Songfacts®:

• On June 6, 1944, 156,000 Allied US, British, and Canadian troops landed on the Normandy beaches of Nazi-occupied France. The Allied forces were able to control the beaches, and in the following days they pushed inland in the largest amphibious military operation in history. The invasion - known as D-Day - was a major turning point in World War II.
  
  Jim Radford was only 15 when he served as a ship's galley boy on Merchant Navy tug Empire Larch during D-Day. It helped to build the Mulberry harbor off Arromanches at Gold Beach which allowed the British Royal Navy to get troops, vehicles and supplies onto the beaches of France. The Merchant Navy was not officially allowed to sign up under-16s, but the teenager had found a towing company who turned a blind eye to his age.
  
  Twenty-five years later Radford wrote a poignant ballad to honor those who died in Normandy. The haunting folk song features lyrics about men who "stormed the gates of hell" and "died upon that blood-soaked sand."
• Radford explained he wrote the song following his first visit to Normandy after the war.
  
  "I had been back to France, but I hadn't been to Normandy. I remember it all very clearly, but I thought I'd got it all in perspective and I wasn't going to be emotional about it," he recalled in a video on the Normandy Memorial Trust page.
  
  It wasn't until I went back, saw the children playing on the beach, that I was sort of overwhelmed with recollection of what I've seen and moved to tears by the contrast, as a lot of veterans were."
  
  Radford has been performing "The Shores of Normandy" since then, including at two 2014 televised concerts from the Royal Albert Hall commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day.
• The song was released as a single in 2019. The record is raising funds for the Normandy Memorial Trust's monument commemorating the 22,442 men and women serving under British command who fell in the Battle of Normandy.
• "The Shores of Normandy" topped the Amazon download chart in the first week of June 2019. Radford said of the chart success: "The more copies we sell, the more money we raise to build this memorial."
  
  "We want people to remember all those good men," he added. "They deserve to be honored and remembered. The thing that I remember most is seeing [the bodies of] those lads floating in the water – the ones who had to run up the beaches into the machine gun fire and never made it. I can still see their faces now."