大象传媒

Memories of D-Day in RAF Air-Sea rescue

Norman Eastmead. Edited transcript of a video interview

D Day, I was based mostly on the South Coast of England, various places, depending where the action was, they moved us, the biggest action of course was the D-day operation, a couple of months previous to that they moved us from Exmouth, near where the Slapton Sands episode was, and we moved round to Plymouth, when we arrived at Plymouth the whole of Plymouth Sound was chock-a-block with Liberty ships, all American stuff, you could almost have walked from Devon to Cornwall across the decks of the ships, there was so many in there. It got to the stage where we had to start up and run the engines for fifteen minutes every four hours, so we knew there was something big in the wind, and finally we got a call to go out. Four of us left Plymouth, heading up the Channel, initially with an escort of Naval MLs, the first day we got recalled, as you know D-day had been postponed for twenty-four hours, so we went out the next day, made forty miles out of Plymouth, got a change over of escort, got some heavily armed naval motor gunboats, and their job was to get us past Cherbourg, which was the home of the E-boats and their hunting grounds and to get us to our rendezvous position. So going through the afternoon to get to our rendezvous. The sea that day, as you can see from this painting that I鈥檝e got here it was done by the coxswain of 2513, it鈥檚 of a boat that I was engineer of, it was a real filthy night, choppy seas, squally showers, really overcast, and we got there and formed up in a diamond formation, facing west, so that our lights could be seen, for we put our lights on, and they stopped on all night, be seen by the incoming American airborne division, the 82nd American airborne division, when they got to see us it gave them a chance to correct their course, altitude, angle of descent, to pick up the next light they could see which I鈥檒l come to in a minute. The situation was with the diamond formation that if we鈥檇 been knocked out, and we had the commanding officer on board so we took the hot seat, nearest the coast, which is normal, you never send other people in to do jobs you wouldn鈥檛 do yourself, it鈥檚 a rule I have always lived with all my life, never send people in to danger which you can鈥檛 do yourself. We switched our lights on, and we sat there, and I came up from the engine room for a breath of fresh air, and in the skies above me is a sight I shall never ever forget, how it didn鈥檛 wake up half of France I shall never know, but above me, port and starboard, forward and aft, there was nothing but planes, a lot of them carrying gliders, and it was a fantastic sight to see that. Well after they had left us and got their position for angle, there was another light they would see, which was a friend I met at D-day 50, he was a naval man who parachuted in twenty one days before D-Day, and the first thing he done when he got there, he went into a farm and he 鈥渂orrowed鈥� a rake and a hoe, you might think that鈥檚 a strange thing to do, but he used to patrol all round the lanes, picking up information, troop movements, build up of troops, fortifications, and send all the information back to the UK. If he was walking down a lane or road and saw a patrol coming down, he鈥檇 open a farm gate, go inside, and start either hoeing or raking depending on what鈥檚 inside. It was a pretty good disguise for him. I mean twenty-one days on your own, a lone operator, and he鈥檚 still alive today and still operating
In fact one piece of information he sent back, a build up of tanks and troops, he didn鈥檛 know it at the time, but that was the position where the 82nd Airborne division was supposed to have landed., and at the last minute they had to move them ten miles further east, so he literally saved the 82nd brigade. Anyway, we still meet, we still go back to France, we鈥檙e going back this year for the last time. When our stint was over, at half past six, we got a signal to go and search for two B24 Liberator bombers, American, which had collided and gone into the sea, all we had was 鈥淪outh of the Casquets鈥� Well that is a big area, well we searched, about five hours, found nothing, then we got directed to come down to the SE corner of Guernsey to look for a Canadian pilot who had failed to return to Hurn airport. It wasn鈥檛 till I came to live here many years after, and I started to make some enquiries over here, that I found that he had been shot down, and he went down with his plane, and it was just outside Havelet Bay, I was looking for him 6th of June 1944. Well not finding him, we had no choice but to return to Plymouth to refuel. So we went back, going round the back of Sark, we were asked to look for another pilot who had gone down off Flamanville. Not having the fuel for circling, we kept a lookout. When we got back to Plymouth, I鈥檇 been at sea on duty for thirty hours without a break 鈥� a long day. They called it the Longest Day. It was for me. That was quite an episode. We were on station there, continually starting and stopping engines, to maintain our position, we had to be in an exact position. Any drifting we had to make up and get back to station. We had a fair mileage, not as great as with the boats we had later, which were converted MTBs, That was the range of those, but these were not too bad, they were designed for short distances in the Channel and back, that was about the longest spell we ever done, the thirty-hour day

When we were below decks we didn鈥檛 know what was going on, no idea.. The only person who knew what was going on was the commanding officer, and D-day, I don鈥檛 know if you know this at all, but we was operating under two different codes in morse, one was codefox and the other q-code, and they鈥檙e still used today, but there was a third code, that was the D-day code, and they were only valid for twentyfour hours, they changed every day at midnight, so by the time the Germans had got hold of signals and got them transcribed, another code was in use, they couldn鈥檛 keep up with it.
We wear this number [122 ] on our jackets in honour of the boats we lost, we lost three boats out of five on D-day, heavy losses for us, and that was one of the boats that went down.

Norman Eastmead

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