REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON
The Battle of Normandy has been covered extensively in the 80 years since it took place. But less well remembered is the naval campaign that accompanied it, the subject of this new book by Nick Hewitt, formerly of the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth and now a historian for Orkney Islands Council. As Hewitt demonstrates, the Allied navies played an absolutely essential role in ensuring that the 1944 invasion of northern France, and later Germany and the Low Countries, was a success.
They did so by ferrying in an enormous quantity of men and matériel in the months after D-Day, often in extremely unfavourable weather conditions, all while protecting the perilous coastal supply line from continued enemy attacks. This campaign, which Hewitt calls ‘The Battle of the Seine Bay’, lasted not just one day but for most of the summer that year, and in the author’s opinion was the most important naval campaign in the West during the entire war, second only to the Battle of the Atlantic.
Hewitt takes us through each stage of the campaign, from the preparations in the months before, through to Operation Neptune (the landings on D-Day itself) and the long aftermath. What emerges is a campaign that was meticulously planned and unprecedented in its scope and complexity, but still extremely vulnerable to not just violent weather but also an enemy that even by the last year of the war had by no means given up the fight.
Celebrated crafts and cross-cultural connections