Suzanne recalls planning for D-Day landings

100-YEAR-OLD SERVED IN NAVY AS TROOPS WERE SENT TO FRANCE

- CARL EVE

AS Plymouth salutes its D-Day heroes 80 years on, one of the city's most well-known daughters, who witnessed the preparations herself, will also be marking the big day.

Dr Suzanne Sparrow, a former Wren (member of the Women's Royal Naval Service), remains one of the last witnesses to the city's role in the greatest amphibious landing the world has ever seen - and is among those preparing to honour all the heroes of Operation Neptune 80 years on.

Suzanne, astonishingly, was still a teenager when she played her part in the prelude to D-Day.

Suzanne was just 17 when she joined the Wrens in 1942 and was still only 19 when the invasion force set sail two years later, on June 6, 1944.

Codenamed Operation Neptune, the Normandy landings made up the largest seaborne invasion in history and played a crucial role in liberating western Europe from Nazi occupation.

The operation was top-secret but Suzanne was privy to the movements of the American forces, estimated at 36,000, as they loaded up their landing craft in the days before they departed for Omaha and Utah beaches. "I was told not to speak about what I had seen," she recalls.