is a Shetland pony with his own uniform and rank of lance corporal (his stroppy behaviour, I discovered, was because he was not actually the real Pegasus; post-Brexit paperwork makes it too bothersome to travel with a pony so the Paras had borrowed a local lookalike).

Once the formalities were over, I met old friends Penny Bates and Margaret Brotheridge, both from Devon. Penny is the daughter of Major John Howard. After his men had landed in their gliders in the early hours of June 6, it was Margaret’s father, the gallant Lt Den Brotheridge, who led the first charge over the bridge. 

A machine gun opened up and he fell, still urging his men forward as he died. He has gone down in history as the first fatality of D-Day. Margaret was born a few days later and never knew the story of her father until adulthood because her mother refused to talk about it.

She remembers living in digs as a young teacher when her landlord handed her a newspaper retelling the story of Pegasus Bridge. ‘He said: ‘There’s this chap with your surname’,’ she told me. ‘Then I started coming back here and have been coming ever since because I should have come long before.’ 

She soon started meeting her father’s old comrades and it was like switching on a light. ‘I wasn’t that much like my mother but when I met all these men who knew my father, it started to explain so much about me.’

Penny Bates remembers an anniversary dinner when Margaret bravely stood up in front of the old soldiers and announced that she was Den’s daughter. ‘There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,’ says Penny. ‘And Margaret’s been part of the family ever since.’

Don’t tell any of these women that this is all stuff for the history books. The anniversary is always a challenge for Margaret and this one is no different. ‘You just have to swallow hard,’ she tells me. 

Last night, just like her father always used to do, Penny was at his original landing spot near the bridge just after midnight, reciting the speech he would give each year to spellbound crowds as he talked about ‘taking the gliders down’. Margaret never attends this particular ritual, however. As she put it: ‘I don’t want to be listening and thinking: ‘And ten minutes later, my father died….’.’ 

Her annual tradition is always to go across the bridge for a glass of champagne with Arlette Gondree at her family café. Arlette still remembers, as a little girl, watching the liberators arrive on that historic night.

So, too, does another French woman, Blanche Boulet. ‘I will never forget what I saw,’ recalled Blanche, now a sprightly 105, when I met her at another charming ceremony in Colleville-Montgomery. The town was renamed after the British general and the service was taking place beneath his statue. ‘It was bomb, bomb, bomb — all night. I didn’t sleep. And in the morning, we had 28 dead and many injured.’

Young Blanche helped administer first aid to the wounded and then volunteered to run a tea station for British troops in a local house, Riva Bella, even though it was soon attracting German artillery. She kept her ‘English club’ going for several months.

Yesterday, a small posse of British veterans returned the favour – with a Royal British Legion poppy scarf and a kiss.

As veterans move the Queen to tears at D-Day ceremony, King pays emotional tribute… Our eternal debt to the fallen heroes

The Queen was moved to tears during a highly emotional D-Day service in Portsmouth yesterday.

At a poignant event marking the anniversary of the Normandy landings, the King spoke of the nation’s eternal debt to the heroes of 80 years ago.

Charles said it was ‘our duty to ensure that we, and future generations, do not forget their service and sacrifice in replacing tyranny with freedom’.

The King and Queen, watching from the Royal Box, looked emotional as one the few remaining D-Day veterans, 98-year-old Eric Bateman, said he was one of the ‘lucky’ ones.

Mr Bateman was given a standing ovation as he took to the stage with two of his great-granddaughters – Annabel, 12, and Imogen, nine.

He told how there were ‘ships as far as you could see – you could almost walk across the Channel’.

As a photo of him as a young man in uniform was shown on the large screen behind him, he said: ‘I’m lucky to be here 80 years later… so many men and women, including my best friend Fred who joined up with me, unfortunately never made it.’

Mr Bateman, who served in the Royal Navy on HMS Erebus, added: ‘I’m proud to be here today to honour them and make sure they will always be remembered.’

His great-granddaughters then paid tribute to all who took part in D-Day, saying together: ‘We will never forget. Thank you.’

Eighty years ago today, on June 6, 1944, tens of thousands of troops landed on beaches across Normandy, marking the start of the Allied campaign to liberate Nazi-occupied northern Europe.

