June 6, 1944 was the date when Britain, the USA and Canada led an Allied assault across a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coast to begin the liberation of Europe. It was a feat of meticulous planning, using 5,000 ships and 1,200 aircraft to deliver more than 150,000 men to occupied France in a single day. Yet it could so easily have been a disaster.
Bad weather, espionage, intelligence failures and so many other variables could have led to a catastrophe. Instead, the Allies not only established a foothold but were soon advancing amid some of the fiercest fighting of the war. By the end of August, two million troops had landed and liberated France. The Low Countries followed soon afterwards.
It was a hard-fought winter en route to Germany. Yet by the following May, with Russia advancing from the East, victory in Europe was assured. Japan would surrender three months later, bringing the Second World War to an end.
No one is entirely sure how many Normandy veterans are still with us. In theory, anyone old enough to have been on active service on June 6, 1944 would be at least 98 by now. All will all have been at the lower end of any chain of command, their senior officers long since departed.
The other day, a gallant few Normandy veterans came to London to support the campaign to build the new education centre alongside the magnificent British Normandy Memorial, which now stands above Gold Beach (pictured: a wartime portrait of D-Day veteran John Dennett)
‘I think about it all the time’: Landing craft gunner John Dennett, now 99
June 6, 1944 was the date when Britain, the USA and Canada led an Allied assault across a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coast to begin the liberation of Europe. It was a feat of meticulous planning, using 5,000 ships and 1,200 aircraft to deliver more than 150,000 men to occupied France in a single day. Yet it could so easily have been a disaster
Between them, organisations such as the Royal British Legion and the Spirit of Normandy Trust think there are between 50 and 100 of them living in the UK, with others scattered across the Commonwealth, the United States of America and beyond.
The other day, a gallant few came to London to support the campaign to build the new education centre alongside the magnificent British Normandy Memorial, which now stands above Gold Beach (thanks in no small part to readers of the Daily Mail).
Others are less mobile, which is why, in recent weeks, I have been travelling around the country talking to a cross-section of veterans in their own homes.
In total, they include a dozen old servicemen plus one very remarkable Wren (as members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service were known). A few have returned regularly to northern France over the years. One or two are going back for the first time now.
Even today, fresh witnesses who have never previously spoken of their experiences are stepping forward. Some have yet to be reconciled with the past. To this day, one former boy sailor feels unable to return to a place which still haunts him.
My interviewees include a Royal Navy gunner for whom June 6 was a breeze compared to the crippling horror to come in the same spot two months later; an Essex teenager who would later meet Rommel when he was a prisoner of war; and a Lancashire private who was wounded in the worst V2 missile attack of the entire conflict before going on to witness one of its most notorious war crimes. What they all have in common is that their lives are still defined by what happened in Normandy 80 years ago.
They all regard themselves as ordinary people, yet there is nothing ordinary about any of them.
Life might have been heading in a pretty conventional direction for Geoffrey Weaving as his schooldays drew to an end in 1940. ‘My father said: “What do you want to do?” And I said, “I haven’t a clue.”
Veteran Richard Brock pictured when he joined the army aged 18 in 1942
Second wave: Richard Brock (pictured, in April) was on a transport ship on D-Day
Christian Lamb pictured in 1943. Each day, Christian and her colleagues would be sent home from work early, at 4pm, to give them a better chance of getting to their accommodation before the nightly air raids
‘Intensely exciting’: Mrs Lamb, now 103, plotted landing zone maps
‘He said: “Well, how about going into a bank? You get a very good pension.” ‘So I left school at 16 and, joined the Midland Bank in Goole.’
In 1942, however, with no end to the war in sight, he was called up.
‘I didn’t fancy the Army after all the pictures I had seen of the trenches in the First World War,’ Mr Weaving tells me at his care home in Horsham, West Sussex.
Having once listened to a children’s radio programme about Morse code, he set his sights on becoming a wireless operator.
Peter Seaborn was at the local grammar school in Essex when, on September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. His parents thought it would all be over before it involved their three school-age sons.
