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What follows is the second of three accounts of the World War II experiences of Norman Ellis (1920-2004). It is based on an account of his wartime experiences that he wrote after the war. It follows on from ‘Norman Ellis's experiences in the Friends' Ambulance Unit’.

After serving in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit during the Blitz, Norman Ellis had a change of heart and decided to enlist in the army. After 6 weeks preliminary training, he was sent in September 1942 to a Royal Armoured Corps Training Regiment at Catterick near Richmond, North Yorkshire, where he trained as a driver and wireless operator. He was never called upon to use those skills. In the evenings he went regularly to the Methodist Canteen in nearby Richmond. That was where he met his wife-to-be, Peggy. She worked by day as a short-hand typist at the NAAFI Office at Catterick Camp and in the evening served cups of tea to soldiers in the Methodist Canteen in Richmond. Norman volunteered to wash up the cups as a device for getting to know Peggy better. The ruse was a success: on 17th June 1943 Trooper 14218254 Norman Ellis married Florence Margaret (Peggy) Richardson at the Methodist Church, Queens Road, Richmond, North Yorks.

Norman’s subsequent Army experiences can be told in his own words:

"I was sent to join the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards, an ex-cavalry regiment which had been mechanised as recently as 1937. Soon after my arrival there, my Squadron Leader, discovering that I had been in the Civil Service, detailed me to fill a vacancy in the Regimental Orderly Room; and a clerk I remained, officially, for the rest of my army career. The year between June 1943 and June 1944 was spent by the Regiment, as by nearly all the troops in England, on schemes in preparation for the D-Day assault. We travelled all over Great Britain — to Inverness, Dumfriesshire, Pembrokeshire, and Suffolk — in pursuance of these schemes; but by this time most of us were too "browned off" to appreciate the joys of travel. I use the Army phrase advisedly, because it alone can express that mixture of boredom and general discontent which affected nearly everyone during periods when we seemed to be simply marking time. There was nothing heroic about our impatience; we simply knew that D-Day must come, and wanted to get it over with and go home. It was therefore a relief when at last we were sent to a restricted area in Hampshire, and knew that D-Day was at hand. Perhaps we should have felt differently, had we been in action previously. A fortnight before D-Day I was posted to a Regiment Unit, with which I was to remain as a reserve in case one of the Regiment’s clerks became a casualty. Like all other Regiments, mine had accumulated dozens of men in excess of War Establishment, and I had been one.

"On the eve of the invasion we moved to a location very near the south coast. A flood of ‘Top Secret’ documents passed through the Orderly Room on the way to and from the Colonel. They were in small brown envelopes, sealed with sticky paper, and marked "Top Secret". We routinely opened them, read the contents, put the small sheets into identical envelopes, sealed them with our own sticky paper, and stamped them with our own "Top Secret" stamp. As a result of this skullduggery we knew well beforehand where the regiment was going to land, and also that the Allies were allowing for 50% casualties on the first day.

"I left Southampton with my new Unit at about 8 a.m. on the morning of D-Day (6 June 1944). For the first few hours of our journey we sat with our ears glued to the wireless, waiting for news of the invasion, and anxious to know how it was going. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ had already broadcast German reports of paratroop landings, but not until dinner-time [i.e. midday] did they make any reference to the main assault, on which our own Units were engaged. Our anxiety was on behalf of our friends, not of ourselves. We were much too excited and interested in what was going on to think of our own danger; and I have learned in conversation with men who were in the first assault that they were the same. It was, indeed, more like a film than reality. Two parallel rows of landing craft, about 150 feet apart, stretched as far as the eye could see; and on the horizon at either side cruisers and destroyers patrolled at regular intervals. Overhead, in a cloudless blue sky, hundreds upon hundreds of planes flew in an endless procession. The sea was so calm that not a man felt any sign of sickness. At night, a [German] E-boat succeeded in piercing the convoy, and torpedoed a landing-craft opposite our own; but even then the flames and exploding ammunition smacked more of Guy Fawkes night than of warfare, and apart from this incident we had no evidence that any enemy existed. The next day [7 June 1944], when we arrived at the other side, we saw what was perhaps the most memorable sight of all; a fleet of ships, ranging from the enormous battleship H.M.S. Nelson to small tugs and landing craft, drawn up peacefully off-shore.

