World War II heroes share their heartbreaking tales from the D-Day Landings to commemorate 75th anniversary
ON Thursday it will be 75 years since more than 160,000 servicemen set sail to Normandy to liberate France from the Nazis in a daring top-secret assault known as D-Day.
Today, there are only a few thousand left – all men in their nineties.
Many will return to Normandy this week, including 300 veterans on a ship chartered by the Royal British Legion.
Here some of those returning heroes – and the women who played a vital role in events from home shores – tell Mike Ridley their stories of June 6 and the following 77 days of the campaign that changed Europe’s face for ever.
'The Brigadier told us in his pep talk, "You’re the assault wave – you won’t be coming back"'
Alan King, Tank Radio Operator, 27th Armoured Brigade
AS his landing craft made its way to Juno beach, Alan King found himself surrounded by flames . . . and the heads, arms and legs of dismembered British soldiers floating ashore.
It is 75 years since he witnessed the carnage of the first assault on D-Day but the memory reduces him to tears.
He still can not bring himself to go into the sea.
On the sleeve of his jacket bedecked with medals, Alan proudly wears a tiny seahorse badge. This one-inch square of bright embroidery was given only to those who were first to storm ashore on D-Day.
Their chances of being killed or maimed in that first wave on to the Normandy beaches on the morning of June 6, 1944, were even higher than at World War One’s Battle of the Somme.
Alan, now 95, will never forget the pep talk given by Brigadier George Prior-Palmer to tank crews of the 27th Armoured Brigade as they prepared to free Europe from Hitler’s tyranny.
He says: “The Brigadier told us, ‘You’re the assault wave – you won’t be coming back’. A few like me survived but many didn’t.”
Radio operator Alan, from Eye, Suffolk, and his crew had caught the last ship heading out to France from Gosport, Hants, after their Sherman tank was among several that broke down on the way to the harbour.
He remembers watching General Bernard Montgomery drive past the convoy of stranded tanks waiting to be repaired and recalls: “Monty was in a vile temper as he went by in his car.”
Then, after a night spent bucking and rolling in the choppy English Channel with no rations or sleep, a Naval officer stuck his head around the corner of the ship’s metal corridor and said: “Oh you poor buggers, you’re going now.”
Just after 7am, as the tiny Landing Ship Tank 3204 approached the Normandy coast, it looked as if Juno Beach was on fire.
At 7.26am the battleship HMS Warspite launched a broadside – the starting signal for the assault.
Alan recalls: “There was a small infantry ship alongside us which was hit by a German shell. It sank and the soldiers were thrown overboard.
“The men were all in the water, thrashing about. Some were dead, some were injured. Others were trying to save themselves.
“The ship went over the top of them and they were all chopped up into bits by the propellers.
“As we went in, legs, arms, bodies and heads floated along in with us on a rising tide. It was a terrible sight.”
The landing ship was carrying a lorry which was also hit by a shell and burst into flames. Alan says: “The lorry was blazing like mad and the tank behind it rammed it off the ship.
Four tanks blundered off on to the shore.“The beach masters were shouting at us to fire this way and that but because the tank had been so heavily waterproofed, we couldn’t turn the turret or fire the gun.
“Then they were shouting, ‘Get off the beach, get off the beach!’
“So we went hell for leather across two roads, out into the countryside where we found a big depression where the Germans had been digging soil to make defences. We got into the hole to try to scrape off some of the waterproofing.
“Shells were going one way, bullets the other way. I was terrified.
“The radios were no use. The British dialects were so strong you couldn’t understand what was being said, especially when they started swearing. It was a shambles.
“Our officer, Goodwin his name was, said, ‘I think I’d better go and see what is happening’. But Jerry spotted him, dropped a mortar and he got hit in the back with shrapnel. He went back on the same ship he came in on.”
Separated from their regiment and with no orders to follow, the crew of Alan’s Sherman made their own way until they found other tanks.
