On June 6th 1944, 75 years ago this year,
Operation Overlord took place, the largest
amphibious invasion in history consisting
of some 156,000 British, American and
Canadian troops, 6,939 ships, 2,395
powered aircraft and 867 gliders and
the aim, to land and take the five key
beaches of Normandy which consisted
of Juno, Sword, Utah, Omaha and Gold.
I was lucky enough to spend two weeks
in that beautiful part of France in 2018
and visit pivotal historical places such as
the beaches, parts of the Atlantic Wall,
Pegasus Bridge and Point du Hoc but this
piece is not about that either.
As you can probably imagine, an assault
of this kind took more than a few days to
plan, historians believe it took years rather
than months although the bulk of the
preparation does appear to have started
around 7 months beforehand with the
training of the troops and the requisition
of a small part of the Dorset coast around
Lulworth and Kimmeridge Bay and
including the tiny hamlet of Tyneham.
As a child, my parents used to enjoy
taking my younger sister and I on annual
caravanning holidays down to the south
coast, and our regular trips to the beach
were by a 10 mile hike (ok, it felt like 10
miles at 9 years old but was less than
a mile) to the beautiful coastline at
Worbarrow Bay, but one of the areas we
used to pass by very close to was what
has become known as the ghost village
of Tyneham. I would argue that it is only
a ghost village in the most generic of
senses as it was not abandoned due to
the residents all mysteriously dying, nor
was it left to fall down due to some weird
unexplained phenomena, it was vacated
purely and simply due to an order from
Winston Churchill’s government that it
was required for the war effort as the area
it stood in bore an uncanny resemblance
to the coastline of northern France where
the taking of the beaches at Normandy, or
more commonly known D Day, was to take
place.On the 16th November 1944, a mandatory
requisition notice was issued to thoseresidents within this target zone advising
them to vacate by 19th December 1944,
to provide a training area for the army
to enable them to perfect their use of
modern weapons and to facilitate the
use of live ammunition. The crucial part
of this request was that the residents of
the village were told that their tenancies
could be maintained and that they would
be able to return to their homes once
the war office had no further use for the
area. Why then is this once quintessential
part of English life, the little hamlet
that was all linked to the once great and
beautiful hall, a place that can prove
inhabitants from the Roman era and was
also mentioned in the doomsday book
as “Tigeham” now a ghost village and
somewhere that investigators sneak into
to try and find evidence of inhabitants
long deceased?Quite simple, the War Office (now the
MoD) never returned it to the villagers
as initially promised. Many of the
buildings were damaged by the shelling
received during mock battles and were“The residents of the village were told that their
tenancies could be maintained and that they would
be able to return to their homes once the war office
had no further use for the area.”