This unfinished painting was commissioned while Barnett Freedman was working as an Official War Artist during the Second World War and documents Allied preparations for D-Day in the War Room of the Portsmouth Army Base. He was made a War Artist in 1940, serving first with the British Expeditionary Force in France (alongside illustrators Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden), and then with the Admiralty until 1946, when he was awarded the CBE for his war work. This included large-scale paintings, portraits of entire ships’ crews and a lithograph of the 15-inch Gun Turret in HMS Repulse.