He says: “There was a scream overhead and word went round that there was a German Tiger tank in the woods ahead. An officer came up with what they called a tank destroyer.
“It had a bigger gun than what the German tank carried but it had no armour at all. It took a direct hit and bits flew everywhere.”
Later, they found themselves leading a convoy, and Alan’s tank was hit as it climbed a railway embankment.
Infantrymen managed to drag the crew out. As they waited for the Sherman to be repaired, they caught their first sleep in days.
Alan says: “The only thing we did have in the way of food was cans of cocoa or soup.”
After smashing through “Rommel’s asparagus” – wooden poles strung with wire to entangle British paratroopers and gliders – they fought German Panzers near Pegasus Bridge.
Later, they were ordered to attack a chateau near Sannerville being used as SS headquarters. Alan, who worked as an engineer in Suffolk after his military career ended, says: “I looked through my periscope and I saw a German stand up as calm as can be with his bazooka.
“Bang, off went our left-hand track. Shells were coming in all ways. Our tanks were being blown up right, left and centre. In his memoirs Monty said, ‘We lost a few’. We lost nearly 400 tanks in one day.”
On July 9, Alan’s crew was still in the thick of the action north of Caen when the tank commander, Cpl Louis Wilkes, dropped down from the turret, blood pouring from his head.
Alan says: “I dived under the gun and held him in my arms while we got him to a field dressing station, where the medics laid him out. I had lost my best friend. He was 27 years old and married with two children.
“We rolled him up in his blankets and buried him in a grave we dug ourselves in an orchard, placing his tin hat to mark where we laid him.”
Forty years later Alan found his friend’s grave had been moved to the military cemetery at Cambes-en-Plaine.
Alan’s story features in a new book A Time To Fight, by Robert Anderson, published by Uniform.
Read the remarkable stories of the returning veterans from our superb souvenir pullout
- What happened on D-Day, as told by the heroes
- D-Day veteran remembers being told: ‘You’re the assault wave, you won’t be coming back’
- D-Day veteran remembers not caring about the German loss of life but how seeing the horses being killed really stuck with him
- Wren officer recalls how she found out her secret fiancé had been killed on Sword Beach
- One of Britain's last surviving D-Day heroes talks of liberating France with a fold-up bike and a misfiring gun
- Two fearless D-Day veterans in their nineties are to parachute into Normandy, 75 years after they first landed there
- Rod Stewart sang his hit Sailing to D-Day veterans ahead of 75th anniversary
'We were firing two-pounders – like pea-shooters against the Panzers with their 88mm guns'
Les Reeves, Corporal, Royal Armoured Corps
IT was 3pm on D-Day before tank driver Cpl Les Reeves, who was attached to 261 Royal Armoured Corps, landed on Juno Beach.
A veteran of El Alamein, he had already been in combat many times but was still extremely nervous.
Les, who will be 95 on June 16, says: “Those who said they weren’t nervous were either fools or liars.
“We hit the sea and we were submerged before the beach appeared in front of you. Our first hit was a German pillbox, which we blew up from 150 yards.
“We were firing two- pounders, which were like pea-shooters against the Panzers which were equipped with 88mm guns.
“The Germans had superior arms. The best pistol in the world was the Luger. They had the best machine-gun of the war, the Spandau, and, of course, they had the Tiger tank.
“How did we win the war? We steamrolled them but would never have won if the Yanks hadn’t come in.”
Les drove his Churchill tank through Normandy, survived the carnage at Arnhem in the failed Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge before pressing on into Germany. Near Osna-bruck, the first tank in a convoy of three was hit.
The next thing Les remembers is waking up in hospital in Oxford nine days later. The rest of his tank’s crew had all been killed. Les only survived because a metal plate attached to the tank’s turret protected him from the blast.
But a piece of metal lodged in his head, leaving him blind for six months and paralysed down one side.
Les returned home, to Walsall, West Mids, was married for 62 years to Della and ran his own business selling frozen food and commercial fridges.
