As the German guns opened up on the morning of December 16, 1944, all that stood between Adolf Hitler and victory in the West were the battered remnants of American divisions that had been fighting since Normandy or units of fresh faced young GIs who had yet to see combat.

It’s been called The Great War, The War For Democracy, The War for Civilisation and the War to End War. No matter what name you use to refer to the First World War, it was a cataclysm that altered the course of European history and changed the world forever.

Overcome with emotion, as he emerged from 11 Group Headquarters on August 16, 1940-the summer when Britain stood alone-Prime Minister Winston Churchill was overheard to say, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed, by so many, to so few.

On September 1, 1939, the guns of the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte; igniting a war that would, eventually, engulf the world and not ending until the Red Army raised the Russian flag over the smouldering ruins of the Reichstag.

For 86-days in the summer of 1944 the eyes of the world were riveted on Normandy, France, where the liberation of Western Europe had begun and the fate of the Nazi regime would be decided.