This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame came up and almost blinded us from our guns. More than 132,000 Allied troops landed on the Normandy beaches on the 6th of June, 1944.

Through their efforts, the tide of the war turned for the final time to favor the Allies.

But how did the Allied Army get to the shores of Normandy?

The contribution of landing craft to D-Day is often overlooked. To correct this oversight I'm joined by

Andrew Whitmash. Andrew has worked as a curator in military history museums for

over 25 years, latterly as the curator of the D-Day story in Portsmouth. Outside of his day job, he's also the author of D-Day Landingcraft, how 4,126 ugly and unorthodox Allied craft made the Normandy landings possible.

Welcome Andrew, now there are a plethora of landing craft used on D-Day, so I thought we would start by looking at a few.

Firstly, those are Salt Craft that hit the beach in the first waves that are so synonymous with D-Day.

I suspect many people will not be aware that there was the L-C-V-P, which is the American Higgins boat, and the British had the

LCA, which is a landing craft assault, which I tend to think gets overlooked.

Let's start with the LCA.

Did the British have the LCA before the war?

Was it in production?

I think it was in production before the Higgins boat wasn't it?

Yeah that's right so during the war and obviously we're talking about multiple

Allied countries here so the war from the British point of view in 935, the LCA, the British version or the

British equivalent, there's a small number produced even before the Second World War

has begun for the British, whereas the LCVP is developed as the war goes long and

actually there's several predecessor versions that effectively are evolving from a version that has no ramp, it's one of the early ones, to one that does have a barrel ramp, but it's a bit narrower than on the LCVP, and then the LCVP, which is the one that people are probably more familiar with.

And confusingly, well all kind of little landing craft carrying troops are sometimes called

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