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D-Day: May and Macron in France to mark 75th anniversary

| Updated: June 08, 2019 12:21:32


D-Day: May and Macron in France to mark 75th anniversary

Theresa May joins D-Day veterans in northern France for a second day of events to mark the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, BBC.

A lone piper played to mark the moment when the first UK soldiers went ashore.

Mrs May and the French president are attending an inauguration ceremony for a memorial to honour the British troops who died in the Battle of Normandy.

D-Day was the start of the liberation of Nazi-occupied western Europe.

Hundreds of veterans have gathered in Normandy for the anniversary of the largest combined land, air and naval operation in history.

The day’s commemorations mark key events in the operation, which started on 06 June 1944.

Overnight, serving British soldiers marched across the first bridge captured on French soil - 75 years to the minute when the key strategic target was taken from the Nazis.

In 1944 it took troops less than 15 minutes to seize Pegasus Bridge, Benouville, clearing the way for the Allies to storm the beaches hours later.

At 06:26 BST - the exact minute the first British troops landed on the beaches in 1944 - a lone piper played on a section of the Mulberry Harbour in the town of Arromanches.

Mr Macron and Mrs May - in one of her final engagements as Conservative leader - will be in Ver-sur-Mer to see the first stone laid for a memorial to commemorate the 20,000 British troops who died there in the summer of 1944.

The British Normandy Memorial is being built on a hillside overlooking Gold Beach - one of the key sites for British troops during the D-Day landings.

Once completed, it will record the names of the 22,442 members of the British armed forces who died.

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