D Day Journeys

75 years ago 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, France. D Day Journeys is a fantastic story map which allows you to follow the journeys of four of the individuals who took part in the D Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. These stories of an individual pilot, sailor, riflemen and engineer help to personalize this massive campaign, a campaign which consisted of thousands of individual men.

The four stories in D Day Journeys were created by the Veterans History Project and use manuscripts and photographs donated by veterans of the D Day landings and their families. Each of the four stories starts with some background information about each individual's life before D Day, their military training, their arrival in England and their preparations for the D Day campaign.

The On D Day section of D Day Journeys uses an interactive map to show where the four men landed on June 6th. This section also includes personal accounts of the landings taken from the men's personal logs and letters home,

"I looked to my left at the man lying next to me and I found he was dead. He had a neat little bullet hole right thru his forehead".

The After D Day section again uses an interactive map to trace the four men's journeys through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany after the landings.


You can view some of the locations of the D Day landings in a series of photographs published by The Guardian newspaper. The Guardian has released a series of then and now interactive photographs showing archive images taken during D Day and modern photos showing the exact same scenes today.

For the interactive D Day Landings Scenes in 1944 and Now photographer Peter Macdiarmid revisited the scenes depicted in a number of historical photographs of the D Day landings. He has captured the same views as they can be seen today. The vintage photos really help to convey a sense of the scale of the campaign and the individual soldiers involved. The modern photos of the same locations provide a near counterpoint to the scenes of war and help remind us how much we owe to those Allied soldiers.