Crass commemoration

SIR – Penny Howard Bates (Letters, June 21) speaks for many in describing the planned pop concert on Sword Beach on June 6 next year as an inappropriate way of commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-day.

My late partner, the writer and historian Norman Scarfe, landed, aged just 21, on Sword Beach in the first hour of D-day. His 1947 book, Assault Division, described the 3rd Division’s part in the operation.

Many times between 1944 and his death in 2014, we revisited Normandy in early June and walked on that beach, where the noises of battle had been replaced by the cheerful shouts of children and holidaymakers. We always made a pilgrimage to one of the beautiful and immaculately kept war cemeteries where some of his friends were buried. While he stood by their graves, I looked along the headstones at the ages of those, little more than boys, who had been participants in Operation Overlord.

Can the Dutch, who benefited from that campaign, really think that any sort of pop concert is a suitable expression of gratitude? Paul Fincham

Woodbridge, Suffolk