SIXTY years ago this Sunday, the world witnessed the largest sea invasion of all time as the Allied forces of America, Britain and Canada finally opened a Western front in the battle to destroy Nazi tyranny.

Operation Overlord, to land 150,000 Allied troops along a 50-mile coastal stretch of occupied France, was also the most complex military operation ever, taking two years of planning and utmost secrecy.

It should have happened on June 5 but the weather in the Channel was too bad.

Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D Eisenhower took a momentous gamble and ordered the invasion of Hitler's "Fortress Europe" for the next day.

"Ike" dubbed it The Great Crusade, telling the thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen the tide had turned against the Nazis.

Failure was not an option as there was no back-up plan.

If the Allies had been thrown back into the sea, history would have been very different.

The Redditch Advertiser & Alcester Chronicle has tracked down six men who were there, all of whom played a different part either on D-Day itself or the following weeks and months.

They of course were lucky, for on D-Day and in the harrowing weeks that followed, Allied forces paid a heavy price in blood as the Germans moved armoured forces against them.

The British forces went in at Gold and Sword beaches with the Canadians in-between at Juno. The Americans, further west, stormed Utah and Omaha beaches.

An interesting fact recently cropped up in a book entitled Ten Days to D-Day by David Stafford, of Edinburgh University, about the planning for the invasion.

Amid tight security there was severe paranoia that there would be a leak about the date as servicemen were briefed in the days before.

Dr Stafford records in his book that a few days prior to D-Day, a security scare emanated from Redditch. A United States Army Air Force sergeant had got drunk in a Redditch bar and flashed special French currency notes he had been issued and boasted he was leaving for France on "the 4th or 5th". Intelligence officers moved quickly to smother the story.