Addresses

Address by the Reverend Canon Roger Devonshire RN at the Service of Thanksgiving and Remembrance at Portsmouth Cathedral attended by the D-Day and Normandy Fellowship on 6 June 2010.

A collection of beer tankards is like a history book. The inscriptions tell you something about where a person has been during all those years in the military. A tankard usually has on it the name of a squadron, a ship or a unit and the dates that go with it – or it might be a sports trophy. Among the tankards that I have at home is one with the inscription ‘Chaplain Second Frigate Squadron 1972-74.’ It was my first sea job. There were nine ships in the Squadron, four of which had been involved in fishery protection. You might think that this has little to do with D-Day and the battle of Normandy, but there were also two ships in the Second Frigate Squadron that had seen service in the Second World War – HMS Grenville and HMS Undaunted.

HMS Undaunted was a U-Class Destroyer, built by Cammell Laird and adopted by the London Borough of Barking as part of Warship Week. Three months after being commissioned on 3 March 1944, HMS Undaunted took part in the D-day landings, covering the Roger sector of SWORD Beach. One of those present on that day recalled that on board HMS Undaunted Commander Angus MacKenzie stood wearing his highlander’s bonnet as he played the bagpipes from the bridge whilst the LCAs, crowded with infantry, went by his ship towards the beach. By the end of the day nearly 30,000 Allied troops had gone ashore from the ships at SWORD Beach, the furthest east of the five beaches used on D-Day. Later it was in HMS Undaunted that General Eisenhower and Admiral Ramsay were embarked for a fast passage back to Portsmouth. The ship in which they had been embarked, HMS Apollo, had grounded and damaged its propellers. The flag of General Eisenhower was duly hoisted in HMS Undaunted and later presented to the ship, the General having signed his name across two of the stars using indelible pencil dipped in whisky.

For a brief few hours HMS Undaunted had been part of the D-Day story and now that story had become part of the ship, the same ship that I joined in Portland some thirty years later. History has a habit of making events of the past part of our own story. It happened to me through my serving in HMS Undaunted and I could give you other examples of history becoming part of my story. Here, as you meet to commemorate D-Day and the days that followed, history is your story. What happened then is part of who you are now and that is what you share with one another.

Of course, it is not only wartime memories that can become part of us, and through HMS Undaunted even part of me although I was only four years old when you were landing on the Normandy beaches. There are a great many other things from the past, including stories from the pages of the Bible, which show the human experiences that make us who we are.

In war people see things they would rather not have seen and from his writings the prophet Isaiah would appear to be one of those people. Cities have been destroyed, large numbers of people killed, and many have been forced to become refugees. Against this background he writes poems on the subject of the suffering servant, the servant who in his mind probably embodied the whole nation. The words of Isaiah would in future strike a chord with anyone who had witnessed great suffering and would in time be applied to Jesus. People would see in Isaiah something that was part of them. But even with the words of Isaiah to reflect upon, there is still much in this world that is beyond our understanding. Isaiah knew this as he wrote of the kings and nations of his time and their silence in the face of the big issues that confronted them: ‘that which has not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.’

Every time D-Day and the battle of Normandy are commemorated, as well as those like yourselves for whom these events are part of their lives, we want there to be those for whom Isaiah’s words will come true: ‘that which has not been told them they shall see, and that which they have not hear they shall contemplate.’ And on this 6 June 2010 what do we contemplate? Some will contemplate the sheer magnitude of what they saw and heard: the crowded beach, the deafening noise. Others will remember a few words from a conversation, something someone said, or perhaps an act of courage that passed almost unnoticed. The memories will always be there.

After the war HMS Undaunted was converted into a Type 15 anti-submarine frigate and went on to complete thirty years in the Fleet until being decommissioned in 1974. Before being decommissioned HMS Undaunted paid a final visit to the Pool of London having been invited to a reception in Barking Town Hall. An abiding memory of that day is of our arrival resplendent in uniform and of an elderly woman who shouted that it was our fault that the Borough was on the verge of bankruptcy.