After the attack, it was another year before movement returned to his right hand, arm and leg.
Les added: “It seems to me that sadly anyone under 55 doesn’t even know what D-Day was. They don’t know about Operation Market Garden.”
Les has a severely autistic relative and was recently informed by a council official that a meeting about their welfare had been arranged for November 11.
He says: “I told the woman, who was in her late thirties, ‘We can’t do that – it’s Armistice Day’.
“She replied, ‘It may be important to you but not to me’. I was disgusted."
'You could see all the blown- up crafts and bodies there in the water, dead or slowly moving'
Leonard Emmings, Coxswain, Royal Navy
LEONARD “TED” EMMINGS was the coxswain of a Royal Navy landing craft bringing soldiers on to Juno Beach on the morning of D-Day.
Carrying a platoon of 36 from the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, Ted (in forefront of inset pic) steered his landing craft toward the shore.
He says: “Our mission was, ‘Whatever you do, you’ve got to get your troops off’.
“We were told, ‘It doesn’t matter what is going on around you – it’s your job to put the soldiers on the beach’.”
Arriving under a hail of gunfire, Ted’s craft hit an obstacle and his crew had to kick its ramp down.
Despite the damage, Ted’s crew were able to get all 36 troops out and on to the beach.
He recalls: “We were one of the first lot to hit Juno Beach – the first wave.” But what Ted, from Guildford, Surrey, saw that day will never leave him.
He says: “You got in as far as you could. You dropped your ramp and that was the signal to come out. That is when they were picked off.”
The landing-craft coxswains spent days at the Normandy beaches in the initial assault, bringing more and more troops to further the Allied advance.
Les says: “We were one of the first waves in but when we came back later on during the day, you could see all the blown-up landing craft and the bodies of the guys in the water – both dead and the ones slowly moving.” At one point, Ted’s craft hit an obstacle which detonated a mine.
He says matter-of-factly: “We sank and got picked up out of the water. We didn’t have time to be scared.”
Having survived that day, Ted saw many Canadian friends, who he had spent months training with, perish on the Normandy beaches. He says: “They came over here, trained over here, died over here. They never made it across the beach.
“People should be told about it. I feel so sorry for the Canadians. I wonder how many of those got back to Canada one way or another.”
Having lost so many of his mates, Ted has not missed a memorial since.
The 95-year-old says: “I always go to Bayeux cemetery because two of my crew are there.”
After the war, Ted worked for the Forestry Commission until he retired – but losing all those friends will always haunt him. He says: “We won the war in the end but whether it was worth it I don’t know.
“I feel so sorry for the Canadians, as a lot didn’t get to go back home.”
' The sight sticks with me – the wounds were terrible. Most of them never made it home '
Ted Cordery, Torpedo Operator, HMS Belfast
A VETERAN’S tears of grief for his fallen friends, 75 years after they died at Normandy, showed the nation just how raw the wounds of D-Day remain.
In February Ted Cordery, 91, moved viewers when he wept on Good Morning Britain and said: “I lost shipmates I served with. I’ve seen their ashes go over the side.”
He added: “I’m not the hero – they are the heroes.”
As an able seaman on HMS Belfast on D-Day, Ted helped as dozens of wounded soldiers were brought off the beaches.
He told viewers: “These soldiers could have been wounded a mile or two inland.
“They were put on a cart, and brought down to the beach. The wounds were terrible.
Most of them never made it. They were taken to sick bays where most of them died.”
He added: “It’s such a waste of a young life. I try to imagine how they suffered from a mile inland until they were lifted on to the ship.”
Ted was 18 when he volunteered in 1942, choosing to join the Navy because his four brothers were in the Army. He already knew the harsh realities of war. At 15, he had seen his home in West Ham in East London bombed.
He joined HMS Belfast and became a torpedo operator. When the ship was brought in to support the D-Day landings, Ted opened fire on the enemy. He said: “We were firing from the Belfast with the help of a spotter plane to provide support for the initial landings and provide cover fire for the troops.
