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"OK... Let's Go!"
General Dwight Eisenhower - Southwick House, June 1944
"OK let's go!.." With these words, the greatest invasion force that the World has ever seen prepared to hurl itself across the English Channel at Hitler's much vaunted 'Fortress Europe'.
Nestling beneath the northern slopes of Portsdown Hill, the escarpment that stands sentinel over the Naval base of Portsmouth, the village of Southwick with its thatched roofs and half-timbered cottages remains largely unchanged from that day in June 1944 when this little Hampshire settlement became, quite literally, the centre of 'OPERATION OVERLORD.'
It was at Southwick House, the elegant Georgian mansion and ancestral home of the Thistlethwayte family, that GENERAL DWIGHT D EISENHOWER (left), the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, made his historic and momentous decision committing 3 million men and 2,727 ships to the operation which turned the tide of World War II. In the spring of 1944 the house became the forward headquarters for
the Normandy invasion. The large, specially produced, wall map on which the progress of the Operation was plotted still remains; the room in which it stands is now part of the Wardroom of HMS DRYAD. |
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