MY father fought in the D-Day landings, and was shortly after wounded out of active service. He had previously fought at El Alamein, the invasion of Sicily and that of Italy with the Gordon Highlanders.

I honour his contribution to the fight against and triumph over Nazism, but am appalled at the way the Brexiters are using the 75th Anniversary of D-Day to peddle the line that "we" alone saved Europe (and especially the feckless French) from Germany. Corporal Mitchell had a little help from now-forgotten friends.

It is no disrespect to either my father or to any others of those who on D-Day contributed to the liberation of Europe from Hitler, to point out that the real destroyers of the Nazi war machine and the Nazi state were the USSR and the Red Army. At the time of D-Day, four out of every five German soldiers, four out of every five German tanks, four out of every five German aircraft were not in Normandy but were on the Eastern Front, attempting to stem the victorious advance of the Red Army after Stalin-grad. This was the most important battle by far of the Second World War, indeed probably in human history. Again, without disrespect to my father, when he was fighting at El Alamein, there were armies more than 10 times larger combating for the city of Stalingrad.

D-Day would have been impossible, and the liberation of Europe would have been many, many years distant, but for the sacrifices of the Russian and other peoples of the Soviet Union, 20 million of whom died, a contribution now airbrushed out of history through decades of the Cold War and its aftermath.

Ian R Mitchell,

Glasgow G3.

IT is ironic, indeed tragic, that, as we remember D-Day, so many of us seem to have been unable to draw the lessons from it, that after centuries of warfare in Europe culminating in the slaughter of the Second World, that the European Union was and is the bedrock on which we build a new future, the guarantor of peace among neighbours.

The EU and Europe are indivisible, if we really care about the future of this continent. Treaties of friendship come and go, as history has told us so many times, but they are fragile and weak. Europe is a geographical concept, the EU an economic and political concept, to bind us together to make strife unthinkable, impossible. We should not look back to our past and glorify our role in it, but look hard at the present and future, learn to work together, to share power as we do at present with our European partners. This is where our true interest lies.

Trevor Rigg,

Edinburgh EH10.

Read more: Letters: Will mankind ever learn the lessons of this sacrifice?

REBECCA McQuillan rightly states that we dishonour the sacrifice of those who gave their lives in the Second World War if we cannot have an honest debate about the lessons of the war. ("The lesson of D-Day must surely be the need for unity", The Herald, June 6). Perhaps that desperately-needed honest debate should begin by asking how Hitler's Germany was able to arm itself in the 1930s with vast, brand new military, naval and air forces when the country was totally bankrupt and utterly ruined fol-lowing her defeat in the First World War and the massive reparations payments she was forced to make to the victorious allies.

Many Herald readers will doubtless have seen the pitiful pictures of starving, freezing German citizens literally burning barrowloads of the worthless paper money trying to stay alive. Did the astronomical sums of money required to build thousands of powerful Panzer tanks, large fleets of brand new war-ships and U-boats and a huge air force of heavy bombers and fast fighter planes just drop into Herr Hitler's lap from the sky? No, the money to arm the utterly broken Germany to the hilt came from our nice friendly bankers in London and Wall Street, New York. There is nothing more profitable to bankers than war.

Anyone doubting this should, for starters, read Professor Antony Sutton's book, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler: The Astonishing True Story of the American Financiers who Bankrolled the Nazis, and Dr Guido Preparata's Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich. For daring to publish such truths, both of these brave mainstream American historians were driven from their academic posts and ruined, with the former meeting an untimely suspicious death.

Dr Jim Macgregor,

Dollar.

A BRIEF reminiscence of June 7, 1944, 75 years on, the day my father arrived on the Normandy beach-es, as a sapper in the Royal Engineers. He was 39 and had unexpectedly lost his wife (our mother) in childbirth 16 months previously, in February 1943. Left at home were my sister, aged 12, and myself, aged eight, with our aunt, who looked after us until Dad came home.

Dad did not talk about the war very much. His job had been kept for him and the person who had covered while he was away was promoted. The privately rented house he tenanted had a new owner. Not a bona-fide conscientious objector but a man who had avoided conscription by claiming he was a welder in a war supply industry, though he had had no such training.

Things settled down, rent control still applied, rationing ensured everyone ate. Dad lived on to 1988, when he died aged 83. We owe so much to him.

Andrew McCrae, Gourock.

YESTERDAY (June 6) BBC News at One reported that the commemoration of the landings in Normandy began with a lone piper playing a lament, although the Scottish News that followed referred to the strains of the pipes. A little bit of research would have revealed that the tune was Hielan Laddie, the regimental March of the HLI, and clearly not a lament. This was corrected at 10pm where it was referred to simply as the sound of the pipes, but the Scottish News announced it was a lament.

If this was a solitary example of poor research, it might be understandable, but the recurring misinformation about Scottish history, perhaps forgivable when the news comes from London, is unpardonable when repeated by Scots. Clearly the teaching of Scottish history, and BBC's research needs serious re- appraisal.

T J Dowds,

Cumbernauld.