“The sight of all those troops being lowered into the water from the ships, some you knew would never make it to land, was just astounding.
“It’s a memory that sticks with me – all those small boats full of men trying to get up on to the beaches . . . and the sight of those that didn’t make it.”
Ted added: “When I landed on the beaches I saw the devastation. A few days later, out of nowhere, a local Frenchman passed on a bike, spat at my feet then carried on.
“I was so angry and started to go after him. Luckily, my commanding officer told me to calm down and I stopped.
“I thought, ‘He doesn’t know who I am and what I’m doing there. He could have lost his home, same as me’.”
After the war, Ted worked as a Fleet Street printer. He married and lived in Oxford.
'When I joined the Normandy veterans, there were 170 of us. There are just four of us left now'
Percy Lewis, Signalman, 1st Battalion Black Watch
SIGNALMAN Percy Lewis was 21 on D-Day. His regiment suffered huge losses on Sword Beach and in the days that followed he ended up serving with the 1st Battalion Black Watch in a unit made up of men from other regiments.
He said: “We were advancing through Holland. There was a bit of expected scrapping but after a week or so we advanced on this small village near a forest at night.
“The way you advance, one platoon goes forward, then two platoons come up and you stop. And then they go through you. You are leapfrogging all the time.
“We didn’t know where we were and I was told to send a signal back that we were all right because it was quiet. I couldn’t get through so was sent back on foot.”
On his way back, Percy was captured by German paratroopers. He was taken into a building where he found a fellow soldier on the floor, covered in a blanket, begging for help for his hand.
Percy said: “There was hardly anything of his right hand. It was all bleeding and two German medics were doing nothing.
“I took out his field dressing and started bandaging it up. I put the tourniquet on and asked if he was all right. I’d just got him some water when someone dragged me up from behind.”
A German officer with a rifle pushed Percy up a flight of stairs where he was greeted by gunfire and the sight of a Panzer tank. He had been captured by the German 6th Parachute regiment and was handed over to the 122nd Panzer Grenadiers, shackled and placed in a makeshift cell in the cellar of a nearby castle.
Percy, from Windsor, Berks, said: “There were three beds with two blokes lying on the other two, but the beds were just the raw springs. The other two men were asleep but covered head to toe in mud, and they stank.”
For the next ten days a German commander interrogated him daily about his mission, division and unit as the number of men in the cell grew from three to 25.
Eventually he was released, and after the war Percy returned to carpentry, the trade he learned before war broke out.
He has returned to Arromanches in Normandy to remember his fallen friends almost every year since 1984.
He said: “When I first joined the Normandy veterans, Surrey branch, there were 170 of us.
“There are just four of us left now.”
'There was so much noise with bombs dropping everywhere – you couldn’t hear yourself talk'
Joe Corless
Commando, Royal Marines
BOY soldier Joe Corless lied about his age to sign up at 16 – and marked his 19th birthday battling enemy fire at D-Day.
Joe, 93, says: “A lot went in as boys but you came out a man – a lot wiser.”
The son of a Boer War veteran, Joe adds: “On my 16th birthday I cycled 32 miles to Plymouth with two friends and we volunteered for the Marines. We told them we were 18 and we got away with it. They needed young men.”
Recalling D-Day itself, Joe, from Bridgend, says: “On landing, all we saw was water and about 7,000 ships.
“We were driving the boat in and out all the time.
“On the initial landing, the blokes had to go over the side and swim. After that, you’d drop your ramp on the beach and the blokes would run ashore.
“We would go to and fro bringing people in off the different ships.
“We had sailors, commandos and shallow-water divers – or frogmen – whose jobs were to cut the barbed wire and disarm explosives.
“The naval ships were shelling and there were bombs dropping all over the place. You couldn’t hear yourself talk.
“Instead, we communicated by semaphore.”