As a brand new ship HMS Undaunted had played her part in one of the most significant events in our nation’s history. D-Day and the days that followed saw many examples, unforgettable to those who witnessed them, of suffering, determination and camaraderie. As so often happens when these three – suffering, determination and camaraderie – come together a new sense of fellowship was created and later put to good use in the founding of the D-Day and Normandy Fellowship. It is fellowship that fosters a sense of community and nowhere is that seen more powerfully than in the New Testament book called the Acts of the Apostles. We heard verses about the Apostles’ new life read to us this morning with that telling phrase: ‘there was not a needy person among them.’ In other words, they looked after each other. What they had experienced brought them together. That is how life should be: what we experience should bring us together. A new community grew around their fellowship.

Fellowship is a word that is coming back into use. It used to be considered an old-fashioned word, but recently it has been used not only in religion and the Armed Forces but also in business and commerce. As fellowship comes back into use as a word, may your Fellowship continue to put it back into life. May God bless all that you are doing to promote and keep alive the fellowship that by your lives you have created.

Address by the Venerable Stephen Robbins, Chaplain General and Archdeacon to the Army, at the Service of Thanksgiving and Remembrance at Portsmouth Cathedral attended by the D-Day and Normandy Fellowship on 7 June 2009.

First of all, can I say what a privilege it is for me to be with you today and, from one point of view, strangely appropriate? As many of you will know, one of the first units on GOLD beach on 6 June 1944 was the 1st Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment, and at that time they were part of the 50th Northumbrian Division. Now I’ve heard all the old jokes about officers and maps, but surely they couldn’t get it that wrong!

What it does show though is that people from the whole of the country were involved in this invasion and the subsequent campaign throughout Normandy and beyond. The biggest naval force ever assembled, the RAF totally committed, the army putting 75,000 British and Canadian troops on the beaches on the first day. At what cost? The 1st Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment, on that first day had 182 casualties from about 800 men; both the Commanding Officer and Second-in-Command were amongst them.

The breakout from Caen had an attrition rate bigger than the overall rate in the Battle of the Somme. Some people ask – was it worth it? All that death, all that destruction of sailors, soldiers and airmen; killed or maimed, physically or mentally, in the prime of life. The widows, children and parents left grieving. Was it worth it?

In 1989 I happened to be serving in Berlin when the Wall came down. A few months later an officers’ study day took us to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Unlike many camps Sachsenhausen was virtually intact. It brought home to me the horrors of Nazism. This systematic abuse and torture of people was done not by terrorist groups or perverted criminals, but by the State itself. Why? Because you belonged to a Trade Union or because you were a democrat, a communist or a socialist, or because you were of a religion that the authorities disapproved of, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, or you were a homosexual. Or because you were a Jew. If the Nazis did this to their own people, what would they do to others?

The Nazis had to be stopped. What our sailors, soldiers and airmen did in Normandy, the sacrifices they made, the sacrifices you made, were crucial. In the first lesson we heard today Isaiah said to God, ‘Here I am, send me.’ Most of us in the Armed Forces know we go where we are sent. Thank God that those sent to Normandy did their duty no matter what the cost.

But there is something we have to keep asking ourselves, and that is, what about our country now? How should we judge it so that we can still say that the sacrifice was not in vain? Jesus only gave us two commandments: love God and love your neighbour as yourself. The one ought to follow the other. So according to the Bible a country is not judged on how strong it is militarily or financially. It is not judged on winning World Cups or Olympic Medals. It is judged on how we treat our fellow human beings under God. It is judged on whether we are fair or not, and whether we care or not; to put it in the words of the D-Day and Normandy Fellowship’s motto, whether we ‘honour all men’. If we do that, God will honour us and have a place for us in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Address by The Reverend Mike Williams, Trustee of the Royal British Legion, at the Service of Thanksgiving and Remembrance at Portsmouth Cathedral attended by the D-Day and Normandy Fellowship on 1 June 2008.

