STATELY SECRETS

80 years ago, D-Day marked a turning point in the Second World War. Far from the Normandy beaches, a number of stately homes played a pivotal – and top-secret – role in wartime operations

FELICITY DAY

“D-Day has come,” a BBC newsreader told Britons early on 6 June 1944, Allied forces having launched the largest invasion in history across the Channel in Northern France. Involving 156,000 troops, 11,590 aircraft and almost 7,000 vessels, ‘Operation Overlord’ would mark the beginning of the end of the Second World War. But the invasion on that June day, 80 years ago, could not have happened had it not been for the work ongoing for months beforehand in a large, turreted house in the Chiltern Hills. Danesfield, built for a soap magnate in 1901, was home to RAF Medmenham, where over 1,700 men and women worked capturing and studying aerial reconnaissance photographs and producing intelligence reports – around 600,000 of the former and 1,500 of the latter every month in the…

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Britain (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/Jun 2024

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