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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jan Bedford of Kent County Council Maidstone Library on behalf of Reginald Ranson and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions

BC People’s War - Madginford Library Wednesday 21st July 2004

Mr Reginald Leigh Ranson

Actually I don’t know how to start because I haven’t got anything recorded like this gentleman here. It’s only just my memory and of course now at the moment it’s probably not perfect.

In the invasion we went over (to Normandy). We were a small company, selected from an ammunition dump in a place called Marston Magna in Somerset, and I was selected to go there from a training battalion in Derby,

Why I was put in ammunition I’ll never know, that’s what it was. It was small ammunition dump, where we used to put all the ammo into the field, hidden behind hedges and things like that, and I learnt quite a lot about the type of ammunition that we had to deal with at that particular place. Whilst we were there in 1942 /43, 40 of us were suddenly formed into a company in fields quite a long way away from this ammunition dump. From then on we went into very serious training, all kinds of battle training - assault courses and rivers and things like that. We still didn’t know what it was, but we were all young then, most of us were in our early 20s at the time.

Eventually two of us were suddenly sent on a driving course, because we didn’t know how to drive, and when we passed the test, the officer said what sort of transport do you have, and we laughed, we said we have got any transport. When I got back to unit we went straight away and collected some lorries, but on top of that we suddenly were sent right the way up to the top of Scotland, near Loch Ness. We went on to a landing craft, and we’d never seen one in our lives before. There were only 40 of us in the whole company, because it was the Navy that was looking after us at the time.

We went out to sea - this was January, and we pulled in close to the shore, somewhere along the line, and about 100 yards from the shore, and we waited and waited until the commander shouted out off you go, off you go (words like that, but of course more vulgar). We said, ‘what do you mean, we’re not going’ but we had to walk through the sea, with the rifles above our heads, through the sea to the land, and then because when we got there we started to undress, there was another shout ‘what do you think you’re doing, what do you think you’re up to’. So then, we didn’t know, we were completely confused by it all. But after that we walked and marched for another 10 miles, which dried us off of course. But that was an incident that happened.

Sometime later we finished up somewhere near the big racecourse, Kingsride at Epsom, I’m afraid I don’t know, some of the stuff I’ve forgotten a lot about it. But there again we were on to training, all kinds of ammunition training as well as field training. We went to a little road, a very quite little country lane and summer was approaching. A car came towards us, an army one, and the king and queen were in it. We were single file, both sides of the road, and they sort of half waved to us and all that. So that was surprising.

The next thing we can talk about, is that we were shown on film the beach where we were going to land, because it was all secret in those days. I had a three ton lorry at that time, although I was an ammunition man, as it was all the transport we had. I carried all the goods from our unit in that lorry, kitchen utensils and things like that. As we left the harbour, there was a destroyer in the harbour, with all the white coated beautiful sailors all lined up in front of it, and guess who was there (Churchill). He waved to us, and smiled to me - I was in the cab of the lorry.

But I didn’t get there till the afternoon, and the rest of my little unit was there in the morning, two hours after the main assault, but of course they weren’t infantrymen, we weren’t infantrymen at all. Of course, from then on it was rather hectic, what with seeing all those terrible dead bodies lying about for a long time and then poor stretcher bearers going about picking up our (British) bodies, our boys. They left the Germans for a couple of days, I think, before they took those away as well, it was absolute chaos as I’m sure you can imagine.

As I wasn’t doing anything at the time, an officer came up to me and said Ranson I want you to take a party of marines up to Ouistreham which is right on the very extreme edge on the left hand side of our battlefield at the time. A little incident here - they came out of the water, these marines did and the officer, you won’t believe this, got a little revolver out, with all that going on, so what he was going to do? I had to smile, I couldn’t help it. A single thing like that I still remember.

Anyway I found the way to this Ouistreham and of course we were right on the front line again there. They were there for making that Mulberry Harbour, the docking, they were special docking people these marines were. I would have loved to have seen them again, but I never ever saw those men again.

So after that we were there, and we were the last ones to leave that area. Because we were helping to reload all the ammo that was laying about all round the fields, on to lorries to go on the train towards Caen, along towards the front line again. We stayed there I can’t remember how long, but we were the last to leave those beaches. We were one of the first to get there and we were more or less the last to leave.

We suddenly went away from there right up through France, stopped one night in Menen(?) just one night there. We carried right on into Belgium, and from Belgium we stayed at Roosendaal, which is in Holland. We then came back, after just one night, into Essen which was just a border town between Holland and Belgium. And that’s where we stayed for the rest of the war.

Another incident that happened, was that an officer came up to me and said ‘I want you to take ammo’, what I think it was that it was some highly dangerous ammo. I had 2 red flags on the front of the radiator and I got a volunteer, one of the boys, to come with me. I don’t where we took it, but we had to take it somewhere with a station or somewhere like that. It was sympathetic detonation, and would blow us all to pieces, but anyway nothing did happen.

When the war ended they went mad, the Belgians did, hugging us and kissing us and all that. But at the same time I’d just like to say off the bat, about my little wife, who I married up there in Belgium.

The trouble they had up there with those wicked swines (Germans). She and her parents one night after a dog-fight, rescued a Canadian parachutist, got him down from a tree, and onto their bikes back home. They had to get him through a hedge in the back of the garden, as they couldn’t go in through the front door because across the road were Nazi sympathisers and one was in the German Army. They hid him away in an underground cellar in their home for 2 months, but they had no medical supplies except iodine, so she (Mr Ranson’s wife) says all we did was pour iodine over his wounds, it was all we had. Then they got in touch with some brothers from a religious order, and they came along with a horse and cart and they quietly put this Canadian boy into it. They took him away and eventually he got back to England. My wife kept the parachute which belonged to the Canadian airman. She has since made this into a blouse, and still has it to this day.

But on my side of it, 6 of us got awards, I got an award from Monty, the rest got MBEs, BEMs and the rest of it. 6 of our little company, and we’ve never been thought of ever since then. We were a bit surprised when the golden anniversary came along, because some of our boys were on that golden anniversary but no English officials were there at all. We were a bit annoyed about that. On the diamond one which is the big one which just happened, I think there were 20 from my small section that I belong to now, which is a veteran section — the Normandy Veteran Society.

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