The first time I came to Portsmouth I was asked a question that has stuck in my mind ever since. ‘If someone pointed a gun at you what would you do?’ I was a naive seventeen year old hoping to become an officer in the Royal Marines. My answer has also stayed in my mind – shoot them before they shoot me; hoping that it would never happen. It does happen and British Service men and women have died on active service in every year except one since 1945.

Sadly there has been a very long history of conflict and fighting between human beings. Some are small and local wars whilst others have been worldwide. We gather today as a Fellowship of people who have links to and memories of some of the most significant events of the Second World War: D-Day and the subsequent fighting in Normandy. For those of us born after that war it is difficult to understand and feel the emotions of those involved in such an endeavour to defeat Nazi Germany. For Great Britain to hold off an invasion of its shores and then turn defence into attack and conduct an opposed landing on the beaches of France was undoubtedly the turning point of the war.

Most families contributed to the war effort in some way. My father-in-law was in the West Riding Yeomanry evacuated from Dunkirk and then landed on Sword Beach and was heavily involved in the Normandy and subsequent battles through into Germany. I only know this from reading his army record – the memories are too painful for him to speak about what happened.

For those in the front line the bigger picture of why the war is being fought is often replaced by their loyalty to comrades and their regiment, or squadron or ship. The acts of heroism are usually associated with saving their mates. Their focus is on a small area of ground: making it across the open beach, finding a ditch in which to shelter from incoming mortars. The comforts of home rapidly become a distant but longed for memory. Yet when you probe deeper into why those men were there you often find what someone described as a silver thread running through their conscience; they had a sense of values that they fought to uphold.

The book of Nehemiah from which our first reading came tells the story of his conscience and concern being stimulated. He acted in a bold way and we heard in our reading of Nehemiah leading his people in the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. They were doing so in the face of opposition from their enemies. Construction was carried out with the labourers carrying their loads whilst also holding their weapons. The trumpeter was close to Nehemiah to sound the rallying call. God was there to help them.

When the wall was completed even their enemies perceived that the work had been completed with the help of God. God has been invoked by both sides in many conflicts over the centuries. Few would dispute that in the Second World War there was a clear sense of the Nazi regime demonstrating evil intent with its ethnic cleansing and mass killings in the concentration camps. There was a powerful sense for the Allied forces of fighting for what was right and seeking to hold the high moral ground. The silver thread of morality was present in the just cause of taking on the Nazis.

The passage from Nehemiah also points out that it is the nature of the weapons that dictate the type of conflict that occurs; swords, spears and bows mean close quarter fighting. Industrialisation brought with it the terrifying invention of guns with the ability to fire without complicated reloading procedures. Bombs, machine guns, aircraft, tanks were all part of the armoury available in 1944.

Men coming ashore onto the Normandy beaches from landing craft into enfilade machine gun fire and artillery had little chance of survival. Yet thanks to their bravery they achieved success but often with heavy casualties. Also we know the civilian population suffered through bombing of places such as Portsmouth. I recently went with a group on Pilgrimage to visit the war cemeteries in southern Italy with the Royal British Legion. I took one gentleman and his wife to Bari on the east coast of Italy to visit his father’s grave. His father had been killed when he was six. But what was harder to comprehend was that his mother had died the year before during a bombing raid whilst serving as a Wren here in Portsmouth. Delivering death from thousands of feet up was not invented until the 20th century.

The concept of mutual destruction through the atomic bomb was also invented during the 1940s. It has been argued that the deterrent factor prevented a third world war. When I was being trained as a Royal Marine troop commander we were told that once hostilities started with the Soviet block the life expectancy of young officers was two minutes. The reality was that many of us went straight from training on to the streets of west Belfast. The concern for my generation was the tactics of the Provisional IRA. The nature of war had changed in that we were fighting civilians who used remote controlled bombs and sniper fire in the midst of housing estates in our own country.

