During 1943 and 1944 planning and preparation for Overlord gathered pace in Britain.

On 11 November 1943, orders from the Admiralty announced that an area of about 15 square miles, on the Tarbat peninsula including the entire village of Inver was to be "requisitioned" for military purposes. Click to read about the secret rehearsals.

The tower on the left was built as part of the preparations for the D-Day landings.. Tank and  personnel landing craft rehearsed the landings in the Cromarty Firth and were controlled by loudspeakers from this tower.

The concrete tower has a wooden upper balcony and iron railing. Ladders to reach the upper levels were mounted on the walls, but are now missing.

The next photograph shows Field-Marshall Montgomery being greeted by Captain Hutton on arrival aboard HMS Tyne in Scapa Flow. He was on one of his morale-boosting visits to servicemen during the run-up to D-Day. .

HMS Tyne was a destroyer depot ship, built in 1940. Her equipment included 2 furnaces, a foundry, machine shops and a bakery which had a daily output of 25,000lb. of bread.

Due to censorship, the local press could merely report that Montgomery had recently arrived at a "Northern Base", had visited units of the Home Fleet and was later seen "in the street of a northern town" (Kirkwall).


Read more about how the D-day landings were practiced on Nairn Beach and at Findhorn Bay, where to this day Valentine Tanks lay sunken at the bottom of the Moray Firth by using either of the links below:

Nairn Beach

Valentine Tanks