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Yesterday was June 6th, the 66th anniversary of the successful 1944 Allied invasion of France. Several operations were combined to carry out the largest amphibious invasion in history – over 160,000 troops landed on June 6th, assisted by over 5,000 ships, aerial bombardment, gliders and paratroopers. Thousands of soldiers lost their lives on those beaches on that day – many thousands more would follow as the invasion succeeded and troops began to push German forces eastward, eventually leading to the Allied victory in 1945. Collected here are some photographs of the preparation, execution and immediate aftermath of the 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy, and a few images from 2010…

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A team of 12 divers will today (Thursday, August 6) begin a five-day project to try to find a Landing Craft Tank (LCT) which sank in 1944. The team hopes the project in Bracklesham will solve the sea mystery and save the LCT before it is lost to the sea forever. The LCT was used in the D-Day landings, carrying tanks and armoured bulldozers. It was part of J Force and was due to landforces before it was sunk by gunfire.

“There are many second world war wrecks along the south coast and many remain unidentified,” said Alison Mayor, who will be leading the diving project.

“Their story could soon be lost forever to the sea. Some of these wrecks have been dived for many years, but it is only when you start looking at the story behind their sinking do you begin to appreciate their true historical significance.”

Last year the divers, from Southsea Sub-Aqua Club, finally solved the mystery of how two tanks, two bulldozers and a gun came to rest on the seabed eight miles offshore in Bracklesham.

The exact location of the LCT has yet to be confirmed. Earlier in the year a relative of one of the crew who had survived the sinking contacted the Southsea Sub-Aqua Club after hearing about the work it had been doing in connection with the incident.

The historic world war two armoured vehicles and gun lie jumbled up on the seabed at a depth of 20m, but there is no known associated shipwreck nearby.

As a result of their work the divers believe they now have the evidence to prove they were lost from a LCT and not from a section of Mulberry Harbour bridge section as previously believed…

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The French town of St. Mere Eglise was the first to be liberated June 6, 1944, during the Normandy Campaign of World War II. Years later, Philippe Esvelin, whose parents grew up in Le Muy, decided to write a book detailing some of the lesser-known heroes of World War II: the glider pilots. His book, “Forgotten Wings,” details the history and use of gliders in the war, and Melvin Pliner of Safford is featured on the cover as well as on double pages inside.

Pliner grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. When he was 16, he volunteered for the Citizen’s Military Training Corps and was trained in field artillery. When World War II started and America began the draft, he was certain he would be drafted, and his experience with the training corps almost guaranteed he would be sent into military artillery, and he didn’t want that.

Instead, he enlisted himself into the U.S. Army Air Corps in hopes of becoming a pilot. Unfortunately, everyone who joined the Air Corps also wanted to be a pilot, and the waiting list was long…

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The first Armed Forces Day will be held on Saturday to provide an opportunity for the nation to show its support for the men and women who defend our lands. In the run-up to the day, PETER COLLINS talks to veterans and armed service personnel about their service and lives. Here he meets a World War Two veteran who was part of the greatest armed invasion force in history

COUNTLESS bodies bobbing on the water and hundreds more strewn on the beach.

This was the scene that faced the young Horace Sewell when he landed on Gold beach, Normandy, as part of the D-Day landings. In fact, he landed on “D+2” – two days after D-Day on June 6, 1944.

The terrible sight has remained with him to this day.

But as he sits at home in Chesterfield Street, Barry, the 84-year-old father of five can look back with satisfaction and even some pleasure at the war years, the role he played in defending his country and the friends he made. Mr Sewell is one of the few who have been awarded both the Veterans Badge and the Merchant Navy Badge.

He left school when he was 13 to become a butcher but left after being accidently locked in a freezer. Just after his 15th birthday on September 28, 1939, he joined the Merchant Navy, something his eldest brother Elijah had already done. However, a developing skin condition meant he could no longer sail so he applied to join the Royal Air Force and was turned down twice.

On the third occasion, with his skin complaint cured, he was accepted…

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A soldier who helped build a strategic airfield near Caen during the D-Day landings said his regiment’s contribution to the historic moment has been forgotten in history.

Lindsey Jones, 85, from Ewell, helped build an airfield near Caen which was vital to landing heavy duty tanks in France to help push out the Germans.

However, he has not been able to find any record of their heroic efforts.

He was just 16 when the war broke out and immediately went to Brighton to join the Army.

By the time of the D-Day landings he found himself in the Royal Engineers.

Their mission, on June 6, 1944, was to construct an airfield near Caen so planes carrying military tanks could land and roll out the vehicles to help in the fight against the Germans…

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For the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, an association of local towns in the American sector of the invasion (Sainte Mere l’Eglise, Utah Beach) commissioned a GPS tour guide to visit the beaches and the inland countryside to better understand the events which took place on June 6, 1944.

Created by the French GPS multimedia tour guide company Camineo, the whole project cost was €60,000, reported the local press. The tour is offered on a Windows Mobile PDA from Mio Technologies. The rental cost €8 and is available at the local tourism office.

Based on many unpublished visual documents from the US Army and the Caen Memorial (museum), the tour includes 30 minutes of videos and almost 500 pictures of the invasion, as well as a spoken text from French writer Gilles Perrault, well-known for writing several books on the Normandy invasion and World War II. The guide is available in English and French…

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The gray wall of the missing soars high over Omaha Beach, etched with names of lost World War II troops and the melancholy mystery of “comrades in arms whose resting place is known only to God.”

