Life on the Home Front

The D-Day Museum is not simply a 'military' museum, but also covers an important part of Britain's social history in the 20th century. The Museum shows how in a 'total war' the whole population was involved in the struggle.

Civilians were in the front line when the Blitz began in 1940. There were 67 major bombing raids on Portsmouth between 1940 and 1944, and 930 civilians and many Service personnel were killed in the city.

The Museum illustrates how the war affected the lives of everyone, including children, and the exhibition features material on evacuation, rationing and the Blitz, an Anderson shelter, gas masks, ARP equipment and German bombs.

There are also displays on the vital role the Home Front played in the build-up to D-Day in 1943-44, preparing the equipment and supplies needed for the assault on Hitler's 'Fortress Europe'.

The D-Day Museum especially recognises the enormous contribution women made to victory in World War II - in the Services, in factories, shipyards and transport, on the land, in nursing and civil defence, and in the home.

The D-Day Landings

On D-Day, 6 June 1944, 156,000 troops landed by sea and air in Normandy, whilst thousands more manned the ships and aircraft which formed the Allied invasion armada. The Museum's displays on D-Day begin by telling the story of the airborne landings in the early hours of 6 June, and include a reconstruction of a jeep emerging from a crashed Horsa glider.

After massive naval and air bombardments, the Allies began landing on the Normandy beaches. The displays on the seaborne landings feature an authentic World War II landing craft, an amphibious DUKW and a rare Beach Armoured Recovery Vehicle. Models, maps, photographs, documents, original objects and personal recollections tell the story of the landings on the American beaches, codenamed Utah and Omaha, and the British and Canadian beaches - Gold, Juno and Sword.

But D-Day was just the beginning of the battle for Normandy and three months' hard fighting lay ahead for the troops who landed on that day. The panels of the Overlord Embroidery chart the course of the campaign until the final break-out from Normandy and the liberation of France.