Next week sees the opening of a new exhibition at Lyme Regis Museum. Called “Lyme Lads”, it commemorates the 70th Anniversary of the Normandy Landings during the Second World War.
“Lyme Lads” marks the service and sacrifice of the local young men as they battled from the wide, sandy invasion beaches through the heavily-wooded small fields and lanes of Normandy to eventual victory at the Falaise Gap. As the exhibition shows, eleven Lyme Lads still rest alongside thousands of their comrades and opponents under Normandy’s soil.
The exhibition plots the routes taken by the Dorsetshire 1st Battalion from Gold Beach to the battles at the small town of Hottot and beyond, and by the 4th Batallion through its terrible baptism of fire on ‘Hill 112’ through to Mont Pincon.
The display also includes the story of the American 16th Infantry Division which was stationed in Lyme Regis before leaving for the horror of Omaha Beach, as well as the actions of the town’s RAF launches, who rescued airmen from aircraft that came down in the English Channel.
The story of the “Lyme Lads” is one of courage and loss and is part of Lyme Regis’s commemoration of D-Day the event that seventy years ago marked the first step in bringing democracy and freedom back to Western Europe. The exhibition will run from June 5th to July 4th 2014.
[Image: Cecil Gollop, who died three days after D-Day on June 9th, after landing on Gold Beach on 6th June 1944, as part of the first wave of British soldiers to invade Normandy.]