The current generation of Service men and women face another set of potential and real threats brought about by the misuse of technology, the misplaced view of the world and religion and a willingness to die as so-called martyrs in suicide attacks. In contrast D-Day and Normandy was part of a conflict in which nation states were fighting each other. There were rules of war, combatants were in uniform and you knew who the enemy was.

The nature of power has moved from the nation state in recent years. Sir Richard Dearlove, the former chief of MI6, gave a public lecture recently in which he pointed out that global and encrypted communication used to be only available to governments. Now anyone with internet access can pay an extra £12 for a powerful encryption service. Those with misguided ideas of the world are able to organise and disperse. An American colleague of Sir Richard’s, he told us, described Al Qaeda as being like of flock of birds – how do you spy on them, never mind defend against them?

The lesson we can draw is that there has been throughout human history the tendency to fight each other. The reasons and methods may change over time but sadly the reality is that there will be occasions we cannot find ways to overcome our differences without resorting to violence.

The Christian response to this situation is either a pacifist stance or to adopt the just war principles. In other words in each situation we should be examining our conscience to identify the silver thread; namely to see if there is a moral case or justification for the use of force. Each of us as individuals will have our own view, but importantly nation states, the armed services and international organisations each have a responsibility to identify that silver thread; the moral and legal justification for military action.

The Christian faith underpins the principles of the just war. Our second reading from 2 Corinthians 5 reminds us of the radical nature of belonging to Christ. We are a new creation, a gift from God who as a result has given us the ministry of reconciliation. God acts through us in seeking for people to be reconciled to each other and to God.

Those who fought in the D-Day landings and Normandy, have given us the legacy of freedom to belong to Christ and to exercise that ministry of reconciliation in the presence of ongoing conflict. As such we have a responsibility to seek out that silver thread, to uphold the values and freedoms that they fought to preserve.

Upholding those values means

• challenging those who rename torture as interrogation,
• challenging those who regard rendition as a legal and legitimate response to terrorism and
• challenging those who think that the subversion of human rights through indefinite detention without charge is helpful to the just cause.

If we are to ‘become the righteousness of God’, as suggested by St Paul, then such righteousness means holding the high moral ground, identifying the silver thread and seeking to reconcile each other to God.

We owe it to those who gave their today so that we might have our tomorrow as ambassadors for Christ.

Amen

Address by Canon Nicholas Ash, Precentor of Portsmouth Cathedral, at the Service of Thanksgiving and Remembrance attended by the D-Day and Normandy Fellowship on 3 June 2007.

(Before the Address the Cathedral Choir had sung ‘Vespers’, the final movement of Valete in Pace (Farewell in Peace). The work, by composer, arranger and performer, Harvey Brough, was commissioned by the cities of Portsmouth and Caen to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day in 2004.)

“I wonder if Harvey Brough’s Valete in Pace, the last movement of which we have just heard, will ever get played on Classic FM? It is not what could be called ‘easy listening’. That being said, it is a very powerful piece to hear – all the more so for me because I was able to hear the composer working with our Cathedral Choir, the Portsmouth Youth Choir, the Maitrise de Caen Choir and the orchestra in rehearsal, where he conveyed very strongly what the music was trying to say. To hear the first performance in the Abbaye aux Hommes in Caen on the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, having been in Bayeux cemetery that morning with all the veterans, was very moving.

Valete in Pace is a piece that captures many facets of war. Written for the occasion of D-Day 60, Harvey Brough sets the whole piece for the twenty-four hours of 6 June 1944. The passage of time is marked by the monastic hours, starting early in the morning with Lauds and ending, as we have just heard, with Vespers for the end of the day. The beauty of the monastic plainsong pervades the whole piece and is still there through the noise of battle. Throughout the day, there is the sheer terror of war for which the librettist, Lee Hall, uses words from Homer’s Iliad. This certainly isn’t ‘easy listening’, but then it shouldn’t be. Harvey Brough wanted to paint the horror of war and make a powerful plea that such a terrible conflict should never happen again. It is rather ironic that it was written against the background of the war in Iraq and all its consequences.

