Hayling's contribution to some of the country's finest and most secretive hours in wartime will be celebrated during a special D-Day service to mark the 75th anniversary of the Allied invasion of France in the presence of The Duke of Gloucester. The organisers are inviting the public to come down to the seafront and gather at the Hayling COPP Heroes Monument to join the dozens of schoolchildren, who will take part in a mixture of remembrance, music and pageantry, on June 6 2019, at 11am. More than 200 men and women formed part of the clandestine COPP unit that spent 18 months putting their lives on the line to help wartime leaders plan for the invasion of Normandy, on June 6, 1944. And the bravery shown by members of the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPP) will be remembered during the event being held next to the monument erected in the units honour seven years ago.

Robin Walton, who founded the COPP Heroes Memorial Fund monument appeal in 2010, told the Islander: "We have been working on our plans for the 75th anniversary of D-Day for several months. I am delighted to be able to announce His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester has agreed to be our VIP guest and will lay a wreath in memory of all our D-Day heroes from Hayling. It is totally appropriate we should mark the incredible contribution COPP made to the D-Day invasion, as well as the Islands important role in those monumental hours in the early hours of June 6 when hundreds of thousands of troops went ashore on Gold, Juno, Sword and Omaha Beaches. Hayling was also a major base for training landing craft crews in 1943 and 1944, and we must not forget Operation Fabius II, the rehearsal for Operation Overlord and Neptune took place on Hayling Bay in front of Winston Churchill and the Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, on May 3, 1944."