Welcome to Dispatches, a shorter podcast from the Old Front Line and me, military historian Paul Reed.

Eighty years ago, Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy.

But as so often the criss-crossed piles of history connect the First Great War

with the Second. In this episode we ask was Gallipoli the first D-Day? This episode of Dispatches

goes out close to the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings,

that pivotal event in the West when on the 6th June 1944 the Allies landed in Normandy.

I'll be there myself this week with a group from York, the York Normandy veterans

who have been travelling to Normandy with for the D-Day commemorations for many, many years.

And my journey to those commemorations began 40 years ago

when I first went there for the 6th of June with my dad in 1984, when there were hundreds, if not thousands, of Second World War veterans in attendance.

The Second World War, in particular Normandy, really has been as much part of my life as the old front line of the Great War,

growing up in that airfix generation of the 1970s

with kits and model soldiers and plastic guns and war films and comics full of the Second World War,

it was almost impossible to avoid. And from some of my kind of very earliest memories, I can remember talking to uncles

who were there.

My uncle Jack was wounded with the Royal Navy, taking the Americans in on Omaha Beach.

But kind of more than that, the culture of childhood then, you know, I remember constructing

D-Day defenses on beach holidays,

and I remember building kind of D-Day play sets at home.

And there were these fabulous Dennis Knight books,

these kind of landscape books in the 70s,

that gave you the history of different parts of British history,

...