Joe landed at Lion-sur- Mer on Sword Beach – under heavy enemy fire. He says: “We didn’t know where they were, but they had guns up there damaging us.
“There were six-inch anti-personnel shells. They would scatter their shrapnel and make holes in your boat. I was just standing there and lucky nobody shot me.”
Instead, Joe – armed with two Lewis guns on his craft – managed to take out an enemy plane. He says: “These two German dive bombers came in and we all had to open fire and we hit one and destroyed it. A report came over the tannoy, ‘Well done, Marines!’.
To align his craft, Joe was given a map reference of a house up on the hill.
Years later, he returned to Normandy with fellow former Marine George Davis, who recalls: “We found the house, and when we saw the front, Joe recognised it. He was absolutely thrilled to bits this house was still there.”
Joe became an engineer after the war, working in power stations and chemical plants. But he never forgot the friends he lost in battle.
He says: “You had mates going in but you didn’t have them when you come back. But it was what we trained for – and I have never gloried in it.
“The survivors are all getting older now but D-Day should never be forgotten – like those close friends we lost.”
'I didn’t care about the German loss of life, but the horses being killed really stuck with me'
Albert Price, Tank Operator, Royal Dragoons
HAVING watched his friends die during a training exercise six weeks earlier, Albert Price was one of the first men on to Gold Beach.
At 18 years of age, he had been part of Operation Smash, the largest live-ammunition practice of World War Two.
It was supposed to herald the success of the new DD Valentine tanks which could “sail” on the sea then drive on land. But instead of a successful preparation for D-Day, five tanks sank and six men perished.
Albert, 93, who now lives in Solihull, West Mids, says: “I managed to get out when my tank started to go down but other men weren’t so lucky. We knew we had to do it again in Normandy so we put it behind us and focused on the task in hand.”
Albert had joined the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards in 1942 and he says of June 6, 1944: “When we set off I think all of us felt very proud, but none of us knew we’d be taking part in something that would go down in history.”
After landing, Albert’s unit happened upon an enemy building in the distance and groups of retreating soldiers.
“There were lots of German infantry marching away,” he recalls. “I remember how archaic their columns looked – there were no tanks or armoured vehicles.
“There were horses pulling things and what looked like furniture vans. We fired upon them and while I didn’t care about the German loss of life, the horses being killed really stuck with me.” But Albert’s D-Day ended after a skirmish with the 12th Panzer division on day two.
He says: “I had my head on the tank telescope. I heard a loud blast and someone shouting, ‘We’ve been hit’. It was like a sheet of red came across my entire face.”
With blood pouring from a head wound sustained from the telescope, Albert fled out of the tank.
He says: “There was machine gun fire all around us. I was shot in my left foot and a ricochet hit my right shoulder.
“A fire was raging so I backed away as best I could. I was still trying to move when a black figure walked past me.
“I barely recognised him as our driver because he was burned so badly.”
Albert was eventually rescued and taken back to an aid station.
He says: “My tags said I was Catholic even though I wasn’t and the padre came and gave me my last rites as I waited evacuation.”
After the war, Albert lived in Canada for 11 years. He returned to Britain and worked in insurance.
Recalling a return to Normandy, he said: “I found the graves of the men I served with but I prefer to remember them as the men they were, not the men buried there.”
'I found out at work my fiancé had been killed'
Marion Loveland, Wren Third Officer, Royal Navy
MARION LOVELAND was working in the Navy pay office on D-Day.
But she remembers June 6 for all the wrong reasons because her fiancé, marine commando Alec Aldis, died serving his country on Sword Beach.
Marion, 97, from Southampton, recalls: “Alec and I hadn’t told anyone about us. I read in the lists he’d been killed and from then on I lost my love of service and left the Navy.”
Marion was familiar with Forces life, as her father was a colonel in the Royal Marines and her mother was a Wren during World War One.
Marion says: “I grew up on a barracks so it was a life I already knew. I’d got a job at BP in London but then war broke out so I signed up to serve.”
