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. |
| | |  | "THAT'S MY LOT. I'VE HAD IT!" |
 | | One of the landing beaches at Arromanches in Normandy as it is today |
GERRY: "I was in the 205 Field Company Royal Engineers and I landed on D-Day on Gold Beach. We'd been in a camp in the forest in Hampshire, fastened up with barbed wire all the way round, and when we were on our way to Normandy we put all the sheeting down on lorries so we couldn't see out and nobody could see in.
We got on the boat on the 29th May and we went down towards the Bay of Biscay and back up again and we went out two or three times in the LCAs [landing craft]. Then D-Day came, it should have been two days before but the weather was so bad and so rough. We got into the boats and came down the rigging and I had a 25 pound charge on my front to blow a pill box up and a big yoke on my back with all the kit. One minute the boat's up and the next minute it's down and you had to make sure you got in the boat before you let go of the rigging and I found myself the first one in the boat.
Normally when the Royal Marines take you in, they drop the boat in shallow water then come back and me, with all this weight on, I thought: "That's my lot I've had it!" And unfortunately when the Marines went in, negotiating his way through, he dropped the ramp and the first lad went out and dropped off in 20 foot of water. I I was very, very lucky that it wasn't me. Anyway he went further in - I was only 5 foot 7, either short or tall you might say - and the water's over my head and I'm scrambling to try and get to the beach and there are people floating around you and boats coming in.
 | | BBC reporter Howard Marshall: "He was going to do a running commentary as we went on the beach but unfortunately his boat got blown up...He survived." |
In one of the boats that came alongside us was a man called Howard Marshall (right) and he was a BBC commentator and he was going to do a running commentary as we went on the beach. Unfortunately his boat got blown up. He survived, he got out, but when you're wading through water four or five feet deep with waves coming over your head and people firing at you, all hell's let loose.
Once we got onto the beach I found the pill box [Gerry's target] had been blown so I unearthed my 25 pound charge and got rid of that right quick. Then we're down on the floor and then we're under instruction to start plotting for mines to let the other tanks come though.
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