I'm John Bachelor with my good colleague Gregory Coppley, Defense and Foreign Affairs editor and publisher.

King Charles Report, the King Intents with his son, William, the Prince of Wales, to attend the 80th anniversary of the D-Day

landings by a combined alliance ranging from the U.S. to Britain to Australia Australia was present, Canada was present,

France was president, the whole world was present on those beaches.

A 50 mile or so front, the landing in marginal conditions to say the least. And 80 years later what is to be

remembered. Gregory, what I go over and over again in my mind is I read through different versions of the landings

is that they have a lot of good luck, but at the same time, Rama's defenses.

It's odd now to think that they were the Atlantic Wall. He knew better than to build a single line of defense. Defense in depth had worked for the Germans in the first war, and he understood that. Did he not have time to put in secondary

and tertiary lines of defense? Well they didn't have time that neither did they have

the money to do it so they had to keep moving their defense in strength to

wherever they thought the threat would emerge.

And the Allies did a particularly good job of diverting the Germans attention to the

Particale further north than the Normandy landings, where the allies made it clear they were going to attack

by building up a shadow army under the General, who was basically had to pay for his mistakes in Italy,

and he was told, well, if you lead this shadow or fictional army which is preparing to attack at the Part of Calais

once we get onto Europe you will be given another operational command which was the case.

So the deception operation was extremely good, did distract the Germans from building up in Normandy, not that

the Norman defences were light, they were very competent and strong, but the

surprise element was profound.

And by the way, we didn't have Australians there unfortunately we Australia had to pull its

bulk of its troops out of North Africa and the Levant and Europe to meet the Japanese

threat because the Japanese were coming down through New Guinea at that stage after the fall of Singapore.

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