History of Sussex airfields around Sussex. During the lead-up to the D-Day landings, the people of Sussex were witness to the build-up of military personnel and materials, including the assembly of landing crafts and construction of Mulberry harbours off the county's coast. Five new airfields were built to provide additional support for the D-Day landings, four near Chichester and one near Billingshurst. A legacy of the D-Day landings are the sections of Mulberry harbour that lay broken and abandoned on the sea floor off the coast, of Selsey Bill, having missed the invasion. Sussex was an industrial county, from the stone age, with
Provisional Government of the French Republic on 3 June 1944, the day before Charles de Gaulle arrived in London from Algiers on Winston Churchill's invitation, and three days before D-Day. The CFLN itself had been created exactly one year earlier through the uniting of de Gaulle's ("Comité national français", or CNF) and Henri Giraud's organisations. Among its most immediate concerns were to ensure that France did not come under allied military administration, preserving the sovereignty of France and freeing allied troops for fighting on the front. After the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, it moved back to the capital, establishing a new "national unanimity"