In the ancient seafaring town of Portsmouth, England, overlooking the English Channel, stands the D-Day Museum. This June it will be at the center of ceremonies commemorating the forty-fifth anniversary of the day when Allied troops—many of them embarked from this port—breached Hitler’s Fortress Europe. The museum is full of telling exhibits, but most impressive by far is the Overlord Embroidery, which tells the story of the Normandy landing in glowing fabric.

In the ancient seafaring town of Portsmouth, England, overlooking the English Channel, stands the D-Day Museum. This June it will be at the center of ceremonies commemorating the forty-fifth anniversary of the day when Allied troops—many of them embarked from this port—breached Hitler’s Fortress Europe. The museum is full of telling exhibits, but most impressive by far is the Overlord Embroidery, which tells the story of the Normandy landing in glowing fabric. Stretching 272 feet in width, this tapestry is made up of thirty-four individual panels 8 feet wide and 3 feet high. It is the largest work of its kind in the world.

The extraordinary project was conceived by Lord Dulverton in the early sixties. He had decided there should be some lasting tribute to the ordinary men and women of Britain and its allies who turned the tide of Nazi domination in World War II. He envisioned an epic embroidery, a kind of modern-day Bateaux Tapestry. Just as its eleventh-century predecessor told the story in medieval stitchery of the invasion of Britain by the Normans in 1066, Dulverton’s tapestry would document the invasion of France on June 6, 1944.

In 1968 Dulverton, heir to a tobacco fortune and himself a veteran of the Normandy fighting, commissioned the Royal School of Needlework in London to undertake the ambitious project. It was to be called the Overlord Embroidery after the code name chosen for the top-secret D-day operation.

The first step was to find an artist who could design an embroidery that would translate easily into appliqué, or applied embroidery. Fabric cutouts of graphic images would be sewn onto linen panels, and the details filled in with embroidery stitches. A talented young English painter named Sandra Lawrence, who was not even born on D-day but who had learned to draw properly in Florence, got the job.

After a somewhat daunting beginning, when her trial panel of King George VI bidding farewell to the invasion troops was rejected by Dulverton, Lawrence quickly settled down to some serious research. She surrounded herself with contemporary photographs, newspaper clippings, and reference materials, and soon began to capture the mood of the time. For historical advice she drew on the authority of a committee of three distinguished military men, representing all three services, men who had themselves taken part in the invasion. Her preliminary sketches for each panel were vetted for accuracy, corrections were made