The Longest Day

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory! Good luck!

6 am June 6, 2024. Gatwick Airport, Surrey. Thousands of people queuing, waiting – some patiently, some impatiently – for what is about to come. Clutching their papers, their bags, their boarding passes, ready to present them when required, and head off into the blue skies of their cheeky early Summer break to the Continent. Or, in my case, the blue skies of the NMBS Conference.

6 am June 6 1944. The English Channel. Thousands of men, British, American, Canadian, French. Waiting – some patiently, some impatiently – for what is about to come. Even though they don’t know exactly how it will end or what exactly ‘it’ will be like. Clutching their guns, their rifles, their valour, ready to present them when required, as they head off into the misty, murky dawn of the northern French beaches.

OK, so comparing the jolliness of Gatwick with the horrors of the D-Day landings, might strike you as unspeakably naff and inappropriate. But, I beg you, bear with me.

80 years ago, 156,000 troops, 7,000 planes and 10,000 vehicles took part in the most audacious, most incredible piece of military planning that had ever been undertaken. Almost scuppered by the weather – it was supposed to happen on June 5, but was postponed due to a Channel storm, from a purely practical point of view, the operation was the most outstanding piece of logistics. You only have to watch the film The Longest Day, the first beach scenes of Saving Private Ryan, or the series Band of Brothers to know that. And I defy anyone to watch any of those without bawling.

Watching the TV programmes this week commemorating the landings, celebrating the veterans, mourning their losses, makes me feel pretty insignificant. The old men and women in their uniforms, their medals pinned proudly and poignantly to their chests, then barely older than my twins are now, did what they did because they had to.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the world has, since then, all gone to shit. It probably looks that way if you are Israeli, if you are Palestinian, if you are Ukrainian, or from any of those countries bordering Ukraine and Russia – Georgia perhaps – who are wondering if, should Russia prevail in Ukraine, they will be next.

One of the old soldiers on the news last night said that his heartfelt wish for the time that he has left, it to see the people of Israel and Palestine to find it in their hearts to achieve peace. Amen to that, yet today’s news of another strike in Palestine makes me doubt his wish will come true.

It sounds so trite, so BBC newsreader-ish to say, Thank You, to all those who took part, who staggered up onto those beaches, to come back changed in ways we cannot imagine, many of them not at all. But it’s all we have.
No, actually, that’s wrong. Thank you is not all we have. What we have is an obligation, a duty to ensure that we do not let the world fall into that kind of state again. We are in danger of forgetting what those men and women fought for and died for. We mustn’t.

I don’t know what kind of world we would have, had D-Day gone a different way, had it not succeeded in being the beginning of the end, but it did.
The fact that the Allies did plan it, that they did attempt it, that they did succeed is precisely why we have the sort of world we do.

A world where I can get up at 3.30am, drive to my local airport and, 75 minutes later, (Oh, speedy boarding, how do I love thee, let me count the ways) be amongst the over-price gold Toblerone bars, dowsing myself in perfume that I can’t afford, even at 40% off.

The sort of world where we can get together, as an industry, to connect and reconnect, establish and re-establish business relationships and life-long friendships.

I think that was probably worth fighting for.