Along the wall, set in the American cemetery here on the Normandy cliffs, bronze rosettes mark soldiers whose remains have been found in the 65 years since the D-Day invasion. But for the vast number of missing Americans from the war — almost 73,500 — there are few rosettes and thousands of unanswered questions.

With time running out to crack the case of the missing soldiers, the United States fields teams of military researchers to search for the remains of World War II troops, but it has limited resources. So much of the detective work has fallen to amateur sleuths in Belgium, France and Germany who hunt for makeshift graves and the ghosts of war. Their tools are Google satellite photos, old-fashioned shoe-leather investigation and high-powered metal scanners that can detect a helmet 20 feet deep.

But most vital are the memories of elderly villagers who dig back deep into their past, some with sadness about old allies, some with nagging guilt about the killing of ancient enemies.

“We have maybe four or five years left, and then it’s over,” said Fabrice Corbin, founder of Génération Souvenir, a volunteer group with 30 members that has been searching for grave sites in the French countryside of Normandy for the past five years and has located about 20 remains. “The old witnesses and memories will vanish. And without witnesses who remember what happened, it will be very, very difficult.”…

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It was a lifetime ago, but Louis Venditti has never forgotten how time stretched out as his 137-pound frame hung from a parachute over the French countryside, German guns blazing below.

Venditti, 87, was part of the advance wave of paratroopers airlifted into France to prepare the way for the D-Day assault on Normandy Beach in 1944. He survived four major battles, came home with a chest full of medals — including the Purple Heart and Belgian Croix de Guerre — and joined the Chicago Heights Fire Department, retiring in 1979 after three decades of working two jobs (days off he worked as a roofer).

Two months ago, he got up from his leather recliner to check the mail and found a letter notifying him he had been awarded the French Legion of Honor, France’s highest honor. Saturday, the 65th anniversary of D-Day, President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will attend a ceremony in Normandy honoring the Americans who fought on D-Day — among them, Venditti and 37 other veterans receiving the medal.

Receiving the honor will be an amazing moment for an Italian kid who grew up in a Chicago Heights neighborhood called Hungry Hill, where his family kept goats…

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The U.S. is leading an effort to stop environmental erosion from jeopardizing the clifftop of Pointe-du-Hoc on France’s Normandy coast, an area that has become hallowed ground for the American sacrifices of June 6, 1944, AFP reported.

New efforts are being extended to stabilize the cliff, on top of which sits a monument and a German bunker.

Decades of powerful tides, rain and wind shoveled deep into the rock forced the Pointe-du-Hoc memorial to be closed to the public in 2000 over concerns that it could collapse into the sea.

However, the memorial site should reopen to the public in 2011, as work is set to begin next year to stabilize the cliff.

Stephane Simonet, a historian at the Caen Peace Museum, called it a memorial to American heroism, as only 90 of the 225 Rangers survived attempting the insurmountable cliff.

Pointe-du-Hoc overlooks both Omaha and Utah beaches and was chosen by the Germans as the location for six artillery batteries that could resolutely repel any landing force.

It was the number one target of Operation Overlord for the American forces. Scaling the vertical cliffs in order to take Pointe-du-Hoc fell to the US 2nd Ranger Battalion, who were backed by naval and air bombardment.

US troops seized the cliff on June 6, 1944, where the German artillery bunker lay 32 feet from the cliff’s edge. Now it sits right next to the cliff’s steep drop. Crews will attempt to strengthen the base with small stakes and cement that will be sculpted and painted to blend into the cliffs.

Regis Leymarie, an official with the coastal conservation authority, said such a memorial site is extremely important for Americans, whose history is not as long as Europe’s. The D-Day landing beaches receive over 1 million visitors every year. The U.S. lost between 20,000 and 30,000 men between June and August 1944 in Normandy…

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The ghostly remains of five Nazi soldiers gunned down by the British on D-Day have been uncovered in northern France.

Still surrounded by their World War II German helmets and ammunition clips, they were found almost exactly 65 years to the day since Allied forces stormed ashore on June 6th 1944.

Scraps of camouflage smocks and tunic buttons also adorn the mangled skeletons, which were all hastily placed face down in a shallow grave ten feet long and four feet wide. All retained their ‘dog tags’ – small aluminum plates on a chain inscribed with name, rank and number – which would normally have been removed by their comrades and sent home to the Fatherland. Rifles and machine guns were all taken, possibly by British parachutists who had lost their own weapons during the night-time landings before D-Day.

‘The bodies weren’t covered before being buried which was unusual,’ said local council director Jean Deloges.

‘The presence of identity tags also suggests that they were buried extremely quickly by English or Canadian parachtists who were operating in the sector. All the Germans were clearly killed in the early hours of June 6th 1944.’ Tunic buttons have revealed that one of the men was an officer, with artifacts also including gas mask bags, gold teeth, and even a Berlin-made fountain pen.

The grave was found on May 8th by an amateur historian investigating the battlefield around Bavent, seven miles north east of Caen. The town is even closer to the fabled Pegasus Bridge, where the first troops to land on D-Day were from D-Company, 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, in a 6th Airborne Division glider…

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