Today marks the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, a decisive turning point in the Second World War which saw thousands of Allied troops launch the invasion of Normandy.

We hear from Kent veterans who recall their part in Operation Overlord, and explain how the county played its role in the deception which helped make the invasion a success…

“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.”

With these words, General Dwight D. Eisenhower opened his Order of the Day on June 6, 1944. It was D-Day, the commencement of Operation Overlord, which would see the combined land, air and sea forces of the Allied powers launch the largest amphibious invasion in military history. Their target - the beaches of Normandy in Nazi-occupied France.

As the sun rose on that momentous morning, an invasion fleet of more than 5,000 ships and landing craft set out across the English Channel towards the French coast. Their objective was the landing of more than 150,000 troops on five beaches, the opening of a long-awaited second front against the Germans which would liberate France and ultimately contribute to the complete destruction of Hitler’s Third Reich.

John Roberts, then a 20-year-old Royal Navy officer, was on board the destroyer HMS Serapis, sailing towards the head of the massive Allied armada. Serapis was part of Force S, the naval group charged with targeting Sword beach.

“Crossing the Channel, there were I think about 25 minesweepers ahead of us,” the 100-year-old veteran recalled of those opening hours of Operation Neptune, the codename given to the seaborne assault phase of Overlord.

“They go quite slowly, about 10 knots, and that was very slow for us. We were just following them, and it was quiet. You could hear the sea lapping against the ship's side, and every now and again you heard a ‘plop’ in the water and it was a minesweeper putting a buoy in the sea for the ships behind to follow.

“We got to about six or seven miles from the French coast and suddenly there was a loud bang. It was a destroyer that was next to us, about a thousand yards on our port side. It had been torpedoed by a German fast patrol boat.

“It hadn't come out for us. They used to come out every night anyway in case there was something there, and to their surprise they saw all these ships.

“So they fired off their torpedoes and one of them hit the destroyer next to us. It was manned by Norwegians who'd escaped from Norway during the war. It sank in about three minutes - it broke in half.

“That woke us up to the fact that it wasn't a quiet picnic that we were going on. It was serious.”

It had been 4.40am when the destroyer HNoMS Svenner – part of a bombarding force alongside Serapis – had been hit. It was the only Allied ship to be sunk by the German Kriegsmarine on the morning of the invasion. Serapis and the rest of the invasion fleet sailed on towards the French coast.

The great deception

Although the earliest plans for an invasion of Europe were being worked on soon after the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, it was not until late 1943 that detailed preparations for Operation Overlord began in earnest.

The Germans knew that an invasion was inevitable, and they set about constructing the so-called Atlantic Wall, an extensive system of heavily fortified coastal defences intended to stretch all the way from the French border with Spain to the coast of Norway.

For the Allies, the success of any assault against the Atlantic Wall would depend not only on the brute strength of their military forces but on their ability to keep the Nazi high command guessing as to where the blow would be struck.

Kent was to play a key role in the complex deception strategy designed to blind the Germans to the eventual time and location of the invasion. Operation Fortitude, a key element of the mission to deceive Berlin, aimed to make plausible two alternative points of attack – one against Norway and the other across the Dover Strait against the Pas-de-Calais.

As part of their attempt to convince the Germans that the invasion of France would be launched from Kent across the Channel at its shortest point between Dover and Calais, the Allies created the fictitious First US Army Group, an entirely imaginary force ‘based’ in the south east of England.

Fake radio signals were sent to give the impression of a huge military build-up, and decoy equipment – including inflatable tanks and dummy landing craft – were deployed in a bid to fool enemy reconnaissance of the south coast.

Paul Pattison, a historian at English Heritage, told KentOnline that in our age of modern communications and surveillance it can seem astonishing that this deception could have proved so remarkably effective, with Nazi commanders remaining convinced even after D-Day that the main thrust of the invasion would come from Kent.

He said: “They wanted to convince the German high command that there was an enormous army assembling in the south east of England, focused upon Dover, and that that army was about to embark.

“That army was theoretically about one and a half million soldiers. Now, it's very difficult to conceal one and a half million soldiers, even across the whole south east of England. So what they had to do was to simulate in a number of ways that this army was actually there.

“Dotted around the countryside there were things like inflatable tanks and armoured vehicles. They literally were inflated, so that from the air they looked realistic.

“They would even go so far as to drive a real armoured vehicle around a muddy field so it left tracks as if there was lots of movement, and they would move them every day to keep up the idea that things were changing constantly.”

The deception strategy was to prove one of the most successful in military history. The Germans were left convinced the Allied forces were stronger than they were in reality, and as late as July 1944 the generals were still convinced of the invasion of the Pas-de-Calais that never came.

“None of us, not even the captain, knew where the invasion was going to be,” Mr Roberts, who today lives in Whitstable, recalled of the early days of June when the Serapis joined the invasion fleet in Portsmouth.

