Comrades forever: how the courage of D-Day was carved in bronze | Art and design

As The 75th anniversary of D-Day unfolds, one man in particular holds his breath. Sculptor David Williams-Ellis created the centerpiece of the new British Normandy Memorial in Ver-sur-Mer, France: a trio of soldiers advancing on a triangular granite base. With its Baltic grace and lack of triumphalism, it marks the turning point of the war and represents the changing face of the war monuments of recent years.

Until April, the site on which Williams-Ellis's sculptures are located was only a green field located on a small hill overlooking a beach. This is of course not just any beach, but Gold Beach, the second of the five code names attributed by the allies to the Neptune operation, the first salvo of the liberation of France. To the northwest of the site are the mbadive concrete remains of the temporary Mulberry B port of the allies. This is where a piper will play Thursday at 7:26 am, the exact time the first man landed three-quarters of a century ago.

In recent years, the number of war memorials in the United Kingdom has increased rapidly: according to the National Register of Imperial War Museums, there are now over 80,000. And yet, of all the countries that have took part in the Allied invasion of 1945, Britain is the only one to have no dedicated memorial where the forces landed in France. That's something Williams-Ellis helped to rectify.

In his studio in Oxfordshire, the artist shows me the original sculptures he worked on, using the remaining frame of an imposing large format silhouette and a 3D digital rendering scan. of the finished piece in miniature. When we meet, the bronze is in a foundry at Basingstoke, from where it will be salvaged and placed at the back of a lowered truck, and then ferried to France. The play took months of concentration and hard work, not to mention trips to several sites in France and sessions with veterans and their children who are still 75 years old. To finally see it in place will undoubtedly be a relief.

Williams-Ellis worked with a former footballer and ballet dancer to model his statues of life: "I wanted to have leadership and camaraderie, but nothing too obvious," he says. The kit of soldiers (shovels, gas masks, water bottles, a cup) and weapons (.303 rifle, Bren machine gun and Sten gun) are reproduced with details but not hyperrealism. He knows how to cope with the human head, but these faces really pushed him: "I took the head off one of them twice, it was horrible .

Unusually for a commemorative painting, the characters rise from the base in silhouettes that are clearly flexible, because, as William Ellis says, "if you dragged, you would not survive." In 2020, the sculpture will stand in front of the neoclbadical memorial by architect Liam O'Connor – a walled enclosure with colonnades and gardens on either side. The names of the 22,442 soldiers and soldiers who died here will be inscribed on the 160 columns.

Richard Kindersley and Robbie Smith spent months creating a font to record the deceased. The Honor Roll shows rank and age: The youngest soldier Smith has met so far, was 16 years old. "It's shocking," he says. "They were children." Kindersley thinks of how they all had parents, brothers and sisters, friends: "The amount of sadness and distress accumulated had to be catastrophic."

Frances Moreton, Director of the War Memorials Trust, points out that the vast majority of memorials of the last century are not memorials, but vicarious burials for those in mourning who are buried too far away or never. But the Normandy Memorial marks the beginning of a shift in living memory towards a collective commemoration of the conflict as a whole.

Victorian memorials were often dedicated to military leaders – for example, the statues of Henry Havelock and James Napier who flank Nelson's column at Trafalgar Square – and this tradition has continued, with feld-marshals, majors and Bronze generals until the 1990s. But recent efforts have changed. The Normandy Memorial, much like the 2007 Armed Forces Memorial in Staffordshire, the 2014 Korean War memorial to London and the Iraq and Afghanistan memorial of 2017, also in the capital, all focus on casualties suffered by ordinary soldiers and civilians. Beyond that, there are modern monuments that recognize the complexity of what they represent (millions of lost lives or unknown names) that have used more abstract or symbolic forms. These include bronze maple leaves floating down the Green Park Memorial of Canada and the coat hangers and coats for women of the Second World War in Whitehall.

From an aesthetic and conceptual point of view, the Normandy Memorial is extremely conservative, its design is far removed from what one would expect from a contemporary work. This is an indirect result of the process: war memorials, as a whole, are financed and created by private funds. There is no public call for nominations, no conservation committee, no broader contribution from the world of art. This means that, contrary to the impressive sense of possibility that each new Fourth Plinth commission brings to the public – Michael Rakowitz's astonishing tin-tipped bull; Elmgreen and the funny rocking boy from Dragset – commemorative statues exist in a cultural void. Williams-Ellis was chosen by architect O'Connor, chosen by the Normandy Memorial Trust. "I think it's a good thing that they are not trying anything controversial or radical," said historian Antony Beevor, pointing out that this memorial is a tradition. It is essentially a monument for past generations.

So what about creating a commemorative sculpture in the context of the current controversy around historic statues – such as Cecil Rhodes in Oxford and Robert E Lee in Charlottesville? Williams-Ellis thinks that in 70 years, we will always think that people died on D-Day doing something that seemed good to them. And, unlike the 2012 Bomber Command Memorial, there is no doubt in the UK whether the 22,442 people should be commemorated. In France, the feelings were more mixed. Beevor highlights the considerable losses suffered by the Allies in the Calvados region. O'Connor's neoclbadical monument will include a large French memorial that indicates that nearly as many French civilians – around 20,000 – have been killed and many more wounded. Compared to the almost symbolic dedication of the Bomber Command flag – "to those of all nations that lost their lives during the bombing of 1939-1945", this offers at least the benefit of increased accuracy .

One of the most powerful aspects of last year's World War I centennial events was the attempt to fill the gaps in the way this story was told – the African porters whose names and numbers have not been registered; the incredible stories of Caribbean soldiers. Here, the three characters are white and male. If it had been in Italy or the Far East, Beevor explains, the demographics would have been different. Here, however, any ethnically diverse representation would have raised eyebrows, as only a very small percentage of the people involved were not white men. The website of the trust notes that only two were women. "We expected to be truthful," Williams-Ellis says.

He speaks of the many boxes that his sculpture had to tick – symbolism, precision, possibility of link. Mixed reactions to recent memorials show that by 2019, a memorial should at least allow for national complexity and humility. Despite the profusion of new memorials, Luytens' minimalist cenotaph is still turning heads for its deep simplicity, its few words.

What seems undeniable is that this memorial of Normandy could not be more relevant now. The irony, as Beevor puts it, is that when we do almost everything to undermine international cooperation by leaving Europe, here is a monument to one of the greatest examples of international cooperation: the liberation of Europe. Western Europe.