D-Day 70th anniversary

Seventy years ago today thousands of men lined up on makeshift jetties beside South Parade Pier in Southsea to board the landing craft that would take them across to France and D-Day.

For a time, the Allied Supreme Commander himself, General Dwight Eisenhower, watched them embark. "Good old Ike!" they're said to have shouted when they recognised him.

Though Eisenhower's experts had correctly forecast a break in the prevailing bad weather the following morning, D-Day itself, on Monday, 5 June the wind was up and the seas were rough.

Many of those who made the crossing through the night were badly seasick. Some would never return.

Today the weather was very different.

A cold, stiff breeze first thing fell away and the sun shone from a cloudless blue sky as men from all three services - along with contingents from France and Denmark - held a drumhead ceremony in the shadow of the towering Navy war memorial on Southsea Common.

Princess Anne was there for a service meant both to commemorate the dead of D-Day and honour the survivors - not just those who fought on the beaches but also the thousands of civilians in cities like Portsmouth whose work was vital to the war effort and who shared in the privations and the dangers, not least from frequent German bombing raids.

"We had a wee scuffle here and a scuffle there and then took over the radar station”Dugald Buchanan-MortonD-Day veteran

Many citizens of modern Portsmouth had come out to watch. They applauded as the contingents of servicemen and women marched off towards Southsea's seafront D-Day Museum at the end of the ceremony.

The men embarking at Southsea on that windy day 70 years ago were part of Assault Force S, the British units destined for the easternmost of the five invasion beaches - codenamed Sword.