Featuring: Nick Hewitt, National Museum of the Royal Navy

‘It may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing. Nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution’. So wrote Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay on 30 July 1944. His words were prophetic: the efforts of sailors off Normandy have over time become compressed into a single day of tension and weeks of uneventful freight hauling. Sailors are often absent from the literature, despite the exhausting and dangerous campaign they fought to seize, exploit and defend these hostile waters. This overlooked naval campaign was vital, and sailors in the Seine Bay were not taxi drivers but active combatants, guarding the vital waters of the Seine Bay and the five assault areas against a wide range of threats which persisted until the very end. This seminar will be the launch of the new book Normandy: the Sailors’ Story, a naval history of D-Day and the Battle of Normandy published by Yale University Press.

About the speaker: Nick Hewitt is a naval historian and Team Leader for Culture with Orkney Islands Council. He studied history at Lancaster University and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London before working initially at Imperial War Museums and later The National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth.

Nick has been a regular contributor to television and radio, notably as a presenter for the BBC’s Coast, specialist historian for Channel 5’s D-Day’s Sunken Secrets (2014) and presenter for the BBC’s Battle of Jutland: The Navy’s Bloodiest Day (2016). His first book, Coastal Convoys 1939-1945: The Indestructible Highway, was published by Pen and Sword in December 2008, and he has since published The Kaiser’s Pirates (2013) and Firing on Fortress Europe (2015).

This event is open to the public and free to attend both in-person and online (via Zoom). In-person spaces are limited, so register now to secure your spot!

For those joining online, the Zoom link will be sent by email two days before the event.