“We all knew, and had known for ages, that there was going to be an invasion of France. But we didn't know until the morning of June 5 when the captain was told he could open the envelope with all the instructions for our ship.

“We'd misled the Germans into thinking we might be going to invade up here, Dover to Calais, or we might invade the other side of the Thames. We kept Hitler guessing.”

The assault on the beaches

By around 6am the naval bombardment force was in position, with the Serapis now around three miles from the shore at Sword beach. The ships began a ferocious assault on the German positions, supported by waves of bombing from the air.

Mr Roberts said: “With our reconnaissance, and also the information that the French resistance had been sending across, we had information as to where all the German defences were, their battery guns and things like that.

“There were three battleships out to sea from us and then there were about eight to 10 cruisers with the next size guns in between the battleships and us, and then there was us with our guns.

“From about 6.30am onwards we started firing at these targets. The noise was terrific. And then at about 7.15am a whole lot of aircraft, including three or four hundred Flying Fortresses, flew along the beach and all the way along they were dropping 500lb bombs.

“The small landing craft that they'd been put into to actually land came past us, so we cheered them and waved them on. And I, and I'm sure all of us felt, ‘Thank goodness I'm not one of them.’

“One of the things that I reflected on was really that probably 50,000 of the soldiers had never even fired a gun in anger. This was their first taste of war, whereas I'd been in the Mediterranean, in Iceland and on a Russian convoy, which was no joke at all.

“The other thing about the soldiers going ashore was that a lot of them were seasick because it was a little bit choppy from the gale the day before. They were seasick in their landing craft, so they were really looking forward to getting on dry land.”

It is possible to detect in those words a hint of the dark humour commonplace among service personnel in wartime. The soldiers and sailors tasked with reaching the landing beaches may have been suffering during the crossing, but on arrival they would be met with fierce resistance from defenders dug in to repel them.

Peter Smoothy, a D-Day veteran from Herne Bay, was among the crew of a tank landing ship which was to reach the Normandy shore at Juno beach, west of Sword.

Speaking ahead of an anniversary visit to France this week, he said: “We were scheduled to unload our valuable cargo of vehicles and men on Juno beach at 7.30am but the beach had not been cleared so we waited for an hour, two miles offshore, for the beach to be cleared so that we could find space to unload.

“There were shells flying all around us and we were lucky not to be hit, but of course we were just one of thousands of boats.

“We were all very young men and said at the time, ‘If our names are on a bullet it's our bad luck.’ We were lucky that our names weren’t.

“When we finally got to the beach it took us three to four hours to unload, with shells whizzing over our heads. When we were ready to leave, the tide had ebbed and we couldn’t get off. Fortunately for us, an empty ship isn’t really a target for the enemy, so we spent the day on the beach without being hit and only heard two air raid warnings.

“During that wait by the shore, 200 German prisoners of war were brought to our ship. After searching them we put them on the inner deck where they sat quietly smoking, and not causing us any problems, probably very relieved that for them the war was over and they were safe.”

John Desmon Manicom, another Kent resident, took part in the D-Day landings aged just 17 as a member of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment.

Born in Folkestone and now living at The Kimberley Care Home in Mickleburgh Hill, Herne Bay, he remembers boarding the landing ships 80 years ago before having to wade through chest-deep waters with heavy equipment.

“It was brutal and tense,” he said.

“It was so loud with constant shots being fired.

“I lost a lot of my comrades and remember feeling lucky to make it out when so many didn't.”

Mr Manicom will be 98 in September and has a daughter called Elfra who is “very proud” of him.

A decisive step towards victory

More than 150,000 troops were landed on the beaches, allowing the Allies to establish a foothold on French soil from which to begin the bitterly-fought campaign on the ground in Normandy.

The Imperial War Museum describes the fighting as “one of the most intense campaigns ever fought by the British Army, with casualty rates at times rivalling those of Passchendaele in 1917”. But the immense sacrifice of those who participated in the landings of June 6, and in the fighting in the weeks and months which followed, paved the way for Allied victory over Hitler’s Third Reich.

Paris was liberated in August 1944, but it was not until May 8 of the following year that the Nazi high command signed the instrument of unconditional surrender which finally brought to an end the conflict in Europe.

After the war, Mr Roberts went on to enjoy a distinguished career in the Royal Navy – one that had begun as a 13-year-old cadet at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. He trained as a naval pilot, went on to command the carrier HMS Ark Royal and reached the rank of Rear Admiral.

He maintains that, as we mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the importance of remembrance and learning the lessons of history remains as vital as ever.

He said: “I'm worried about the future because there’s almost more fighting going on at the moment than there was in 1939. Germany didn't fight, I don't think, when they occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia, they just walked into it.

“I think it's important that young people do remember, because let's hope it will never happen again.”