About Normandy War Guide
Hi, I'm Phil
Like a lot of people, my interest in the Second World War started young, I spent hours watching documentaries on the Discovery and History channels, drawn in by the scale of the events and the stories of the people who lived through them.
That early fascination never faded. When I made my first trip to Normandy, the history I'd read about and watched on screen suddenly became real. Walking the beaches, standing at the memorials, seeing the bunkers and craters still etched into the landscape
Why I built the site
Normandy War Guide launched in 2014, born out of a practical frustration. While planning my trips to Normandy, I couldn't find a site that showed all the places to visit on one map. Museums, memorials, bunkers, cemeteries, which made it genuinely difficult to see what was out there and plan a route that made sense.
From Trip Planner to War Diary Transcriptions
As the site grew, so did my research.
While planning visits, I began digging into the individual units that landed in Normandy. That research led me to war diaries, the original daily records kept by British and Commonwealth units during the campaign.
Accessing them isn’t easy. You normally have to visit the archive in person to view the originals or hope you can find someone on a forum who would share it with you.
I realised that many families and researchers face the same barriers.
So I began transcribing and publishing war diary records online, making them freely accessible to anyone researching a relative or studying a specific unit. What started as a few transcriptions became an expanding digital archive designed to make these records easier to explore and understand with cross referencing and geocoded locations.
Why I Built Normandy War Guide the Way I Did
Professionally, I have a degree in Web Development and have worked for more than a decade and a half as a web developer specialising in booking systems and APIs.
That technical background, particularly in PHP, data-intensive applications and AWS infrastructure has allowed me to build features that go beyond a traditional history website.
These include:
- An interactive Normandy trip planner map
- WW2 map overlays
- A coordinate converter for British wartime grid references
- Digitised war diary databases
All built in a cost-effective way so the site can remain accessible and continuously grow.
But at its heart, this isn’t a tech project.
It’s a history project powered by technology.
A Passion That Hasn't Faded
Over the past decade I've personally visited and photographed hundreds of sites across Normandy, and I constantly find more. Every trip turns up something I didn't know about: a small memorial tucked away on a country lane, a stretch of coastline that suddenly makes sense when you understand what happened there.
That's what keeps me going. Normandy War Guide has always been a passion project built in my spare time, driven by a genuine love for the history and a belief that these places and the people connected to them deserve to be remembered.