D-Day Part 1

We were sitting in the lounge (108 Wood Lane End, Hemel Hempstead), on 3rd September 1939. I was at the tender age of 15 and the news of the War came over on the wireless and of course being young, I remember thinking it was all going to be one made adventure and I remember we were all scuttled down to the local Red Triangle Club, to be fitted with gas masks which of course as a kid we thought was really rather fun. My Mother panicked and started to stock up the food cupboard as if we were about to be starved out tomorrow, you know really comical.

I had one Brother and 1 Sister and my Father told me when it was pretty obvious that we were going to have to join the forces. He said I was in the Army in the First World War and I wouldn’t want you to enlist and we didn’t, we both joined the Navy.

My Brother was lucky because when War broke out he was already studying fulltime at an Aeronautical College whose Diploma’s are Navy recognised and so having got his Diploma fell straight into the Navy with a technical commission and that was alright, but muggings here wasn’t so lucky, I was 2 years younger, I was only 15 when the war started and I thought well blow the Army I’m not going to wait until I was called up for the Army and be put into some horrible regiment of foot slogger, so I joined the Navy on the lower deck and volunteered before my time came and to cut a long story short nobody wants all the details of naval training it is all really rather boring but, to cut a long story short I ended up by being in the right place at the right time, as a Naval Sub-Lieutenant on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.

I was a member of a crew of a tank landing craft. Now these were curious things, they were originally called TLC’s Tank Landing Crafts, until presumably some wag realised that TLC can also be Tender Loving Care and so the Admiralty in their wisdom decided to put it back to front as the forces always do, putting the adjective behind the noun, they called them Landing Craft Tank, they were 186ft long, 38ft wide and they drew at maximum 4ft of water, because you see they had to get onto the beaches and in a cross wind it was like trying to push a tin tray around the sea, it really was quite difficult a science all its own.

In the Navy from time to time in memorial to run your ship aground was the height of incompetence and here were we trained precisely to do that. When we got onto the beaches in Normandy, Gold Beach by the way all these things that people write about, people who weren’t there and they show aircraft at about 100ft or something — nonsense, I hardly saw a single aircraft all that day, because visibility was bad in addition to which you had the early morning mist which was rolling inland, you had the smoke of the guns, which was also rolling inland and visibility was pretty ropy, as for seeing aircraft well you just couldn’t and the Sea was pretty choppy as well. We had on board us 2 fair sized tanks, 4 self-propelled guns that are rather like a tank with an extra large gun and a few lorries and jeeps.

When we found the right beach there was a great Lighthouse on top of a cliff at a place called Ver Du Mere in Normandy. What we were supposed to do was bombard the fortifications around the Lighthouse, to stop them from firing at us. While our troops went in for about half hour or more we bombarded with these huge guns. Well of course, in practice and we had plenty of that, we had never used live ammunition, when the bombardment was complete we turned around 180º and went out again to give the soldier time to get in, one soldier came up to me and said is that cabin yours and I said yes, why? He said I’m afraid you won’t recognise it now and I said why and he said you go take a look. The blessed guns had sent shattering vibrations right through the ship and everything had been torn off the walls and landed in a heap on the floor and just a I was recovering from this the Cook came up and he said excuse me sir, we haven’t got a single cup or plate in the galley, the whole ship’s crockery had been reduced to a huge pile of clippings, of course, we got it replaced but it was rather curious.

When we got past the Needles near Southampton where we actually left for on D-Day the Captain asked me to go and fetch him the sealed Orders, now these were rather large documents, so large in fact that they wouldn’t fit into the ships metal safe, so they had to be locked in a wardrobe cupboard, I said I believe you have the key to the cupboard, the Captain searched around in his pockets, he couldn’t find that key. I then went out to the soldiers and should out in a very loud voice “are there any professional burglar’s on board”, one big hulking soldier came up to me and said what do you want done, I thought I wouldn’t want to meet you on a dark night. I said well it’s a simple matter of picking a lock and he did it in 10 seconds flat.