The 18-year-old was posted to Eastney Barracks, Hants, where her father served, and it is there she met Alec, a signal officer in 41 Commando Royal Marines. She says: “He was very reticent to pursue anything because of who my father was.”
With the war ratcheting up, Marion was posted to The Old Naval College in Greenwich, far from her fiancé. She recalls: “The last time I saw Alec, a few days before D-Day, he asked me to marry him at Christmas when he got back.”
But Alec landed on Sword Beach, which had very little cover, and was killed. Marion recalls: “I was at work and saw a report saying he’d been KIA. It affected me badly and after that I wanted to leave the Navy.”
While her engagement had been a secret, Marion’s parents knew she had suffered a loss. She says: “Dad didn’t know the details but they knew I’d been hugely affected.”
Marion returned to her job at BP and met her husband Stuart, who she married in 1947.
While she will pay her respects today to those who lost their lives, she will also be celebrating her 98th birthday. She says: “It is D-Day memorials first then maybe lunch in a restaurant.”
On her birthday in 1944, she recalls: “I went to dinner with friends and saw planes flying over.
“It didn’t even cross my mind that Alec wouldn’t come back.”
' I helped draw landing maps in total secrecy '
Christian Lamb, Plottings Officer, Royal Navy
WHEN teenager Christian Lamb joined the Wrens, one of her main concerns was what type of hat she would wear.
But her skills landed her in Churchill’s office in Whitehall making top-secret maps for the D-Day invasion.
Now, 99, Christian, from Battersea, South West London, recalls: “I joined the Wrens in 1939 at 19. I discovered I was going to be a rating, so I wouldn’t have an officer’s hat. Disaster!
“I had to have the worst hat instead.”
Christian was offered a job at head office but says: “I had joined to be surrounded by naval ships full of luscious- looking sailors. So I said, ‘No thanks!’ ”
Transferred to Plymouth as a plottings officer working on the radar covering the Atlantic, she would enjoy nights out with submariners returning from the Med.
She says: “We all had great fun and parties on board the submarines.” Later transferred to Belfast, Christian met John Lamb, a First Lieutenant. She recalls: “We got engaged in ten days. We were married for about 70 years with three children and seven grandchildren.”
Christian was transferred to Churchill’s Whitehall office in 1943 where she helped prepare maps for the Normandy landings under total secrecy.
She says: “There were many of us working on individual pieces of the jigsaw but none of us knew what the others were doing. My brief was to pinpoint everything identifiable that could be seen from the bridge of an approaching landing craft.
“The large-scale Ordnance Survey maps showed all those roads, churches, castles and every possible feature that would be visible.
“Anything notable, I put on my maps. It had to be accurate.
“Churchill had an office upstairs and we used to see secret people doing all sorts of exciting things.”
Christian was then posted to Falmouth to join her husband, who had returned with a convoy.
She says: “When D-Day came, I remember hearing reports on the radio.
“It was absolutely thrilling. They probably used my maps to make a base for their plans.”
'I gunned the engines. The craft lurched and a shell fell where we had been seconds earlier'
Tom Hill, Coxswain, Royal Marines
AFTER spending 16 days on Sword Beach, Tom Hill believes he was fortunate to survive.
Tom, 93, from Purley, Berks, was 17 when he signed up to the Royal Marines in 1943.
“To join other regiments you had to be 18,” he recalls with a smile.
Working as a tool setter – a protected profession – Tom gave up his job to serve his country.
“We had no idea D-Day was happening,” he says. “We were on a ship in Portsmouth and we would often pick up Army soldiers and take them to Scotland, so we presumed it was a normal day, a normal job.”
But when 18-year-old Tom, a landing craft coxswain, saw the soldiers handling French money, he suspected something different was about to happen.
On the SS Empire Battleaxe, Tom was part of a flotilla that landed at Sword Beach. He and his crew of four had to ferry soldiers in Landing Craft Assaults, or LCAs, from the main ships into the shallows at Sword to fight.
