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Introduction

This article is submitted on behalf of Mr Jim Jolly from Cleator Moor, Cumbria. Jim was an anti-aircraft gunner who landed in Normandy on 26 June 1944.

Jim has agreed to share these memories. The terms of the ‘People’s War’ website have been read and understood.

The Invasion

"During our training for the invasion, we did this training at lots of different places in Britain. There was this little place called Smeeth, just outside Ashford in Kent. We took over a country house for our base that had a swimming pool. We used the swimming pool to practice as a jumping off place for craft and then waded through water and came out the other side with our rifles and Sten guns dry. That was the point of all that. From there then we eventually went abroad. In my case it was ‘D +20 I landed in Normandy, that was 26th June 1944.

Before the Invasion we were stationed in different places: Felixstowe, the Ramsgate area and all round the South of England. For the crossing, we boarded a ship in Canning Town Dock, London. That’s where our craft left. I can’t remember the name of the ship. It was just an ordinary freighter. They put all the stuff we needed on board: guns, ammunition, everything. The vehicles were loaded on the deck and all the crew and personnel went down below. We were all bolted down below and we didn’t like very much. We called it ‘The Black Hole of Calcutta’ when we were down there. We knew if anything happened crossing the Channel and we were hit that we’d never get out of there!

If you asked what were we thinking about crossing the Channel I’d have to say most of us were sick. Actually, when we left the docks, the V1’s, the Doodlebugs, were still coming over and were landing all over the place. Of course we sailed down the Thames and out by Southend-on-Sea, the Thames estuary, round the coast right to the south of the Isle of Wight and everybody met up there. That was where what they called ‘Piccadilly Circus’ was, because that was the assembly area. Nobody could just cross the Channel. You had to all form up at ‘Piccadilly Circus’, pick up your escort, go across and eventually go ashore.

There was shelling from the Germans when we landed and mortar fire. The only thing we didn’t see much of from the Germans was any aircraft. The only aircraft we did see after we landed belonged to the Allies. We were lucky that we got ashore dry, mostly anyway. Some of the fellows got quite wet, but we were on the lorries and got ashore dry. We went into a French orchard just off Arromanches, I can’t remember the exact name of the place. While we were there, the first thing everybody had to do was to de-waterproof your vehicles.

Every vehicle has extensions to the exhaust pipes, to the intakes, everything, and there’s a mountain of this stuff. What you had to do after that was to take up your positions, dig your trench and dig in for the night.

That was the first time we saw an aircraft although it was only a ‘spotter’, I think they called them a ‘Hauser’. They aren’t armed in any way. It just came across to see what there was. I couldn’t understand why our guns didn’t blow it out of the sky, because it was the best thing to do. I said, “If you don’t do that, it’s going to send information back and we’re going to suffer for this!” And that proved to be so! Of course it sent the information back that there was a unit there and over came a few shells. Luckily they didn’t hit anything, possibly because it was rather long range.

Battle of Normandy

During the battle it was a peculiar situation because we didn’t know what was behind us or in front of us, or either side of us, really. We were pretty close to the Canadians: they were on one side of us, I did know that. Otherwise, you didn’t really know outside your own unit and your own little few hundred yards what was really going on.

Of course, being Ack-Ack, it wasn’t so much being with the fighting forces such as the infantry and that. We had to protect the roads and so on. We were usually in open ground. You had to be with a gun, so they got the traverse to see anything that’s you know, in the air. We never saw a thing! We never saw an aircraft! Not a German one, anyway. We saw plenty of our own aircraft: Typhoons, Tank Busters and that sort of thing. But we never saw a German aircraft during the Battle of Normandy.

So, this is how it came about, that the ammunition was taken off this anti-aircraft regiment we were in. It was taken off us because normally anti-aircraft shells are loaded in a certain way. There’s one sort of weapon, an actual bullet you might say and then they have a tracer and then they have an incendiary. They go in sequence like that. So all that was taken away and we were issued with armour piercing shells. The reason for that was because otherwise we were really obsolete.

What they did then was they put us up with the infantry. We were down with the machine gunners and the infantry. So, instead of the guns being at forty-five degrees looking for aircraft, it was all pretty flat. We had to pick out anything that was moving on the other side such as tanks, vehicles, anything. Effectively it meant we actually became anti-tank guns. It was pretty hair-raising, that was!