‘My mother said to my father: “I’m glad the boys haven’t got to go”,’ Mr Seaborn recalls at his home in Tiptree.
In the end, all three brothers would serve King and country, two of them in the thick of the D-Day action.
Down in Bristol, 15-year-old Stan Ford watched as his elder brothers went off to serve, one by one. In the end, all eight boys would see action — and all, miraculously, would return home.
Boy sailor: 16-year-old Peter Seaborn (pictured, as a young sailor in Portsmouth in 1944) lied about his age to join up
Mr Seaborn pictured at home in Essex. He recalls the sense of irritation on board his destroyer when they learned that they had missed the first wave
Ken Hay (pictured, right) with brother Bill, who served in the same platoon as him
Mr Hay pictured at home in Essex. He remembers first hearing that D-Day was under way while on a 30-mile route march around Sussex
Fresh from her Catholic boarding school, admiral’s daughter Christian Oldham was staying with a French family near Strasbourg in the summer of 1939, perfecting her French. Christian’s father ordered her home by telegram and she managed to catch the last ferry back to England before the outbreak of hostilities.
Dispatched to live with her grandmother in Scotland — where she learned to play bridge and drive a car — she resolved that she was going to join the Wrens. ‘The idea was to free up a sailor to go to sea and I liked the idea of a uniform,’ explains the 103-year-old author (whose later books include a wartime memoir called ‘I Only Joined For The Hat’).
She soon learned the random cruelty of war. Having undergone her basic training, she found herself working at the Wrens’ headquarters (in the next door office to Winston Churchill’s daughter, Diana) at the height of the London Blitz.
Home was a row of houses in Hampstead, North London, known as ‘the Wrennery’.
She recalls: ‘We had to sleep in the basement during air raids and I remember one night a whole stick of bombs landed on the other side of the road and took out every other house.
‘They just disappeared.’
Each day, Christian and her colleagues would be sent home from work early, at 4pm, to give them a better chance of getting to their accommodation before the nightly air raids.
‘One night, we were on the bus home and saw a cinema showing a film we want to see so we got off and watched it and went home.
‘The next morning, we were on the bus going past it again and there was just this huge hole in the ground. So we must have just missed the bomb, but you didn’t dwell on things like that.
‘We were fatalistic.’
Keen to do something more than desk work, Christian became a ‘plotter’ and was posted to Belfast to chart the movements of Allied shipping in the Battle of the Atlantic. Convoys full of vital food supplies had to brave marauding fleets of German U-boats.
Early on, she met a dashing young officer whose Royal Navy destroyer was in for repairs.
‘His ship was there for about ten days. And on the last day, John and I got engaged.’
Veteran Jim Belcher pictured as a Royal Marine. He could not decide between the Army and the Navy so joined the Royal Marines
Mr Belcher pictured recently. His small landing craft, carrying 14 soldiers, came in right behind another vessel carrying Special Forces commando engineers whose job was to clear booby traps from obstacles on Gold Beach
She had the agonising experience of plotting an incident in which John’s own ship, HMS Oribi, rammed a U-boat in the mid-Atlantic. And radio silence then ensued.
‘Many weeks went by before I realised this man I had just snatched had not been lost,’ Mrs Lamb tells me in her Battersea flat. ‘Very lucky.’
They married in 1943 and then, the following year, she was posted back to London, by now pregnant with her first child.
There in a drab office off Whitehall, she was put to work on a project so sensitive that she would not dream of even mentioning it to her husband. Her task was to study two specific stretches of the Normandy coast in minute detail.
‘My brief was to delineate everything that could be seen from a landing craft, whether that was a main road or a chateau or church or railway. Whatever could be visible — and from every angle.’ There, sitting in front of her, were the charts of the main British landing zones for the impending invasion of France, Sword Beach and Gold Beach.
‘It was intensely exciting work,’ she admits, adding that from time to time she would even see Winston Churchill coming down the stairs. She never forgot the one overriding imperative: ‘It was crucial the maps were 100 per cent accurate.’
