D-Day hero remembers: ‘You’re the assault wave, you won’t be coming back’ in heartbreaking commemorations

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.

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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.