66 Years After D-Day

Hon Heather Roy speech to Normandy Veterans Association of New Zealand 66th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings Commemoration Service; Trentham Military Camp, Upper Hutt; Sunday, June 6 2010.

Distinguished guests, Defence Force Personnel, Ladies and Gentlemen, and especially Veterans of the Normandy campaign.

Today we are gathered together to remember the Battle of Normandy which began 66 years ago today.

"D-day" was the first day of Operation Overlord, the attempt to liberate France and drive on to Berlin to end the war.

The battle will always be remembered for it’s the sheer scale. The assault consisted of 12,000 aircraft and almost 7,000 vessels. The troop numbers were staggering. 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on the 6th of June and, by the end of August, more than 3 million were on the ground in France. Some 23,000 of those arrived by aircraft and gliders.

No sea-borne invasion on anything like this scale had ever been attempted and the result was difficult to predict. In retrospect we think of Overlord as a straight-forward victory but, at the time, it was a huge gamble. Winston Churchill had nightmares about casualties so heavy that the English Channel turned red with blood. Eisenhower had a speech in his pocket to use if the invasion failed.

To those of us in New Zealand the battle seems, like so many of the time, disconnected from our patch of the South Pacific. There were no New Zealand ground units on the beaches in France but, as we have heard, New Zealanders did participate. 10,000 of our men served in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, and as so often is the case, they served with distinction.

Some commanded small landing crafts and others, men of all ranks and backgrounds, crewed the frigates, battleships and, destroyers. In the air our servicemen were on the Dakotas and gliders, or flew in fighters and bombers.

As Jack Ingham, a commanding officer on a Royal Navy Landing Craft, recalled:

"Hundreds and hundreds of planes going across. [there were] the bombers first, they were going to do what damage they could on the beaches, and then the clouds parted every now and again, and you could see the shapes going over, hundreds and hundreds of planes.

As dawn was breaking, and each second that it got lighter there’d be more ships you could see further out, just an amazing sight. Ships of all shapes and sizes and very comforting to see the big battleships there ... the sea was thick with them."

And so we see that, despite the miles between us, and New Zealand units serving on other fronts during the Second World War, it is appropriate that we both recognise and commemorate the role of New Zealand’s allies during this great endeavour.

To complete the picture it is always important to remember the role of those at home. They also serve who stay at home and wait. I had the great pleasure of being at the book launch of ‘Home’ at parliament last Thursday. It is a series of oral histories of some of those who served - in a variety of ways - at home during the Second World War. The book has been commissioned by the Ministry of Arts, Culture and Heritage and is well worth reading.

Today we are not required to act on such a scale but we continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with New Zealand’s allies, supporting each other with our common commitment to the principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. There are 350 New Zealand Defence Force Personnel deployed in nine operational theatres. We should think of them and we should also recognise the 300 non-combatant personnel working and training overseas to aid our troops in their deployments.

I know from my own Reserve service the pride and sense of belonging that wearing a Defence Force uniform brings. Our troops, no matter which country’s uniform they may have been wearing at the time, fought for their families back home in New Zealand and for the freedoms that we enjoy today. It is because of their sacrifices that we still enjoy these freedoms today.

To those veterans amongst you, it has been my honour to speak to you today. Liberty does not come cheap.

Lest we forget.