Ian Fyfe

Ian Herbert Fyfe (1918 or 1919 – 6 June 1944) was a British journalist for the Daily Mirror. He joined the newspaper in 1938 and during the Second World War volunteered for assignment to the airborne landings during the D-Day portion of Operation Overlord. Fyfe's Horsa glider crash-landed in Normandy and he died after being pinned by a Jeep the glider was carrying. Fyfe was the only British journalist to die on D-Day.

Earlier career Fyfe was Scottish and was born in 1918 or 1919. In January 1944, his report on the civilian victims of a German incendiary bombing in London made the front page of the Daily Mirror.

D-Day Ahead of the Normandy landings, the Daily Mirror asked for volunteers to accompany the invading troops as war correspondents. Fyfe was selected because, Procter was told, Fyfe had no children while Procter had four. On the night of 5 June, he filed what would be his final report, an account of a service given by the unit's chaplain (who accompanied them in the operation), before the men departed for France. He said that the unit's "morale has never been higher". The attack on Merville Gun Battery went ahead on 6 June. Only 150 of the assigned 600 men arrived to take part in the attack and around half of those who did were killed.

Legacy

After Fyfe's death, his wife Betty remarried; she died in the 1990s. Fyfe's brother, Crystal Palace footballer Alan Fyfe, named his son, born in 1954, after his dead brother.

Fyfe's body is possibly one of the unknown burials in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's (CWGC) Ste. Marie Cemetery at Le Havre. In addition, Fyfe is the first name to appear on the journalists' memorial, inaugurated opposite Bayeux Cemetery in 2006 and commemorating more than 2,000 journalists killed in war since 1944.