Mayor to Lead Tameside's D-Day 80th Anniversary Remembrance

Mayor to Lead Tameside’s D-Day 80th Anniversary Remembrance

THE Civic Mayor, Cllr Betty Affleck, will lead the people of Tameside in honouring the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

On June 6 1944 allied forces launched the liberation of western Europe by landing almost 150,000 troops on France’s Normandy coast. It remains the biggest seaborne invasion in history.

To mark this momentous and historic milestone, the Mayor will lay a civic wreath on the altar at Ashton Parish Church (St Michael and All Angels) on Sunday 9 June before the regular service of Holy Communion begins at 11am.

Once the service has finished, at around noon, organisations and members of the public are invited to place their own tributes in memory of all those who took part in Operation Overlord. This will be in the memorial chapel in the north aisle.

Cllr Hugh Roderick, Tameside Council’s armed forces champion, said: “Even today, 80 years after it took place, D-Day remains unique in military history. The sheer scale of the invasion is still hard to comprehend.

“However, D-Day involved far more people than the 400,000 sailors, soldiers and air crew who stormed the Normandy beaches in 1944. It took years of preparation and we should not forget all those involved in other capacities such as map-making, reconnaissance and deception.

“We owe a great debt to those men and women – many from Tameside’s towns and villages – who risked their lives to liberate western Europe after five years of occupation and give us the freedom we enjoy today. We must never forget what they did for us.”

St Michael and All Angels Parish Church is on Church Street, Ashton-under-Lyne, OL6 6XJ. It can also be reached on foot from Stamford Street, opposite St Michael’s Square.