"We landed at Arromanches [code named ‘Mulberry Beach’ and part of the ‘Gold’ section of the Normandy coastline] on the early morning of D+1, jumping waist-deep into the sea and wading ashore with our rifles above our heads. H.M.S. Nelson was anchored offshore, firing its big guns at the Germans seven miles or so inland. Planes droned overhead. Tanks were rolling out of our landing craft behind us … Otherwise it was a remarkably peaceful scene. A Royal Marine Commando was leaning against the sea-wall at the top of the beach, smoking a cigarette and waiting to be taken back to England. After walking up the beach, we were loaded into the backs of some 30-hundredweight trucks and directed by a Military Policeman along a quiet country road lined with orchards. Marvelling at the incredible ease and success of the invasion, we drove along for some time, until the C.O. [Commanding Officer] began to feel uneasy, and decided to turn back. We hadn’t been going long when we ran into a Tank Reconnaissance Unit, which had been on the point of opening fire when someone fortunately recognised our English markings. We continued our return journey between the orchards nervously clutching our rifles, and fearing that at any moment we might fall victim to snipers hidden in the apple trees. On getting back to our starting point we were directed into an open field where we used branches and ground sheets to construct tents. Later, having nothing else to do, some of us went into Bayeux, where life was going on as though nothing had happened. Everything was so normal, in fact, that during the afternoon a friend and I went into a barber’s shop and had our hair cut. We spent about six weeks in that field, mostly playing cards.

"The one snag during the first week was that our food and drink consisted essentially of tea (in the form of small cubes the size of Oxo cubes), tins of soup with aluminium strips up the side to heat them, and packets of very hard biscuits [which were] only partially digested, and the groans and gasps from the latrines were pitiful to hear. It is only fair to add that food supplies including bread, distributed by lorries, improved with remarkable speed.

"One event I shall never forget is the 1000-bomber raid on Caen, shortly before the breakthrough. Our field was on a slope, so we were able to lie or sit comfortably and watch the mass of bright silver aircraft high in the sky on the way to their target. Later the sky was lit up by the fires from the burning city.

"Our six-week stay in the field enabled us to see quite a lot of the local people, many of whom were small farmers or farm-workers. On the whole, they were very friendly, and seemed to welcome the invasion. One farmer brought out some genuine Calvados which he had saved for just this occasion. But they had been treated very well by the Germans, who needed their produce, and more than one spoke wistfully of the German way with looters — very different from the ‘blind eye’ policy followed in practice by the Allies. In many small farmhouses the family lived upstairs, and the downstairs rooms were occupied at night by some of the farm animals. We were not allowed to use the wells because the water was considered too dangerous.

"At one time we occupied a former German strong-point, and I found in the ex-Orderly Room an unfinished letter whose writer was complaining of the tediousness of a ‘paperkrieg’ (paper war). Grimmer evidence of the universal tendencies of human nature was provided by the body of a dead German officer, which I saw soon after landing, with a finger cut off to facilitate the seizure of his wedding ring. If one of our reporters had seen the body of a British officer treated thus, what an outcry there would have been! The weakness of that and similar propaganda was strikingly demonstrated to us some weeks later, when we saw in a French cinema a German news-reel of the bombing of, and land attack on, Caen. The commentator expatiated on the horrors of indiscriminate bombing, and we were shown French civilians being carried, dead and dying, from their blazing houses. We had, too, the novel experience of seeing [German] ‘Tiger’ tanks advancing victoriously, blowing up [American] Shermans and [British] Churchills.

"After the historic break-through, we passed with lightning rapidity through the Falaise gap (whose smell, derived from thousands of rotting cows and horses, I shall never forget), and hardly stopped until we reached Diest in Belgium. At one point we were unexpectedly pulled out and taken to a field over the border in Holland, miles from anywhere. There was a unit already in the field, whose job it was to transport petrol in large drums to the tanks at the front. We discovered that whenever they received a new consignment of drums, consisting of several hundreds, it was their custom to back their lorries up to a ditch at the side of the field, in the middle of the night, and roll a number of the drums into it. Locals would then take the drums away and make due payment in the morning.

"We were actually due to move up the Nijmegen corridor on the day when the Germans advanced across it, so that if had we been scheduled to do so twenty-four hours earlier, we should inevitably have been in the midst of the fray. When we did reach Nijmegen, we found the position very unpleasant. The Germans were on three sides of us, and at no place more than twenty miles away; shelling was concentrated and incessant, especially as we were very near the vital Nijmegen bridge; and to crown our sorrows, Stuka planes came into action against us for the first time. These diabolical machines, moving at over 600 miles per hour, and dropping their deadly fragmentation bombs, left us no time even to deposit our mess-tins safely before taking cover. I shall never forget that terrifying whistling sound."

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