Young chaps like Stan Ford had rather less idea of what was going on. After leaving school in Bristol, joining the Home Guard and acting as a messenger during air raids, he joined up in 1943. He opted for the Royal Navy — ‘because I was a strong swimmer’.
In 1944, he joined his first ship, HMS Fratton, with the job of manning the anti-aircraft gun.
Up in Wigan, Jim Belcher, could not decide between the Army and the Navy so joined the Royal Marines.
Unlike many of his intake, he actually enjoyed the famously rigorous basic training at Lympstone. ‘You got nice sheets and you learned to box,’ he says. By the spring of 1944, he was doing trial runs with his landing craft on the Isle of Wight.
Peter Seaborn had been itching to join up ever since leaving school, but was still too young.
At 16, however, everyone received their own ration book, so young Seaborn quickly amended his — to reach the 17 years of age required.
‘It had my date of birth down as 1927 so I changed the 7 to a 6 and then I was in,’ he recalls. Why did he lie about his age? ‘I was the youngest son and the only one of the three who had been to grammar school. I think I felt a little bit guilty that my brothers hadn’t got that kind of education and I wanted to be like them.’
So, still just 16 and with the rank of Boy First Class, he went to sea, initially on North Atlantic convoys.
Stan Ford pictured with wife Eileen on their wedding day in 1947. After leaving school in Bristol, joining the Home Guard and acting as a messenger during air raids, he joined up in 1943
Mr Ford pictured at home in Bath. Watching the vast fleet while still at anchor off Selsey, Stan Ford knew one thing: ‘I said “We’re not going to lose this war” ‘
‘It got so cold my jaw froze,’ he recalls. He was then transferred to a destroyer, HMS Waldegrave, which was charged with guarding the approaches to the Channel from the Atlantic. His mathematical abilities were spotted and he was charged with helping the ship’s navigation officer plot his charts.
Geoff Weaving had sensed that something was up when his ship, HMS Astral, was summoned to receive some new-fangled equipment for monitoring the sea bed and then diverted from patrolling duties off the East coast of England to the Solent.
There, he witnessed a sight he has never forgotten. ‘We saw two of our planes crash in mid-air so we raced over to where it had happened, but there were just bits floating in the sea,’ he remembers. On a cheerier note, he also recalls turning 20 and being allowed to receive his first tot of rum.
Finally, everything became clear for all those involved as June 6 dawned beneath a grey sky. Among the first to see France that morning was Jim Belcher of the Royal Marines. His small landing craft, carrying 14 soldiers, came in right behind another vessel carrying Special Forces commando engineers whose job was to clear booby traps from obstacles on Gold Beach.
‘It was 5.30 in the morning and I thought: “It’s quiet here”.
‘There was a beachmaster walking up and down and It was like landing on Blackpool beach,’ he tells me with a chuckle.
‘We got the soldiers off. The Germans must have been asleep. And then suddenly the guns opened up from HMS Warspite. All the other ships started firing and the sky was full of planes. The Germans weren’t asleep after that.’
Geoff Weaving also remembers the calm as dawn broke. His ship, Astral, had the job of leading Canadian troops into their landing zone, Juno Beach, at first light.
‘I remember the skipper said: “Tonight we are going to invade France.”
‘And then we set off leaving a trail of buoys for the Canadians to follow behind us.’ Just as Astral was approaching the shore, the battleships started firing over their heads. ‘I thought, at the time, this was a mistake because it had been all quiet. And I thought: maybe we’ve woken the Germans. Then they started firing. And once we got near, it got very intense.
‘We were at the front, though the Germans were not much interested in us. They were interested in killing the Canadians. It was carnage.’
And there his ship remained until late afternoon, guiding in successive waves to Juno Beach.
‘All we had was the sight of bodies washing against the ship,’ he sighs. ‘The ones who had been shot; the ones who’d been wounded and had dropped in the water with heavy packs on and drowned.’ He still shudders at the memory.
