D-DAY will only be remembered through the Hollywood blockbuster Saving Private Ryan if Britain’s role in the invasion is not taught, a former army chief suggested yesterday.
Lord Richard Dannatt, who headed the force from 2006 to 2009, stressed the importance of teaching children about the UK’s involvement in the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival alongside Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre, about the launch of their new book ‘Churchill’s D-Day’, Sir Dannatt warned of the risk the nation could be ‘airbrushed’ out of the memories of the largest amphibious invasion in history.
The 73-year-old helped set up the newly-opened Winston Churchill Centre in Ver-sur-Mer in the hopes of combatting this.
He said: ‘It’s really important that we, on that site in the Winston Churchill Centre, which the King opened on June 6, tell the story of D-Day, tell the story of the Normandy campaign, but particularly, tell of the British contribution to that.
‘Otherwise, it’ll disappear into history.
‘It’ll be Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan, and the British will be airbrushed out of it.
‘The British Memorial, the Winston Churchill Centre, actually now, will tell the story for future generations and that’s why it’s really important to get visitors there and to get children there.’
He added: ‘The British haven’t had a memorial.
‘Well, the Brits have been doing memorials in Normandy in our own way, with regimental memorials here, formation memorials there, but the veterans were right that we didn’t have a national memorial.
‘But now we do.’
Touching on the declined use of letters and increased use of electronic records and the impact it will have on historians, he added: ‘I think probably historians in the future may well have to rely on secondary sources.
‘I mean, there’s a cluster of books being published. Boris Johnson was here. His book has just come out.
‘Other people’s books just coming up.
‘And it’s those secondary sources that historians might have to go to because the original material has either been deleted or just can’t be captured.’