Tom says: “I could see other LCAs with their doors blown off.
“There was one beside me. The sergeant had one engine and couldn’t fire the other. The body of one of our troops was wrapped on the propeller.”
Tom and his crew ferried in hundreds of troops and supplies to advance the attack.
“One day we were eating when I had an urge to gun the LCA’s engines. As it lurched forward, a shell landed where we’d been a few seconds earlier. I can’t explain it to this day.”
Just days after their narrow escape, Tom’s craft was delivering letters when a captain told them to stay over on one side of the boat. Intrigued, Tom’s team rounded on the ship only to realise a shell had gone down its hatch, killing every soldier inside.
Tom and his crew continued their work, but on their 16th day they were hit and their LCA sank.
“We swam to an American tugboat,” Tom recalls. “The captain told us they were returning to America and did the four of us want to come.
“But we rejoined a British ship and were given five days’ survivors leave.
“My sister came to Portsmouth to visit me for the day.”
When he rejoined his unit after leave, they started an 11-month commission all over the Pacific.
Tom, a school caretaker for 38 years before he retired, says: “While I’ve been fortunate to marry, have children and live a long life, it is never easy being one of the lucky ones. So many good men I served with didn’t get to see the world in peace.
'We lived and slept inside those tanks and they were not built for comfort. It was claustrophobic'
Ian Forsyth, Trooper, 11th Armoured Division
FOR Ian Forsyth, D-Day was only the start of an 11-month odyssey.
He went on to survive being blown up in his tank and liberate the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp.
Ian, from Rosehearty, Aberdeenshire, was a 20-year-old trainee teacher when he took part in the Normandy Landings as a radio operator.
He said: “As well as operating the wireless it was also my job to load the gun.”
The trooper’s 11th Armoured Division broke out of the Normandy beachhead and harried Hitler’s Nazis all the way back to Germany.
They headed to Northern France and then Belgium where they captured Antwerp. By March 1945, they had also captured the German city of Lubeck.
Ian, 95, recalls: “It was a constant battle. You got brief periods of respite before you were on the go again.
“We lived and slept inside those tanks and they were not built for comfort. They were claustrophobic and very warm.”
Three times Ian was in a tank that was hit by shells – but he says: “The worst that happened to me was losing my front teeth and suffering an injury to my hand.
“It all depended which side you were on when the shell hit.
“Sadly others weren’t so lucky. There were only three of us left at the end of the war from a troop of 20.”
In April 1945, Ian and his troop arrived at Bergen-Belsen.
The Brits were un- prepared for the sight of 60,000 emaciated sick prisoners – and more than 13,000 corpses. Tears fill Ian’s eyes as he recalls: “I couldn’t believe what I saw. The smell from the decomposing bodies was unbelievable.
“Prisoners were looking at us through the barbed wire. We disobeyed orders and threw food over the fence.
“But the folk at the back crushed forward and trampled to death the folk at the front. We made a bad, bad mistake but we didn’t know any better.”
Ian’s war didn’t finish until the surrender of Hitler’s successor Admiral Donitz on May 4, 1945.
Returning home, he finished his training and went on to teach engineering. He now lives in Hamilton, Lanarks.
The grandfather of five had two daughters with his wife Margaret, who passed away in 2008 – and he also has three great-grandchildren. Memories of the war stay with him.
He said: “I thought I was going to help to change the world – it wasn’t long after D-Day before I lost that dream and I was fighting to survive.”
'We believed we’d survive. If you’re flying through bullets, someone will always survive'
John Bell, Bomb Aimer, Bomber Command
WHEN the war started in 1939, John Bell was 16 and took his father’s advice to leave school and get a job “because the war won’t last long”.
He started work as an office boy at an accountancy firm in the City of London but, inspired by hearing the Battle of Britain overhead in 1940, he joined the RAF as soon as he was 18.
