163. Battleground '44 - D-Day's forgotten naval war

Battleground

Goalhanger Podcasts

History

4.6 • 703 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The assault phase of D-Day - Operation Neptune, was one of the most complex amphibious operations in history, involving 7,000 ships and nearly 200,000 men. But despite this immense effort, the wider naval campaign has been broadly forgotten. In this episode of Battleground '44 Saul speaks to Naval historian Nick Hewitt and author of the fantastic new book, Normandy: the Sailors' Story: A Naval History of D-Day and the Battle for France. Nick tells us how, without the efforts of the naval campaign, D-Day would have failed. If you have any thoughts or questions, you can send them to - [email protected] Producer: James Hodgson X (Twitter): @PodBattleground Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:22.8	entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to another episode of Battleground 44 with me Saul David.
0:47.0	With the D-Day anniversary fast approaching, it seems a good time to revisit a neglected field of the conflict,
0:53.8	the exhausting and dangerous naval campaign that was fought to seize, exploit and defend the waters around Normandy through the summer of 1944.
1:02.0	To discuss this, our guest today is the naval historian Nick Hewitt,
1:06.0	a former head of collections and research at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, whose new book,
1:11.9	Normandy, the Sailor's Story, has just been published. Nick, welcome to the podcast.
1:17.3	Hi, good to be here. It's an extraordinary story, isn't it? The naval aspect of Normandy. And as you
1:23.0	point out in the book, it's really been undercooked in, you know, in previous histories. Why do you think
1:29.5	it hasn't received the attention it deserves? Oh, that's a really interesting question,
1:34.4	so I think a lot of it derives from the fact that there was a real imperative in the early
1:40.3	writings after the war to kind of play down the risk. And Ramsey kind of, obviously Admiral Bircham, Ramsey, who was in charge of it all,
1:48.0	he identified this really.
1:49.0	He always thought it would be, quote, you know, it would get portrayed as easy and plain sailing.
1:54.0	And that's exactly what happened.
1:56.0	If you distill out the risk and you distill out the months of effort both before the landings and afterwards,
2:01.6	what you end up with is basically one day of risk and then a lot of logistics.
2:06.6	And that seems to be what's happened. So those early books, firstly didn't have access to the full picture.
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