In his speech from the stage on Southsea Common at the national commemoration yesterday – his first since his cancer diagnosis – the King praised the soldiers, sailors and airmen who helped give us the freedom we enjoy today.

‘We come together to honour those nearly 160,000 British, Commonwealth and Allied troops who, on June 5, 1944, assembled here and along these shores to embark on the mission which would strike that blow for freedom and be recorded as the greatest amphibious operation in history,’ he said.

The King said it was a ‘near impossible task to imagine the emotion of the day: the pride of being part of so great an enterprise, the anxiety of in some way not coming up to scratch, and the fear of that day being their last’.

‘I recently myself spoke to veterans who, to this day, remember with such heartbreaking clarity the sight of those many soldiers lying on the beach, who drowned before they could even engage in combat.

‘The stories of courage, resilience and solidarity which we have heard today, and throughout our lives, cannot fail to move us, to inspire us, and to remind us of what we owe to that great wartime generation – now, tragically, dwindling to so few.

‘It is our privilege to hear their testimony, but our role is not purely passive: it is our duty to ensure that we, and future generations, do not forget their service and their sacrifice in replacing tyranny with freedom.’

The King concluded his speech with the words: ‘We give thanks for all those who gave so much to win the victory, whose fruits we still enjoy to this day.

‘Let us, once again, commit ourselves always to remember, cherish and honour those who served that day and to live up to the freedom they died for by balancing rights with civic responsibilities to our country. For we are all, eternally, in their debt.’

Earlier, the Prince of Wales read a poignant extract of a letter by father-of-two Captain Alastair Bannerman of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, addressed to his wife and written in his diary on the morning of D-Day. ‘Your thoughts have helped me so much,’ Capt Bannerman wrote.

‘They have given me real strength. I can imagine how you listen to the news at 9 o’clock and think of me with love… I must go now and look for the landing markings with my binoculars to ascertain our landing points. So, my darling, on we go! I know that you are with me.’

William said: ‘Captain Bannerman survived the landings and the war, being taken prisoner and returning home to his wife and sons in April the next year. Too many never returned.’ Quoting poet Rupert Brooke, he added: ‘They remain in ‘some corner of a foreign field that is forever England’.

‘We will always remember those who served and those who waved them off. The mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters who watched their loved ones go into battle, unsure if they would ever return.’

D-Day veteran Roy Hayward, 98, who served as a reserve tank crewman and landed on Gold Beach at the age of 19, was also met with a standing ovation when he walked on stage. He was severely injured in Normandy, and both his legs had to be amputated below the knees.

He said he represented all the ‘men and women who put their lives on hold to go and fight for democracy and this country’ and that he wanted to remember those who had ‘fought for democracy’ and ‘to ensure their story is never forgotten’.

After meeting members of the Royal Family, Mr Hayward said: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed every one of them, I thought they were super actually, I was most impressed by the way they chatted to me and were so friendly.’

The leaders of all three main political parties – Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Ed Davey – attended the event, which was hosted on stage by Dame Helen Mirren and watched by an audience including groups of schoolchildren waving mini Union flags.

Writing in the event’s commemorative brochure, the Prime Minister said of those at D-Day: ‘We gather to honour their courage and sacrifice. We must never forget how much we owe them… we must create a country where all our veterans are treated as the heroes they are.’

Two Dakota military transport aircraft, widely used by the Allies during the Second World War, performed a fly-past at the start of the event, and at the end, the Red Arrows flew over, leaving trails of red, white and blue smoke.

Ten veterans and their families enjoyed lunch in the VIP tent, where they were joined by Mr Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps and veterans minister Johnny Mercer. Among them was Vera Brett, 99, who was a 19-year-old Wren based in Portsmouth on D-Day.

She said: ‘It has been a fantastic day. It’s something I never thought would happen. I was only an ordinary Jenny Wren.’

Mrs Brett said of the event, which also featured videoed interviews with veterans, and Call The Midwife star Helen George leading singers in a rousing rendition of We’ll Meet Again: ‘It made me cry. I can sing Vera Lynn songs still.’