‘The skipper was a very difficult man. All these bodies were in the water and one of the seamen said: “Skipper, why the hell don’t we fish some of them out. They’re people’s children.”
‘I won’t say exactly what the skipper said but he put him in his place: “You’ve got a job to do! Get on with it!”
‘And so we just didn’t do anything. We were helpless. It was a terrible sight.’ John Dennett, now 99, was manning an anti-aircraft gun on board a huge tank landing craft. He came ashore on Sword Beach and then had to wait there all day until the tide came back in to float the vessel off again.
‘It was only late in the day when I was having a smoke over the rail at the back and saw two Royal Marines in a small boat with a boat-hook pulling bodies out of the water. These poor souls had gone out with the tide and then came back. I didn’t think about it much at the time. Now I think about it all the time.’
The very same sight greeted Jim Belcher’s landing craft when it moved to the American sector at Utah Beach.
‘It was terrible. There were bodies in the sea from a landing craft that didn’t make it,’ he recalls. ‘It was shocking really. At first, the Americans wouldn’t get off after seeing the bodies.’ For Alec Penstone, an expert in submarine detection aboard the carrier HMS Campania, however, escorting the Normandy landings was no more daunting than his usual beat — the icy horrors of the Arctic convoys to and from Russia (where he would return soon afterwards).
Having volunteered at 17, Private Ken Hay of the Dorset Regiment remembers first hearing that D-Day was under way while on a 30-mile route march around Sussex.
For what is often forgotten is that most Normandy veterans were not actually there on D-Day itself. June 6 was merely the start of a murderous three-month war of attrition in the fields and hedgerows.
Similarly Richard Brock would spend D-Day dawn at anchor in the Medway on board the supply ship Ocean Vigil along with the rest of his battalion from the East Lancs Regiment. They were part of General Montgomery’s second wave. ‘We were support troops so that if the Germans broke through somewhere, then Monty could send us in,’ he recalls. He would have no shortage of action when the time came.
For Christian Lamb, the Wren, the job was done.
‘I heard on my radio that our troops had landed on the beaches that I had so carefully mapped out in that tiny office,’ she recalls. ‘It was a moment I shall remember for the rest of my life.’ Nearly six months pregnant, she would leave the Wrens shortly afterwards.
Peter Seaborn recalls the sense of irritation on board his destroyer when they learned that they had missed the first wave. ‘We were in Milford Haven, waiting to escort all these American ships across and the captain told us that the invasion had started. We were disappointed we weren’t there and we also realised that the Nazis would now be more alert to our arrival.’ He, too, would soon come to realise the horrors in wait.
Newly arrived from Jamaica, Gilbert Clarke remembers his fellow RAF recruits rushing to the window of their Cambridgeshire training base to see fleets of D-Day aircraft fill the sky.
Watching the vast fleet while still at anchor off Selsey, Stan Ford knew one thing: ‘I said “We’re not going to lose this war”.’
By the end of Day One of the landings, codenamed Operation Overlord, a total of 4,414 Allied servicemen had been killed with many more wounded. Britain alone had lost 1,475 soldiers, sailors and aviators.
Geoffrey Weaving pictured in 1942. Life might have been heading in a pretty conventional direction for Geoffrey Weaving as his schooldays drew to an end in 1940. ‘My father said: “What do you want to do?” And I said, “I haven’t a clue” ‘
Mr Weaving pictured at home in Horsham. He had sensed that something was up when his ship, HMS Astral, was summoned to receive some new-fangled equipment for monitoring the sea bed and then diverted from patrolling duties off the East coast of England to the Solent
Many of these had set off for France by parachute or glider under cover of darkness, only to be blown out of the sky or dropped in the wrong place. Others had been lost at sea or killed within minutes of landing. Yet they constituted just seven per cent of the eventual British losses in Normandy.
D-Day might now be over. For so many, however, the battle had only just begun.
To support the British Normandy Memorial or buy a plaque for a loved one, visit britishnormandymemorial.org