Dame Vera shocked by D-Day decision

FORCES sweetheart Dame Vera Lynn is ‘disgusted’ at the snub delivered to the Royal Family and UK veterans as France sought to distance Britain from the 65th commemoration of the D-Day landings.

Dame Vera, 92, who regularly visits France where she has a home on the Riviera, said the lack of a Royal presence was ‘a terrible slur on the sacrifice of our boys’.

Speaking exclusively to The Connexion she said: “I am absolutely disgusted. I feel so sorry for all the veterans, it is as if they are of no account.”

Dame Vera, whose Second World War songs We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs of Dover made her a star among British forces and on the home front, said: “Words fail me. I cannot express what I feel, it's a terrible slur on the sacrifice of our boys.”

Despite her frequent trips to France she has also not been invited to the ceremony.

The Connexion newspaper is leading a protest against France’s handling of the celebrations. It has posted a letter in French on its website for visitors to cut and paste into emails to French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister François Fillon.

The letters says France’s plans to treat the D-Day commemorations as a “Franco-American” event are an insult to Allied soldiers who fought and died to liberate the country from Nazi occupation.

STORY: Voice your disgust at France's stance
Surprisingly Dame Vera never entertained troops in France during the conflict, although she gained her title “The Forces’ Sweetheart” from the British Expeditionary Forces in France at the beginning of the war.

She told The Connexion that she preferred to entertain troops in areas less visited by performers and was flying back from a tour in Burma when she first heard news of the D-Day landings.

“We stopped in Djerba, Tunisia, to re-fuel and were taken into a tent near the runway.

“We continued listening on a crackling radio as the news spilled out.”

There was no alcohol, so the young singer, her pianist, the general and the officials they were travelling with filled their glasses with water and drank to ‘The beginning of the end’.

Today Dame Vera leads a quieter but active life in the south of France where she and her husband Harry bought their home over thirty years ago.

She said she wished she spoke the language but added: “No one went to France from my school in those days. It was Southend for us.”

She felt she could have done well with her career in France as “they sang my sort of song - with a story to tell.”

She said: “My programmes went all over the continent. They would listen in cellars, haystacks, anywhere secretly.

“They said it gave them hope to know that things were still OK in London.

“I always chose optimistic songs. There were three during the war that represented different things, The White Cliffs of Dover, because they were the first or the last landmark the boys would see as they crossed the channel, Yours which was really the only love song of the war, and of course, We'll Meet Again.”

The singer became a dame in 1974 and finished her career performing outside Buckingham Palace for the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995.