THE children squealed with delight as they whizzed round on the merry-go-round – some sat in little planes, others in cars, some in buses. The sun was shining and my partner and I enjoyed an ice-cream as we watched our daughter speed round and round.

When George Orwell said the war against fascism was fought to make the world safe for short, fat businessmen, he could have added, for children to travel across a free continent to enjoy such simple pleasures. Because 69 years ago, thousands of British soldiers were engaged in a life and death struggle on the very spot where the merry-go-round spun to make that possible.

Here on the seafront in Arromanches, in Normandy, on June 6, 1944, part of the greatest armada which has ever sailed appeared on the horizon to deliver men and machines to defeat Nazi Germany.

There is still much to see on Normandy’s invasion coast where 156,000 of allied troops landed on the longest day all those years ago.

It is because of all these reasons that I visited the coastal town of Arromanches a couple of years ago.

Sat in the heart of Normandy and of the invasion coast it is almost at the centre of the British ‘Gold’ invasion beach. It is famous too as the place where one of the Mulberry harbours was assembled after being towed from dockyards in Britain.

We stayed at Camping Municipal Arromanches-Les- Bains, a compact campsite in the heart of the small town.

A typical French site, it is well-appointed with toilets, showers, washing facilities and all well-kept – because when the French faire le camping, they don’t muck about.

The reasons the area was chosen for the landings make it an ideal place to holiday. Long, sandy beaches; small, isolated fishing villages and rolling countryside all make this the ideal place to tour or lounge by the seaside.

Arromanches itself has one of the many fine stretches of sand on this coast and here the reminders of the past are never far away. Fragments of the Mulberry harbour still litter the shore. These vast, reinforced concrete shells are marooned on the beach like strange wrecked ships.

One reason why the Germans never thought the allies would land in Normandy was that there were no harbours. Having landed, an invading army would need vast amounts of equipment, and fast, to secure any beachhead and fight inland. They reasoned, the only nearby port, Cherbourg, was both heavily defended and primed to be destroyed should the allies threaten it.

The allies knew this too, and so at Churchill’s behest, they built two harbours of their own on the south coast of England and towed them in pieces to Normandy. One was built off the American Omaha beach, further down the coast at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer and the other was at Arromanches.

The largest part were the caissons which ringed the harbour, named ‘Phoenix’. These protected the supply ships and some lie off Arromanches still. The metal reinforcing rods are slowly rusting, but they withstand the daily battering from the Atlantic to guard the beaches to this day.

Often when walking over the headlands down into Arromanches, you would glimpse one of the pale, concrete behemoths, immobile as the waves crashed over.

The harbour, christened Port Winston, off-loaded 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles, and four million tonnes of supplies in its six-month life.

It consisted of outer breakwaters, the caissons and an inner harbour of metal bridges linked by concrete pontoons which led to the beach. These would rise and fall with the tide and one of these bridges is kept here as a memorial to the engineers who built the harbour.

Another engineering link had brought me here too. My grandfather, a sergeant in the Royal Engineers landed here to build airstrips in the rolling countryside surrounding the town. He was involved in the construction of two of these strips which allowed the RAF to base tank-busting Typhoon fighter-bombers much nearer the fighting and so increase the amount of time they could spend hunting and destroying German tanks and equipment.

It was while running near the site of one of these airfields when one of Arromanches other jawdropping reminders of its wartime past revealed itself to me. The German gun battery at Longues-sur-Mer is among the best preserved gun emplacements on the Norman coast.

Built as part of Hitler’s so-called ‘Atlantic Wall’ the site consists of four concrete gun casemates, built to withstand all but the heaviest bombardment. Their position, dominating Gold invasion beach made them a prime target for the allied naval guns which pounded the beaches in the hours before the landings.

Happily for the British, HMS Ajax’s guns silenced those of the battery with hundreds of shells fired here on June 6, eventually putting all the guns out of action. They remain, nonetheless, a chilling reminder of what allied troops faced across Normandy on that day.

On Arromanches seafront there is a museum which tells the story both of the Normandy landings and of how the incredible Mulberry harbour was built. It is a well-thought out and fascinating exhibition which tells perfectly the story of ingenuity and sacrifice which marked this giant enterprise.

The museum is ringed with artillery from the Second World War, a howitzer, a Bofors flak gun, a German 88mm – still glowering and potent-looking.

The merry-go-round sits in the plaza in the shade of their barrels as the tots yelp happily, oblivious to their place in history.