Brough not only wanted to mark the horrors of war but also make it a prayer in memory of (to quote) ‘all those who fell on that day in 1944 or who are no longer in this world.’ So the Liturgy of the hours and the plainchant not only marks the passage of time, but the prayers of the church for those whose memory we treasure. They also provide a stark reminder of God’s presence in all the mess of life as he watches what human kind does to itself.

Along with the prayers of the Church and the noise of battle there is a third voice – that of a young soldier. He’s nearly eighteen years old and crossing the channel to Normandy was his first time at sea. His words are in the form of letters home to Mary, his girlfriend. We hear his thoughts preparing to land on the Normandy beach, being in the battle, getting wounded, killing a man; and his thoughts at the end of the day on the waste of war. Here is an individual voice speaking through; over the institutions of the Church and armed forces.

If Harvey Brough and Lee Hall were to have written Valete in Pace 20 or 30 years ago, I wonder if they would have used those three voices. War has become much more individualised in the last few years. It has been made very apparent in the continuing conflict in Iraq. It was considered very unwise for Prince Harry to serve anywhere near Iraq as he would significantly increase the dangers not only to himself but also those with whom he serves. Yet 25 years ago, Prince Andrew was able to serve in the Falklands. Now is not the time and place for a detailed analysis of why this is, but as a society we have become fascinated by the stories of individuals. News reports now often include this kind of stories whereas my impression of news reports 60 years ago is a far greater sense of corporate achievement.

So had Valete in Pace been written earlier, would it have included the voice of the individual? Would we have heard the young soldier writing to Mary? Who knows, but it does remind us, if we needed reminding, that all those who crossed the Channel to France 63 years ago were all known and loved as individuals. And despite the terrible noise of battle, the voice of the individual can still be heard and the prayer of the Church still continues.

Valete in Pace is a wonderful memorial to those who served and those who lost their lives in the Normandy Landings. Rather poignantly, it is just as valid for today’s context as it is in remembering a conflict of over 60 years ago. Individuals, many deployed from this city, are still serving overseas in situations too terrifying for us to think about too hard. They probably don’t write letters home as the young soldier writing to Mary did but rather use texts and emails. The messages will be very similar. The prayer of the Church continues. Every day in this Cathedral we pray for peace in the world because the horror of war continues for many. We owe it to the memory of those who have fought for our freedom all those years ago to ensure we do all we can to make peace the norm in the world.

It may seem a hopeless quest as an individual – what effect can a sole person have on the peace of the world. It is often said (usually when people don’t want to be generous in helping others) that charity begins at home. It could be said that peace begins at home too. We all know that none of us is perfect and we all add our little bit of strife to the world – sometimes it is unintentional – sometimes not! Peace begins with each of us as individuals.

We are gathered here this morning to continue the prayer of the Church. Here in the place where we celebrate Jesus’ teaching it provides a wake-up call to follow his way; remembering that he showed respect to all people no matter how high or low the world ranked them. He always gave people a fair hearing.

Our lives are entwined with complicated reactions to other people. Our natural survival instinct is to be cautious about the unknown, which can mean we can close down and fail to hear what is being said to us when we encounter someone different to us or who holds a contrary opinion to us. That can lead to misunderstanding and misunderstandings lead to conflict – whether at home or on a world wide scale.

Peace may begin at home, but it has to radiate out from there into the world. Each of us has a part to play. The Allied forces made up of disciplined individuals working together overcame the evil of the Nazi regime. Throughout they were undergirded by the prayers of the Church just as we hear in Valete in Pace. We should be at the forefront in our Christian discipline of radiating peace in the world. Lots of individuals working corporately provide a strong beacon for the world to follow.

In writing that piece, it was Harvey Brough’s hope that the terrible conflict of the Second World War may not happen again. His hope lies with us.

Vadete in pace – May you go in peace.”