It was constant movement, unlike the First World War trench warfare. They were static for days, or weeks, or months and didn’t make much ground. We were very mobile. At that time I would be with the 59th Staffordshire Division and I have a map of the Division’s movements. We followed more-or-less the same route as them especially during the Battle for Caen.

Because it was very mobile, you might be in a place one day, two days or longer. They just kept moving you to wherever they want you to be. When they changed us over to the armour-piercing stuff we were then down by the river Orne. I don’t know whether we were north of Caen or south of Caen then. All I know is that the River Orne was between Germans and us and we were fighting across it. After Caen was liberated the Germans still held ground south of the city until later. I can usually see where we were at on the maps I have.

Remembering the Battle of Normandy

The best thing about service life at that period was the way that fellows helped one another out. There was a certain comradeship there. You just had a job and you just had to get on with it. You had no choice, really. It’s a queer situation when you look back on it. You think, “I didn’t really do that, did I?” When you talk to children about the war, they all want to know, “How many Germans did you shoot?” They think it was a one-to-one basis but of course, it wasn’t!

There are films about D-Day, like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and ‘The Longest Day’. ‘Saving Private Ryan’ did us quite a favour. We capitalised on that when it was showing in the local cinemas. Because of that film, we did a collection at each of the cinemas it was showing and did very well! I know the film was ‘All-American’ based, but of course ‘Saving Private Ryan’ was all based on fact. It was on the Omaha Beach in the American Sector that really did happen and the story was true.

What they depicted was real. I didn’t actually see what happened there because I wasn’t there on D-Day but that was the situation on Day One and it was pretty tough! Omaha Beach, out of all the Beaches, really got the worst of it all. They had very heavy casualties.

The first time we went to the Omaha Beach Cemetery at Colleville with the Normandy Veterans Branch was when we went on the 45th Anniversary of D-Day in 1989. It’s really massive! On that occasion we took the Lockerbie British Legion Piped Band from Dumfriesshire in the South of Scotland.

We went into the cemetery and there was this sign saying, “Silence! Respect the dead ” and “Respect this area”. So we asked the supervisor there, “Could the piper play a lament please?” So he agreed, and said to us, “Yes, you can do that. Certainly you can!” There were quite a few visitors there. We stood in front of the big Memorial there in Omaha Beach cemetery and we all stood there, dipped our flag and played a lament. It was quite a moving occasion.

The reason we went with the Lockerbie Pipe Band was that the originator of the Normandy Veterans in this area, Joe Bainbridge arranged to get hold of them. But of course, we had to pay for them. There was a whole Pipe Band. We only took them because we needed somebody to march to.

When we were at that ‘Omaha Beach’ cemetery, at Colleville-sur-mer, we asked the man in charge how many graves there were. He told us there were over 9000 tombs. We were amazed, and even more so when he told us that wasn’t the end of the story. He said there were 9000 in the cemetery that had been lost on the Beach and nearby. Their relatives wanted them buried there in Normandy. But, he also said there were another nine thousand killed who had been sent home for burial. When you think of that number that were at least 18000 Americans from that one area alone over the period of the battle. Yes, they had a tough time there.

When you are at these commemorations, you just think back. You set your mind back to the war and you can even visualise yourself being on the other side. It’s a strange sensation really but you do get over it. What amazes me is now though I mean you hear about people going through life now and there’s all this stress. You hear that people have stress, and you’ve got to have counselling for this and counselling for that. Yes, it really amazes me because all of us lads who were in the war, we came back and never had any counselling or anything like that. There was no counselling. You just got on with your life! I suppose service life in peacetime would be all right today, but in wartime no fear!

Later in the war

Later on in the war, I contracted yellow jaundice, and was flown to Brussels in December 1944. On my return to the Regiment, we were shipped back to the U.K. This was to Woburn Abbey, Worksop. Training took place on two ‘super-heavy’ 155 mm guns and I returned to De Panne, Belgium where the guns were turned to fire on Dunkirk. The town of Dunkirk was held by the Germans until the end of the war.

