Normandy: the Sailors’ Story – A naval history of D-Day and the battle for France

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 protect