John, now 96 and living in Worthing, West Sussex, said: “I was 6ft 4in and was told I was too tall to be a pilot, so I signed up as an observer-navigator and had gun training in South Africa. In 1943 I was assigned to Lancasters as a bomb aimer.”
A member of 619 Squadron, John and his crew flew all over France and Germany in the months before D-Day as part of the RAF’s Bomber Command.
With crews expected to perform 50 ops before going on brief leave, John and his six fellow airmen spent the first few months of 1944 flying over Northern France.
He said: “There were targets and we didn’t know at the time but they were all connected to the invasion – ammunition dumps, factories and the like, all targets that could have had an implication on the success of the invasion.”
On June 5, John’s crew were told the invasion would happen the next day and they would have a pivotal role.
The squadron of 28 Lancasters was split into groups.
Taking it in turns, each group would fly two miles apart, at 180mph, for a minute and 20 seconds before flying back on themselves for one minute. Every three seconds, each plane dropped aluminium strips known as chaff to jam German radar signals.
John, who is originally from Storrington, said: “Every hour we’d be replaced by another formation who would do the same thing. It was to make the Germans consider whether they had enough reinforcements on the beaches or if they needed more in the skies.
“We were excited, and if any of us felt nerves then no one said anything.
“It was a great feeling and we were proud to take part.”
As the end of the crew’s 50 operations approached, John recalled: “We believed we’d survive. Our rear gunner had a wife and child and was a few years older than the rest of us.
“He’d tell us we’d have to get home, and we believed him.
“If you’re flying through bullets, someone will always survive.”
After the war John saw service in Cyprus, Singapore and Washington DC before finally leaving the RAF as a Wing Commander in 1977.
'I came out of our radio station on the Dover cliff and there was Churchill coming up the path'
Patricia Davies, Special Duties Linguist, Women’s Royal Naval Service
AS a schoolgirl recovering at home from tuberculosis, Patricia Davies passed the time by chatting to the Austrian cook and housemaid who had been hired to help her mother.
By the outbreak of war, she was 16 and fluent in German – making her the perfect recruit as a Wren translator.
Now 95, Patricia, from Chiswick, West London, said: “I joined in the spring of 1942, aged 18, and I was a special duties linguist, trained to intercept German naval radio signals.
“We were based on an isolated little radio receiving station on top of the cliff in Dover.
Churchill visited five times in order to be seen in the area as part of Operation Fortitude – to make the Germans think we were going to land at Calais.
“I’d been on night duty and came out of this building at eight o’clock in the morning and there was Churchill coming up the cliff path and I think Monty was with him and a lot of staff officers.
“I thought, ‘What on earth was the Prime Minister doing on top of our isolated cliff at eight o’clock on a spring morning?’ Of course, he went to look at the coast opposite and no doubt intended to be seen in the area.”
She continued: “We were all intensely aware D-Day was going to happen.
“Our Wren officer went on June 5 to Dover Castle to get sealed orders, but the invasion was postponed because of the weather, so we were all on edge.
“Then at about four the next morning, one of the Wrens who had been on duty came rushing round all of our bedrooms, saying, ‘It’s started, it’s started!’
“We got dressed and went out on top of the cliff, but there was nothing you could see from where we were.
“There was always a lot of shelling of Dover – which was known as Hellfire Corner.
They shelled the town and also tried to hit these convoys that passed by right underneath the cliff.
“We saw one little ship hit directly by a shell and it exploded and caught fire. That was very sad.”
Patricia added: “My 21st birthday was a week after D-Day and I was very unsure whether we would be able to celebrate but we did.
“Our friends came to our Wrens’ station and we had a proper party.”
After the war, Patricia became a BBC producer, working on The Sky At Night.
She said: “I still keep in touch with two of my colleagues, both well into their nineties, and we did go back to Dover last spring for our first return to our station on top of the cliff.
“The house is now a luxury hotel – slightly different inside from when it was full of radio sets and bunks.”