A few years ago Mary and I went back to that area with our grandson James. Off we went in the motor across on the ferry and we went to De Panne in Belgium. I wanted to go back to the actual billet I was at during that period. It was a café on a corner called the ‘Hotel du Commerce.’ We went back there to that hotel and I had an old sort of sepia postcard that I’d pinched off their rack while I was there and I’d kept it as a souvenir.

So, I went back in and we booked in there, the three of us and that’s where we stayed. The proprietor was of course the same family and I said to him, “I’ve come back to pay for this postcard!” he asked me where I’d got the card so I told him, “When we were billeted here!” Well of course, it created quite an interest.

Anyway, on the Sunday that we were there, there were a lot of cyclists who met up at this café. Among them, there was a schoolteacher and he could obviously speak English, because he was listening to the conversation. He had been doing some research about the area and he was writing a story about the German Occupation, Dunkirk the English Occupation and all of that. He asked what we had been in. I told him we had had these two ‘Super-heavy’ guns there.

So, he said to us, “When this is over I’ll take you to where they were at!” He met up with us and he took us to show the sights where the guns had actually been at. Of course they’re all totally different now! Some had been built on and there were trees growing at the site, but he was quite interesting. He later sent me some information in the post.

Well then I said to my young grandson James, “I wonder if I can still find that bunker we were in?” It was a bit difficult because you had to go down the side of a canal and the road ran parallel to it and then you had to turn down a track. Eventually I found the same bunker we were in.

There was a bungalow built since the war and a farmer had been using it as a storeroom, but nevertheless I found the actual bunker with the steel door still on it. I said to James, “This is where we were at, son! We were here, the Germans were up there and our guns were facing that way.” It was quite interesting going back there, really!

Contact with civilians

However, during the war I didn’t have much contact with civilians. Some people did, and got to know whole families, but not me. However, I remembered this one girl who said to me, “The War’s over!” When we were over there, we managed to track her down. We discovered she lived, at Koksijde, a little bit further up the coast from De Panne.

We called on her on the way back, traced her sister and then we traced her. But she couldn’t remember! Elaine I think they called her. She’d got married in between times, lost her husband and then she couldn’t remember the incident. That was about the only contact that we had.

I think the worst time about the army was when the War was over and you had to put your time in until your ‘demob number’ comes up. I can’t remember what my number was but you had to wait. I came back home to get married late in 1945 but didn’t leave the army until 1947.

Although I wasn’t a smoker, you were issued with cigarettes. So there was a bit of bartering going on after the war. The Germans wanted cigarettes and they would have died for cigarettes. If you could give them cigarettes, they would rather have the cigarettes than the food! I thought, “Well I can make use of these.” I wanted to bring home a tool kit. By then I had got to know a German mechanic and I said to him, “If you make up a tool kit, I want a toolbox and every set of tools you can get in there, plus a lock, a key and everything complete.” So he asked what I could pay him for that and he told me the price was 2000 cigarettes.

It didn’t take me too long to get the 2000 cigarettes and so he got me the tool kit, although it was quite heavy. When I came home with my pal Des I asked him to give me a hand with it. We had been warned on the boat coming back: “Don’t bring souvenirs, don’t bring guns, don’t bring daggers”. Lots of stuff was getting thrown overboard, but there was one or two fellows coming off with stiff legs with rifles shoved down their legs and things like that.

We came down off the boat and by then we were in the military police just before we finished. When we came down the gangplank, there we were struggling with this toolbox. The first one we met, was of course a Military Policeman. He asked us, “Are you finished lads?” So I said to him, “Yes and thank goodness for that!” He asked us, “What have you got in there then?” I replied, “It’s full of booty. It’s gold bars and all sorts of booty. We’ve raided all sorts! Feel the weight of this. Really, do you want to have a look?” Anyway, of course, he said “No. You’re finished. Go on, on your way!” So he just let us go! That’s how we got through when we landed back home after the war had ended”

Conclusion

Jim led a party of Normandy Veterans for the 60th Anniversary Commemorations in June 2004. It has been an honour to submit this article on his behalf.

Jim has also been actively involved in the 60th Anniversary commemorations for the end of the war in 2005.

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