Over the next six weeks, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, we'll be releasing

three special episodes to tell the full story of the longest day.

This first part is a complete remastering of our original Tide Victory episode with the

addition of much new content.

The From the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Welcome to this special episode of the Bletchley Park podcast.

D-Day 80, Part 1, Tide of Victory.

This first episode takes us to the south coast of Britain, which, in May 1944, resembled one huge army camp as over 2 million men waited for D-Day.

In the Buckinghamshire countryside, the staff at GCNCS carried on feeding detailed and crucial intelligence to the Allied forces that would play an integral

part in the success of the upcoming Operation Overlord.

The Western Front Committee was established at Bletchley Park in 1942 and for the next 18

months built up a comprehensive picture of German forces in the West, recording every unit, its location and its strength.

From February 1943, the committee began to produce reports of which over 450 pages are now held in our archives.

Head of Content, Erica Monroe, our research historian Dr David Kenyon

used these to illustrate how the various departments, using multiple sources, came together to

create the vital information that D-Day planners needed, in some cases even leading to last-minute changes.

Meanwhile, our research officer, Dr Thomas Cheatham,

brings us the full story of a temporary Y station

set up at Bletchley Park just for D-Day.

Many thanks to Dr Ben Thompson for voicing our archival documents. England has become one vast ordinance dump and field park.

In every wood and cops, in leafy, dead-end lanes and side roads,

often in private gardens, under quarries and embankments, there it all was.

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