D-DAY 80 - Honouring and Remembering the fallen.

Aim

To share the significance of D-DAY and the sacrifices made for our freedom, with new generations.

On 6th June 2024, the nation will mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

This will be a moment of significant national commemoration led, on the beaches of Normandy, by His Majesty The King and the heads of state of the other Allied nations who stood together in the Second World War to oppose tyranny and restore liberty to Western Europe.

The 80th anniversary commemoration will be more-than-usually powerful and poignant since it will be the last major commemoration which will be attended by the sadly diminishing number of D-Day and Normandy Veterans.

Eighty years ago, as young men in their late teens or early twenties, these were the men who did not flinch as their country asked them to do their duty in the name of freedom. Many of their comrades perished on the D-Day beaches and during the Battle of Normandy. 

The Normandy Memorial Trust, has already built the British Normandy Memorial. 

It stands on a gentle hillside above ‘Gold Beach’. 

On its walls and pillars are the names of the 22,442 men and women serving in British units who never came home from Normandy.

The construction of the memorial fulfils one part of the ambition of the Normandy Veterans. 

However, the Veterans and the trust now wish to go an important stage further. 

As D-Day passes from living memory into history we believe it is important to establish a Learning Centre at the memorial so that the lessons of the past can be understood by the generations of tomorrow. 

Those generations need not only to remember but to understand and appreciate the sacrifices that were made in Normandy in the summer of 1944.

The 80th anniversary of D-Day offers an important opportunity which the trust believes Britain should grasp.

The new 'Winston Churchill Centre - for learning and education' - will help to take the message to new generations, and your support will help to create the learning materials that can be shared with schools visiting the Memorial from across the globe, as well as with children across the UK. 

Improving the education and skills of young people

By empowering young people with the knowledge of the importance of Remembrance and to learn from the lessons of the past. 

The Winston Churchill Centre will facilitate and encourage school visits, allowing for site and classroom- based learning, in the evocative location overlooking the beach where so many of our troops landed. 

They will be able to research and learn about those remembered on the Memorial who may be from their own towns and cities. They will have access to letters written  home by soldiers, some as young as just 16, and will understand the debt of gratitude owed. 

This project successfully funded on 1st January 2024