June 2004
"I was too young to have a rifle. I had a brush stick instead..!" | |
|  | | Peter Strachan and Gerry Briscoe in 2004...Sixty years after they landed on the D-Day beaches |
| | Sixty years ago Bradford's Gerry Briscoe and Peter Strachan (left) were young, fresh-faced...and about to go to war in the biggest land battle ever seen in the history of the world. Sixty years on, they tell us what it was like to be a teenager going into war. |
| | | WHY BOTHER talking to two local men, one 79-years-old the other 81-years-old, about stuff that happened 60 years ago?
Well, though it might be difficult to imagine in an age of World War 2 virtual reality games on the PC or Playstation, it wasn't such a long time ago that real teenagers and young men were out there on the battlefields of Europe, fighting an enemy enemy that was fighting with real weapons...and there was no 'Play Again' or 'Restart' option in those days...
Still not convinced? Well, if you're young, male and healthy in 2004 - but were then somehow transported back in time to the 1940s - you'd come face-to-face with the biggest battle in history. It's a scary thought: there was nothing virtual about that...it was reality!
Over to Gerry and Peter...and be warned, some of this makes uncomfortable reading.
 | TEENAGERS GO TO WAR |
What's it like being a teenager, not that long after having been at school, suddenly thrown into war?
 | | Then: Gerry Briscoe |
GERRY (who started off in the Home Guard): I come from Doncaster originally. At Spotborough there's a very steep hill and we had to carry this bloke who weighed about 12 stone. We had to carry him up thise hill and I said: "That's me finished. I'm not going to go in the Home Guard anymore!"
So I went to Sheffield to volunteer for the Navy. Three of us butcher's lads went and volunteered and we wanted to be ordinary seamen. We didn't want to go down below decks or anything like that. Blood and guts, that's what we thought as youngsters. Now [my friend] Kenny Empson, he managed to get in as an ordinary seaman and there were no vacancies for Kenny Morris and myself. So, we went back about a month after and we passed 'A1'-fit. There were no vacancies for ordinary seamen…So I came back to Doncaster, went to the Guild Hall Recruiting Office and there was a poster there that said: 'Wanted! Grenadier Guards'. So I went in and this Sergeant looked down on me and says: "Now, son, what do you want?" I said, "I've come to join the guards, Sir." He said, "Come back when you're five inches bigger!"
So...I joined the Engineers instead!.
 | | Then: Peter Strachan |
PETER: I'll tell you how prepared we was. I was standing with this rifle with six bullets, waiting for the Germans to come across. Now, some of the Italians were fighting against us as well and they didn't want to fight. We had some Italian prisoners at Eden camp [a prison camp in North Yorkshire - now a museum] and we got one to clean out our hut, and this particular night - bear in mind that I'm 16-and-a-half - it's absolutely freezing, really freezing. Now, I had to go out on guard at 12 o'clock at night, our blankets were frozen and this Italian prisoner was lying in bed. There's no way I'm not going out there, so I went over, and said to him: "Take this rifle and go out on guard." Annd he did my guard for me and that's how we sorted it out in those days. But, of course, we slowly got round to realising there was a war on. One day we accidentally caught a German plane going over with a searchlight and, what a nasty thing to do, he went and fired bullets down at us!
| THE LANDINGS: "You had to take a deep breath and run like hell!" |
Peter and Gerry were both on the Normandy beaches on 6th June 1944...
PETER: I came ashore at Juno beach. I was just a little over to the left-hand side of Arromanches, but for us it was just something that we had to do.
For the younger people of today they see all the boats and that sort of thing but we didn't stand there saying '1,2,3,4'. We weren't thinking about that. We were thinking about landing there and making sure we were going to live through our war days. But once you got started, in all my time I never thought about getting killed until the last three months when the war was finishing. I'd lie in bed in this posh school and I thought to myself: "You'll be out of the army in three months. You'd better be careful you don't get killed or something." I just don't think you thought about it.
 | | Minutes to go: A modern day BBC reconstruction of the D-Day landings |
GERRY: The thing I remember is once I got on the beach I'd got my 25 pound [explosive] charge and, of course, you had to lay down until you'd got everything sorted out and there was a little ridge about 18 inches. Now when I saw the film The Longest Day, I think it was in the Gaumont Cinema, and I was with my wife and I jumped up and shouted: "It's there!" I actually saw the little part of the beach where it was and it's incredible.
I was looking out and then the tanks started coming, these flotation tanks started coming in. I looked back and these bullets are whipping round and I kept saying: "I'd love to be in one of these things there" and all of a sudden they started sinking and I thought: "Thank God I'm not in one of those now!"
We had to run between two hillocks and the Germans were just whipping their machine gun bullets through there and the Devons and Dorsets [soldiers] hadn't got up as far to get to these hillocks. I've been back several times to Normandy and I stood on the hill where these guns were and you can just imagine them just knocking us off, straight down the beach there.
The lad next to me had been hit and then he got hit again...I don't think he was dead, just winged a couple of times. We had to run in between these two hillocks.
You had to take a deep breath and run like hell and then once you'd got to the other side the Germans would just whip through with the bullets again, and then you'd had to start laying down and prodding for mines.
The day went on and I've no recollection of what happened. People say it's quite normal for your memories to just go.
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