Royal British Legion - Paris France

09/06/2026

08/06/2026

We were very pleased to be present at the various DDay Commemorations in Normandy, represented by Committee members Bill Beauclerk, Caroline Clopet and Rosemary Rudland, who laid wreaths for our Branch.

07/06/2026

The Royal Marines Remembrance Ceremony at Port en Bessin. Remembering 7th June 1944.

06/06/2026

Ceremony at British War Cemetery, Bayeux. We Will Remember Them.

06/06/2026

DDay Ceremony at British Memorial, Ver sur Mer.

06/06/2026

Remembering DDay 1944, where around 4415 men died in the first wave of the Landings in Normandy. These include 2,501 from the USA, 1,449 British dead, 391 Canadians and 73 from other Allied countries.

Codenamed Operation Neptune and often referred to as D-Day, Ooeration Overlord is the largest seaborne invasion in history. The operation began the liberation of France and the rest of Western Europe, and laid the foundations for the Allied victory on the Western Front.
We Will Remember Them.

05/06/2026

For the 82nd Remembrance Commemoration of DDay and the British landings, at the British Memorial at Ver sur Mer, please see the link below 👇

British Normandy Memorial

20/05/2026

An RAF pilot shot down over France in the Second World War and found sitting upright in his Hurricane fighter plane, has finally been laid to rest exactly 86 years to the day since his death.

Yesterday, an RAF bearer party gently carried the coffin of Squadron Leader George Morley Fidler, draped in a Union Jack, to a grave at the London Cemetery and Extension in Longueval, northern France.

During preliminary work for a major canal construction in northern France, the remains of World War II pilot, Squadron Leader George Marley Fidler, were discovered more than 80 years after his aircraft crashed. Squadron Leader George Morley Fidler, 27, was shot down by a German Messerschmitt on May 19, 1940, as he tried to protect British troops retreating to Dunkirk.

His Hurricane, part of 607 Squadron, was one of 12 downed that day. Fidler had been lost for 80 years despite what was believed to be his body being given a grave by soldiers who found a Hurricane's wreckage and assumed it was his.

In 2006 a group of amateur historians excavated the crash site and found the plane had been flown by a different officer. Almost 20 years later, French engineers working on a canal at Oisy-le-Verger in the Pas de Calais found Fidler's Hurricane, with its pilot sitting upright in the cockpit.

Fidler was described as an 'exceptional' pilot and had been patrolling the skies as the Germans advanced across France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

After his death a Hurricane was found which was assumed to be his - the body was given a hurried grave by soldiers and later re-interred in a cemetery in Bachy, a French village.

It was not until 2006 that the aircraft was proven to belong not to Fidler, but to James Strickland of 67 Squadron. Strickland baled out and returned home before being killed in August 1941 as his Spitfire crashed in Portreath, Cornwall.

The body found in the downed aircraft now has the inscription 'unknown airman' on its grave - it may belong to one of two flight sergeants shot down that day but the Ministry of Defence does not allow exhuming graves for identification reasons.

It is believed the downed Hurricane pilot was either wearing kit which belonged to Fidler or had his parachute, which led the soldiers to mark his grave with his name. Some 20 further years passed before Fidler's body was finally found by the French engineers.

WE WILL REMEMBER HIM