The Orders went straight to the Bridge, when we opened them it was amazing because we had complete photographs of the beach we were going to. These photographs were compiled I understand from photographs sent in by pre-war holiday makers and also from midget submarines of course when the Germans weren’t looking. They had a complete panorama of the beach we were going to invade and even which guns were likely to be able to hit us.

Just as we were coming off the beach, I looked inland and saw a whacking great tank on the hill, up there barely half a mile away and I thought this is funny we’ve got the 1st tanks — they’ve got in shore pretty quickly, all of a sudden I realised he’s no friend of ours. The prodigies started hurtling towards us. The first one landed with a mighty splash to port that’s on the left, the next one started with a mighty splash to port that’s on the left, the next one started with a mighty splash to starboard that’s on the right. I thought oh dear, you’ve got the range I wonder where no three will land and just at that moment, we had a little radio set on the Bridge picking up the voice of the Beach Master who was organising things on the beach now by this time he’d given up losing any codes and everybody was using plain language now. HMS Belfast was a very large cruiser which was lying seaward of us, about half a mile away and we heard the very unflustered voice of the Beach Master say hello Belfast there’s something on the hill causing trouble, attend to it will you please and almost before the words were out of his mouth, Belfast spoke with 6” guns and special low strategic shells, where there had been this nasty little German tiger tank, writing my name on his next shell was a little swirling cloud of dust, the tank had totally disintegrated. After the war, when HMS Belfast came up to the tower to be a floating museum I went on board, to thank her for saving my life. I’m reasonably sure she did!

Now after that we took British troops on the first day curiously the Hertfordshire Yeomanry and I used to like to do a bit of painting and I painted various mascots on The Bridge of the ship infer tiller according to the whim of the Commanding Officer of ours somehow or another he wanted a deer and I did paint a deep in full colour on the front of the Bridge and just as it happens the Hertfordshire Yeoman Corp, had the old stag mascot, so it fitted very well.

Before the bombardment we had an agreement with the Gunnery Officer in a motor launch between two rows of ships, this motor launch had radar, which in those days was really elementary and he was able to get the range for our guns and we had all the bridges open in those days no lids, if it was raining it was hard luck, we all got wet, and had come to an arrangement between our Commanding Officer and the Senior Gunnery Officer, a few seconds before he gave the order to fire, he would give us a hand signal so our guns went off a fraction ahead of everybody else, so he was able to say my guns fired the 1st British army shell in the whole invasion, which he did. Just before he gave the orders to fire he had spoken to our Sergeant in charge of the guns, ‘I want you to keep the 1st shell case you fire for the Skipper’ and at the end of the bombardment there were 4 soldiers with shells saying present from no 1 gun sir! I bet he’s got it beside his fireside still. The Captain was a whole fisherman in peacetime and did his finest act of seamanship go out as a drum.

Next we were deflected to Portland to work with the American’s that was alright we took 11 loads of Americans, from Portland to the Normandy beaches. It was rather funny because by the time we got there D-Day was long past and the troops were well inland, it was funny to see these American’s going as green as grass getting off with their guns at the ready, looking around expecting to be potted at, at any minute, there were some great big soldiers that had been there some 2-3 weeks laughing at them.

In September I was asked to take over another landing craft (No 883) from the same frigate the 24th and I was told to take over this time in command. I’d never commanded anything in my life; I was only just 20 years old. I subsequently discovered that the crew thought I was 25 which I found gratifying. Anyhow, I managed 2 perfectly good trips to Normandy in delivering the Americans, just as I ought to have done.

These landing crafts were very long and not very strong in the middle and we were told in the very early days before Eisenhower came along, don’t dry out, that’s to say wait on the beach until the tide comes in so the troops could go ashore dry lot. If your craft lands on a beach which is not flat you’ve got trouble, if you’ve got a hummock in the middle, the bow of the stern are sort of straining against each other under this hummock and this had happened, by the time Eisenhower had come along he said gee these guys don’t like getting their feet wet and so he was lord, our executioner and so the Admiralty had to rescind its directive and we were told we could dry out once the initial invasion was over. Well fair enough this blessed craft had dried up on a bad beach and nobody told me.

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